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The best of the summer produce is beginning to fade, but there are still tomatoes hanging around. And of course, fall may be visible over the horizon, but it is still hot. So a nice chilled soup is a perfect way to survive these blazing days. Gazpacho is the most known cold tomato soup, or my personal favorite salmorejo, but those are both made with peak of season raw … [Read more...] about Chilled Tomato Garlic Soup

Bing of a certain age as social media overtook the world, I am frequently amused by recipes (or fashion, or beauty) that become viral like some 20 year old just discovered it, or unearthed it from total obscurity. And I currently feel that way about the viral butter swim biscuits. There are recipes for butter swim biscuits in some of my community cookbooks that are decades old. … [Read more...] about Zucchini Cheddar Butter Swim Biscuits

I get so excited about strawberry season, it is the harbinger of all the good spring and summer produce to come. I spend an inordinate amount of time making jam and developing recipes to use those berries that I don’t devour right out of hand. And generally, I am trying to think of something new and different – a “twist.”  But with this recipe, I am taking it back to basics. A … [Read more...] about Fresh Strawberry Buttermilk Bundt Cake

The combination of cherry and almond is a favorite of mine, so that must have been the appeal when I stumbled across this recipe in Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison’s A Real American Breakfast Cookbook, which is something of a bible of breakfast recipes. I used to make these muffins all the time. I had a friend whose mother loved these, so I would always take her a batch … [Read more...] about Cherry Almond Cream Muffins

Most of the older community cookbooks I have, even some reproductions of recipe books and “housekeeping manuals” from the 18th and 19th centuries have a recipe for Plain Cake. Sometimes it is used as a base for other things, like trifle, but mostly it just sits there on the page between the other more elaborate cakes. Easy to ignore or just flip past. This has been in … [Read more...] about Plain Cake