With rising food prices, consider spending more time in your kitchen honing your home cooking. It will help stretch your food dollars.

When you have your own fruit trees (or access to someone else's) sometimes you can feel a bit buried in fruit , whatever happens to be dropping off the trees at that time. Summer becomes a mad dash of canning , jamming and freezing, trying to preserve the bounty to enjoy throughout the year. One thing you can do with excess fruit of the season is to make fruit leather, sort of the beef jerky of fruit. I used to love this stuff as a kid, made for a great snack and instant energy, and was easy to pack. Last fall I made fruit leather with the leftover grape mush from making grape juice, and this week it was fruit leather from our neighbor Pat's apricots (Pat's apricots are so ripe that when you go to pick one, two more fall off the branch). What follows is a general guideline to making fruit leather, no set recipe. So much of it depends on the specific fruit you are working with.  read more »

This is the cake I made for my sister's birthday the other day. It's lemon-y and delicious. In the middle there's a layer of blackberry preserves, toasted almonds and white chocolate ganache. The cake is topped with white chocolate ganache and decorated with candied champagne grapes. I had never tried champagne grapes before, but they were really good. Good n' cute.  read more »

. There you have it my lovelies. A photo remnant of the last tuna I will be consuming for a long, long time. (Insert heaving sigh.) The last vestiges of the meal are heating in the oven now...ready to be consumed. (With a bit of trepidation if you must know.) Savored, savory, satiation. Yup. Tuna is off the menu. Pity really. It's delicious stuff. But peaches! It is just about time that we must all face the facts that it's also heinously over fished (and badly fished at that) and way up there on the "for-goodness-sake-people! Really? Please-stop-demanding-this" list. Right? Right. So as my one-small-person act of the week, I have chosen to avoid it from here on out. Oh tuna, I will miss you, but I cannot consume you. No, no, not at the cost of the oceans, the earth and my general health. From now on, I will focus my pesce-energies on mackerel and sardines and all the mid-range sea creatures that aren't a danger to myself and my pretty planet. I promise to be a good, eco-friendly girl. So with this dish, (recipe lifted almost entirely from The Hostess, who served it to me last week, and then repeated for your pleasure) I say adieu and close my eyes and hope and hope and hope that others will stop eating tuna too. At least long enough for you to rebound and for fishermen to find a less wasteful/more humane way to ensnare you. Swim on great tuna. For you my peaches, try this (not entirely summery, but entirely delicious and fantastically satisfying) dish and taste the (bittersweet) joy. And thank you for indulging me in my lil' bitty soap-box moment. Sometimes a girl just can't help but say something that weighs heavy...ya know?  read more »

Homemade grape compote recipe ingredients:

• 1 kilogram grapes
• 1 liter water
• 300 grams sugar
• 100 grams honey
• 10 grams vanilla sugar

Honey grape compote recipe instruction:

Wash and clean grape berries and arrange them in few clean jars.

Pour sugar in water to boil and add honey and vanilla sugar in it. When sugar is melted, pour syrup over grape berries and seal the jars.  read more »

I was curious how braised lamb shanks taste, which most of food shows said so tender. I had been looking for the recipes on the internet and and found lots of them. Most of the recipes are called for red wine, I tried to come up with my idea to substitute for no added sugar mixed cranberry grape juice. Cranberry juice sounds more North America style. Another idea that I put into was by adding chili powder, sounds more like my style, can't eat without spicy taste:-P.  read more »

The sweet and dizzying aromas of freshly crushed concord grapes filled Union Square today, as dozens of discalced shoppers participated in the annual New York State grape-stomping demonstration. I was reminded of this unforgettable episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy, hoping to "soak up local color" goes grape stomping at a vineyard. Watching it again today, I am impressed anew with Lucy's comic virtuosity. Every part of her body is working; she does not have one unfunny muscle.  read more »

Adam exclaims a little too enthusiastically , if you ask me, his admiration for Tyler Florence upon seeing him come striding out. Tyler tells the contestants that their challenge this week is to do a 60 second video on a specific cooking technique. The finalist that does the best will have his or her video on the FN website. Its not clear initially if they get to choose what they do. No they don't. Each challenge is hidden under a cloth. It appears as if they only have a few seconds to look at it before they begin. Adam has to break down an artichoke. OMG. Hes all the over the place. Finally, he squeezes a lemon, with the juice spurting everywhere. Tyler gives him an A for funny, but said he was really sloppy and, of course, he didnt accomplish the task. Aaron gets to slice a pineapple.  read more »

yields 6 servings 2 cups arborio rice 1 onion, minced 2 tablespoons olive oil cup white wine 2 cups tomato puree 2 cups chicken stock cup parmesan cheese, grated 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil 1 tablespoon basil puree 1 cup grape tomatoes, peeled and seeded salt and pepper, to taste 2 filets of monkfish loin 8 slices of applewood bacon, 4 slices for each filet 2 sprigs of rosemary, 1 sprig for each filet 2 sage leaves, 1 sage leaf for each filet 1 tablespoon olive oil salt and pepper, to taste Heat a 4-quart sauce casserole on medium heat, add olive oil. Bring to temperature and add onions. Saut very well, approximately 3 to 4 minutes. Add rice and allow to toast until rice appears to have a white spot in the center.  read more »