I’m not proud of it, but there are certain parts of my own food culture that I don’t just adore. Biscuits, for example. I do not love biscuits. Cornbread and yeast rolls - yes. Biscuits - so-so, except about once a year with fresh butter and warm sorghum.

Still, I live in a family of biscuit fans — Tallest Son in particular. So I try making biscuits occasionally, and I taste biscuits in restaurants, always wondering what it would take to make me like them.

I have made a discovery. Check it out if you are in central Kentucky. The biscuits at Cleveland’s, the excellent new restaurant at the Woodford Inn in Versailles (that’s ver-SALES), Kentucky reflect a balance of structure and tenderness, outside crust and light moist interior - they are so good they are mystifying. Read the rest of this entry »

A light woven cover feels good, sitting on the couch on October 18. I welcome the cool after weeks of heat. Must be time for spicy, chewy Molasses Crinkles.

In fact, I tried out our family’s favorite cookie recipe with about 20 kids and a handful of adults at the Kids’ Café near our house. The kids made about 120 cookies out of a double batch of dough. Some of the little rolled balls were the size of peas — and made delicious tiny baked cookie bites. The five pans of cookies lasted about 10 minutes, and Lexington has 25 new Crinkles Converts.

For the May, 2008 issue of Nougat Magazine, dedicated to mothers, I wrote about the ways Mother Nature and my mother agreed on one big principle: What grows together goes together.

My mother, Ruth, loved growing, foraging, and cooking wonderful food in south central Kentucky. In the Nougat article, I described a meal I imagined she would have cooked for Mother’s Day dinner around 1959 or so. Links to recipes for key parts of Ruth’s menu are included in the article. Read the rest of this entry »

Each December we co-host a carol singing party. I like to try new recipes for the party, and always make several savory things and quite a few sweets. This year I tried amaretti, Italian crunchy-chewy almond cookies. Until now, I thought amaretti had to come out of handsome red rectangular cans.

I used a recipe in an elegant old cookie cookbook I have had for at least 15 years. It was a lot like this one. Add some almond extract in addition to the Amaretto liqueur. Caster sugar is superfine; make your own by grinding cane sugar for 30 seconds or so in a blender at high speed.

I see many recipes for amaretti on the web. They vary widely. How bad can a cookie be, though, if it is made of ground almonds, sugar, and rich almond flavorings? Avoid the ones with flour. T’aint right!

For Nougat Magazine’s December, 2006 issue, I wrote “Love and Joy Come to You,” about our family’s tradition of making complicated foods together during the year-end holidays. Here are the recipes I describe in the article: New Year’s Eve Pot Stickers and Holiday Croquembouche. Enjoy!

Many recipes for spaghetti sauce and savory soups direct us to chop and saute’ several cloves of garlic at the outset. Go ahead as directed, but leave  a couple of teaspoons of uncooked garlic on your cutting board. Chop it fine — tiny. Mince it, in other words. Two minutes before serving your dish, add the fresh garlic to the pot, stir, let it heat through, and serve. Your dish now gets two layers of garlic flavor. With minimal cooking of the small pieces added near the end, the second wave of garlic adds bright flavor that is not harsh.