Author: cara_bgsk

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Homemade Doughnuts for Hanukkah

We lit the first Hanukkah candles on Tuesday night and ate latkes and brisket. It’s never been part of my family’s tradition to make?homemade doughnuts for Hanukkah, but the fried sweets, usually filled with jelly and known as sufganiyah–are one of the customary dishes on the Hanukkah table. But frying? At home? Isn’t that to […]

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Miso-Balsamic Tofu Rice Bowls

If you give me an assortment of ingredients and tell me to make dinner, you’ll likely be eating one of two cuisines, broadly interpreted. I’ll cook greens in tons of olive oil, with lightly sautéed garlic and a pinch of red pepper flakes (let’s call that Italian) and serve them with pasta or eggs or bread. Or, I’ll […]

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Organic Apple Cider Vinegar & Blueberry Soda

Though this looks like any pretty?fruity, fizzy, cool summer drink, there’s a lot more to it. This organic apple cider vinegar-blueberry soda is made with?Pompeian?s Organic Apple Cider?Vinegar – a bottle?that includes the “mother.” Not all vinegars do.? Vinegar is a fermented product made from wine, fruit, grain, or cider. When you expose alcoholic drinks […]

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Savory Sourdough Pancakes with Cheddar & Scallion

My sourdough starter is nine months old. During the week, it lives in the fridge, but on Thursday nights I move the jar to the counter so I can feed the goo twice to revitalize it so that the natural yeast can leaven the crust on our Friday night pizza. I won’t bore you with the […]

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Dinners For Right Now

To avoid the pre-spring dinner rut, I’ve put our meals on a rotation. It’s not the most creative I’ve ever been in the kitchen. But sometimes it’s more useful to have two weeks’ worth of regulars than to improvise and invent every single night, particularly when winter meals are past their prime but spring produce hasn’t […]

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The Best Chocolate Banana Smoothie

Do you know what happens when you put a frozen banana in a high-powered blender with cocoa powder, peanut butter, a little sweetener, and some milk? You make a smoothie that’s as creamy and rich as a chocolate milkshake, satisfying and filling but not indulgent. In general, I abhor fake-y substitutions. If you want a chocolate milkshake, have […]

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Pressure Cooker Chicken & Prune Tagine

At the end of winter, food seems to need extra flavor. I’ve got lots of tricks for adding that flavor: plenty of aromatics, spoonfuls of spices, intense dried fruit, salty olives, or?rich olive oil. In this chicken tagine, a hearty end-of-winter stew, I use them all. The best part is that the ingredients are?all healthful, […]

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Perfect InstantPot Chickpeas

I had the most idiotic moment in the kitchen a few months ago, when I tried to make the chickpea portion of the puréed Chickpea and Kale Soup from the Franny’s cookbook in my InstantPot. The InstantPot is an electric pressure cooker that’s taken over the nation’s kitchens. Like any pressure cooker, it speeds up […]

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20 Dinner Tasks To Knock out Early in the Day

I work from home, and one way I’ve found to make weeknight dinners part of the routine is to take five minutes here and there throughout the day to do a little prep. That might mean picking up an onion on my way back from a meeting or measuring out the soy sauce and sugar for gyudon in between calls. […]

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Two Gifts: Coconut Granola and a Scale

The last-minute gift for your family and friends is a jar of this homemade coconut granola, which hits all the right notes: salty, sweet, crunchy, and rich. I love it. The gift for you (or your favorite baker) is a kitchen scale. Hear me out.