Ok. Truth be told this is a beast of a cake to make. It takes planning - read all the instructions ahead of time. Yet - it is soooooo worth it. No step is particularly difficult, but there are many steps and they take a good chunk of time. To make making this cake more manageable I usually break down the tasks into three days.

Sound like a pain? It is. But I wouldn’t be advocating for it if it wasn’t worth it. Introducing your new favorite cake.

Ok, so this is a little bit different - but hear me out. Before tomatoes come into season, I am always looking for juicy little globes to use as contrast on plates of chicken or veggies fresh off the grill. In walks cherries. Might seem a bit unexpected, but tossed in a good vinaigrette, with a lil’ bit of spice, and topped with the crushed roasted pistachios… I think this one might surprise you.

A light and fresh dish to the delight of any spring table.

Pesto, to me, is one of the most versatile sauces. Wait, is it a sauce? Or is it a dip? I actually don’t know what I would classify it as, other than a combination of ingredients that have the possibility to be simply delicious. As controversial as it may be, basil pesto, while very good, is not my favorite. Have dried tomatoes? Make dried tomato pesto. Garlic scapes, stinging nettle, or in this case, pea sprouts… give it a try.

Pumpkin spice is not what pumpkin tastes like. There is an entire food industry built upon convincing people that pumpkin tastes like cinnamon, cloves, ginger, allspice, and nutmeg–let me tell you, it does not. There is this (typically) orange-fleshed vegetable that grows on a vine and it is delicious. It makes a beautiful pasta, which is a wonderful way to celebrate the “real” pumpkin flavor.

I know you have probably heard of Mark Bittman’s No-Knead Bread recipe. It makes a great loaf, and for many people, the recipe revolutionized their beliefs about the quality of bread they could produce at home. With one loaf, they understood that they too, the home baker, could make beautifully crusted bread with an open crumb, at home, in their own oven. I love it.

This process is an adaptation of his loaf.

This week I decided to make a batch of habanero hot sauce with some of the habaneros I have sitting in the freezer from last season. I use this master hot sauce recipe as a guideline to make almost all of my hot sauces because I believe it creates the perfect base for you to create your hot sauce masterpiece.

Surprisingly delicious, unless told, most people have no idea that these fruit leathers are that different from the store-bought ones. Maybe they have a little bit more sourness and zing to them, but honestly, I find them way better than that over-processed, dyed, sugar-filled store version. The tangy flavor and chewy texture of SCOBY is perfectly suited to these on-the-go probiotic-rich snacks.

A 6-hour drive with no air conditioning across the Mohave desert in over 100-degree heat brought us to our new front door. We didn’t even unpack a thing. We were sweaty, dusty, windblown, and exhausted. I grabbed our camping stove, the camping kitchen set, and the soup.

We set up on the back stoop, overlooking our beautiful green backyard as the sun set, and ate this soup. It will remain on my favorite soup list forever.