Author: karen

Sometime in the last 2 years I bought what I thought was a nice mandoline on Amazon to produce even slices of potatoes, cucumbers, etc. Recently I’ve come to rue my choice though because although quite pricey has turned out to be a POS. The main problem is the slicing blade got dull rather quickly […]

I’ve been wanting to try making sweet potato fries from scratch for a while now. Mostly because I’ve had them several times at restaurants and they were quite tasty. But also because sweet potatoes have less starch than regular potatoes making them more friendly to my diabetic spouse. I wanted an “oven fried” recipe though […]

So I decided to try to make chickpea chips today. I found a recipe on the web and picked up some garbanzo bean flour at the store. When I mixed all the ingredients together the mixture didn’t stick together enough. This should have been a clue that something wasn’t quite right. However, I pressed on […]

One thing I’ve always wanted to try is to make is corned beef from scratch. What I mean by this is that one takes a beef brisket and brine it for a period of time. Typically 7-10 days. This turns the brisket into the corned beef that you’re used to buying and cooking from the […]

Last weekend I picked up some ground buffalo and fresh bacon from one of my favorite vendors at the Farmer’s Market. My plan was to use both ingredients to make some yummy bacon cheeseburger. After a long day of sailing today, that is exactly what I did. 4 slices bacon 1 lb ground buffalo 4 […]

I was reading about different ways to use red lentils last night and came across a blog post about a person grinding red lentils in their coffee grinder to make flour and using this is various ways. One way was to make lentil chips which sounded yummy. Another way that people were describing using the […]

This time of year one of the vegetables commonly available is kale. I’ve tried making this vegetable several different ways in order to get my spouse to eat it. I’ve braised it, put it in soup, made little “kale meatless balls” with it. Alas, no success. This week I decided to take a different tack. […]

I was going back through some of my food photos and found several featuring pies and crisps I’ve made. Typically I make crisps because no matter how I try, I’m not particular good at making pie crust. My friends have tried to teach me how to make it correctly. During one summertime lesson, we made […]

This week I got my husband to take me to one of my favorite places for lunch. Tookie’s which specializes in burgers has been a Clear Lake institution since the 1970s. It suffered a fairly long hiatus after hurricane Ike in September 2008. [singlepic id=132 w=400 h=300 float=left] The building severely flooded and the cost […]

One of my absolute favorite things at Korean restaurants is the spicy cucumber salad. To me there isn’t anything better than this. I suppose it probably goes back to the fact that we always had a plethora of cucumbers in the garden in the summertime. We’d eat them in sandwiches, sliced with vinegar at dinner, […]