Crabapples are in season in the fall and are easy to forage, and this beautiful jelly would be at home on any charcuterie board or your table at Rosh Hashanah. Our neighbourhood in Denver is inundated with crabapple trees, many of them in public areas like parks which are easily accessible to amateur urban foragers…
Sahlab (or Salep – or Sahlep) is a warm winter drink or pudding found throughout the Mediterranean (Turkey, Greece, and the Levant). It is flavoured with a powder made from dried orchid tubers, and has an earthy, floral taste to it. Genuine sahlab powder is not easy to find in the west, and many packaged…
Applesauce has never been my favourite side dish or condiment, mostly because prior to making my own applesauce I’d always been accustomed to the sickly sweet and grainy light coloured stuff you find in the grocery store – in plastic containers with a metal pull-off lid. Applesauce had always been one note to me –…
Date syrup, sometimes called date honey, date molasses, rub, or silan, is one of my favourite things. It’s the ‘jelly’ to the peanut butter and jelly of the Middle East (date syrup and tahini on bread is magical). It has a rich sweetness and depth of flavour that corn syrup doesn’t – and its flavour…
Hawaij is a Yemenite spice mix, which comes in both a savoury version and a ‘sweet’ one, used in Arabic style coffee. It contains ginger, cardamom, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, and clove. This warming spice blend is perfect not just in coffee, but in lots of American autumn favourites, like pumpkin bread, or in this case,…
We use a lot of tahini / tahina in our house – so much in fact that I actually purchase it in bulk. Day to day it’s used in mostly savoury applications – hummus, on top of toast with za’atar, or drizzled over roasted aubergine. It’s also perfect in many desserts. After a business trip…
While I don’t consider myself the type of person who has an ‘addictive personality’, coffee is definitely one of my weaknesses. I’ll drink coffee in virtually any form – from strong espresso to watery diner coffee, but the thick, cardamom-fragranced Arabic coffee is probably my favourite. I am not, however, a big chocolate person –…
Having not grown up in America, I never developed a taste for sweet pumpkin desserts that become ubiquitous around Autumn here. I love savoury pumpkin dishes, but I still haven’t developed a taste for pumpkin sweets. My daughter, on the other hand, has been born and raised here and is a huge fan of all…
With C at Grandma’s house for the last weekend before school started, my husband and I took a quick trip up into the mountains together. On our way up I spotted a fruit stand and I immediately took note for our journey back. There is nothing I love more than a local roadside produce stand,…
Peach season is upon us, and I could not be happier about this. Peaches are one of my favourite fruits, and I only tend to buy them in season – otherwise I am always disappointed by the flavour. Because I went overboard on my peach purchases recently, I was thinking of creative ways to use…
