• Ultimate Winter Comfort Food: Split Pea and Ham Soup

    Split Pea soup is one of my favorite soups. When I was a little girl in the early 1950’s it took almost 18 hours to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco on Highway 101.  My mother and stepfather and…

  • Monticello Hearth Cooking at the Heritage Harvest Festival 2016

    This coming Friday (Sept 9th) culinary historian Michael Twitty will join me at the Monticello kitchen hearth for a celebration of enslaved cooks Edith Fossett and Frances Hern; their skills and their lives. We will prepare a menu of recipes…

  • Roasting Garlic for our summer eating

    Once in the spring and then once again in the fall I buy a big mesh tube of garlic heads and roast those suckers all on the same day for my quart of roasted garlic that lives in my fridge…

  • In which I make beef and venison hand pies

    It was chilly and overcast today – a high of 42-ish. I remembered a recipe for Cornish Pasties I saw in a recent South Dakota magazine and someone on facebook posted a meat pie idea which jogged me into action.…