Simply Recipes Food and Cooking Blog

We’ve introduced South Carolina barbecue sauce and now here is a great recipe you can make with it, barbecued turkey legs and thighs. I grew up with plenty of meals made with turkey legs because they feed a lot, and they’re an inexpensive source of protein.

If you are looking for a special pound cake to prepare for a holiday gathering, consider this one! It is both dense and light, as all pound cakes should be; it’s rich with the aroma of almonds from the almond paste in the batter, and speckled with orange zest throughout. We’ve included a simple orange glaze though the cake stands perfectly well enough on its own without it.

The first is the stock. Your soup will only be as good as the stock you are using. This soup traditionally is made with beef stock, though sometimes a good beef stock can be hard to come by and expensive to make. If you use boxed stock, taste it first! If you don’t like the taste, don’t use it. (If you cook a lot of beef or beef roasts, save the scraps and freeze them to make a stock with later.)

My father stopped by today to say hello. I offered him lunch which he declined but he did take me up on the offer to try one of these turkey meatballs. One bite and two wide eyes later, “Wow, why didn’t you tell me they were good?” Lunch served

Being a quintessential Swiss dish, cheese fondue conjures up images for me of alpine ski huts, deep snow and 20°F weather. Well, we don’t get much snow or cold weather in the California central valley, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy a good fondue party.

People either love turnips or they hate them. And if they love them, it was probably an acquired taste. I can still remember making a face when thinking I was biting into a yummy potato in one of my mother’s stews I had speared a turnip instead. Yet this dish is another proof point that almost all things taste better with butter and cream.

One of the first things I learned from my mother about cooking meat is that fat=flavor. If you have lean cuts of meat, you often need to do something to introduce fat back into the meat just to make it taste better and to help keep it from drying out. Along those lines, here’s a trick you can use with a pork loin roast, a relatively lean cut, to bump up the flavor and keep it juicy. Just brown the roast first on the stovetop, then wrap it in strips of bacon to roast. As the roast cooks, the bacon will bathe it in flavor.

Walk in to practically any taqueria in California and you’ll likely find super-sized containers of agua frescas, right next to the soda dispenser. The usual flavors are horchata (a sweet rice drink), tamarindo (from tamarind, and agua de jamaica (pronounced hah-MY-kah), an infusion of dried red hibiscus flowers.

We all love quesadillas, and we could all use more leafy greens in our diet, so let’s add some shredded kale to our cheese and tortillas and call it a “kale”sadilla! This could even be a rather clever way to get your kids to eat more greens. Though it’s not exactly “sneaky” as you can clearly see the kale.

Are you familiar with Cook’s Illustrated? It’s a magazine and a website from the same people who create the PBS show America’s Test Kitchen. It’s the only cooking show we watch with any regularity, and we read each issue of the magazine from cover to cover. What I love about the magazine is that they go into great deal of detail about the how’s and why’s of various cooking methods; I always learn something new. (What I don’t love about the magazine is that they tend to overcomplicate things, just for that n-th degree of perfection.)