Torta de Mele - Tuscan Apple Cake

A perfectly gorgeous apple cake with bits of apple swirled into the whipped batter and a cloche of apple slices swirling about the top of the cake ... dense and moist when it comes from the oven, with the most heavenly aroma of apple and vanilla sugar. It is a treat!

Five Ingredients ...

This was so fresh and good a salad that I have to just bust it out there at you ! Five ingredients! Perfectly fresh red leaf lettuce, crisp sliced cucumber, black pepper, Ras el hanout, and tzatziki to scoop onto each delicious forkful. For whatever reason, the cinnamon spice of the Ras el hanout and the mint in the tzatziki react with each other and make for a great flavour pop in this salad.

Try it. you'll like it. 

Curried Cauliflower Soup

I'd like to change the picture of The Spice Garden welcome in the sidebar to a lovely, breezy Spring photo, but alas, winter just continues to hold on tight to this little corner of New Hampshire. Taking a little walk around the back acreage, I've found that the daffodils are only about an inch out of the ground. The crocuses along the side walkway are tiny little needles of green just breaking the surface of the soil and there are three lone snowdrops in bloom along the rock wall. For mid-April, this is sad and sorry. To boot, we got a couple inches of snow last evening and into this morning.  So, I make soup and SB keeps the woodstoves going and we wait ...

Perfect Creamed Spinach

Spinach is my all-time favorite dark leafy green. I particularly love it this way - softly wilted in a pan of sautéed onions and butter and then tossed with a rich white sauce made with chicken broth, a bit of heavy cream and spiced with a wee bit of nutmeg.  It's heavenly, as is, but if you have pine nuts for the toasting ? Oh my, they are a nice addition to the dish.

Mediterranean Baked Cod with Olives and Tomatoes

One pan meals have caught my attention of late. Coming across this simple pan of vegetables, lemon tang, salty olive bite, and mellow baked cod seemed a winner to me. I leave it to you to judge. Make this meal on an evening when you don't particularly want to cook, but know you should eat something healthy.

Fig and Walnut Biscotti

The wind is wailing this evening. We've come through the first major snowstorm of the winter. Before this, it's been all rain and slush, a few small spits of snow that accumulated no more than three inches. That's all very anticlimactic for a New Hampshire winter, thank you very much. If it must be cold and grey, let it snow, I say!

That being said, I always like baking up a treat for hot tea when the snows hit. SB does all the shoveling and plowing, so my pay off to him is a sweet treat for his hot cuppa when he comes in to thaw out.

Hummus with Tomato and Kalamata Olive Garnish

The grey cottage had its share of decadent holiday food over the past week. It was a wonderful food fest, but yesterday and today SB and I have been stepping back from all the cookies, drinks, and rich leftovers. Yesterday afternoon, lunch was nothing more than hummus, pita chips or tortilla chips and a cold beer. Today, it was chicken and red lentil soup with oyster crackers and glasses of Vouvray. Simple and far more austere than the past week !

Simple Garlic Hummus

Ingredients:

1 -15 oz can chickpeas, drained and simmered for twenty minutes

1/4 c. lemon juice

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 c. water from hot pan of chickpeas

1/3 c. tahini

1/8 tsp. smoked paprika

1/2 tsp. ground cumin

a pinch cayenne pepper

2 tbsp. EVOO, plus a bit more for drizzling over the garnishes

Garnishes: chopped tomato, chopped Kalamata olives

Place the ingredients in the bowl of a food processor and whiz until smooth as butter ... scrape into a pretty plate or bowl. Serve with choice of dippers ( tortilla chips, pita chips, GF crackers or crudité). Pop a beer and enjoy.

Happy New Year, all ! Hope you, too, have some healthy snacks amongst all the heavy cheesy snacks and sweet desserts that come our way at this time of year !

Staten Island Style Cod

This is a beautiful and spicy platter of cod fillet ! Years ago, I picked up the South Beach Diet Cookbook and went through most of the recipes. This recipe, while written for Chilean Sea Bass, adapts really well to Atlantic Cod.  Silent Bob and I have been going meatless increasingly, as we age and as we read more and more how the agriculture of the meat industry is wrecking the environment and the quality of lives of  'the crop'. To boot, sea stocks are increasingly overfished and harmed by the increase in fish farming ... aargh! It seems we humans need to sit back on our heels and really think about what we eat, how we produce it, and how much we consume. That's a whole book of ranting, though.

I haven't bought fish in weeks and it is my birthday week. This platter of fish was my gift to myself. Easy, very spicy, but freshened up by the addition of chopped fresh herbs and lemon. This is how I did it.