Vanilla Rhubarb Jam with Earl Grey Tea

Vanilla Rhubarb Jam

The strawberry-rhubarb combination is legendary and for good reason. As I’ve advocated in many of my recent posts, it’s the perfect combination of sweet and tart. But sometimes even the best pairs need to be broken apart. I mean think about it, if peanut butter and jelly didn’t spend some time apart, we would have never discovered the romance between peanut butter and nutella. Imagine living without that in your life.

Solo strawberries get a lot of play–ice cream, shortcake, plain with cream–but rhubarb tends to be more of a sidekick. In searching for a savory recipe for rhubarb, it took me hours to find anything at all before settling on a roasted rhubarb salad. And even with sweet treats, rarely do you see rhubarb unless it’s following strawberries. I get it. Rhubarb is a bit tart and difficult for some people to embrace. But cranberries seem to be doing just fine and they might be one of the most tart fruits I know. It’s time to give rhubarb some solo play.

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The Secret to Gourmet Salts

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Vanilla Bean Sea Salt

Be honest. You go to fancy places like Dean & Deluca or William Sonoma or [enter fancy grocery store here] and ogle their gourmet products. Chili infused olive oil, black truffle oil, lavender sea salt. Sometimes you’re even crazy enough to shell out the big bucks for a thimble sized bottle of the good stuff. You imagine your next dinner party and the guests gathering around the table. No matter that you’re serving a basic pot roast. Just think how sophisticated you’ll seem when they see your salt shaker is filled with not regular table salt (can you imagine?) but Himalayan rock salt with eucalyptus oil.

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On the Fourth Day of Christmas Recipes: Gifts from Your Kitchen

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This post should have probably been titled gifts from your bar, but I try to keep up the appearance that I’m not a total lush. But really, who doesn’t love alcohol related gifts? So far this year I’ve made Cranberry Lime Vodka and Buddha Hand Vodka (think citron vodka). After learning so easy those where, I’m tempted to infuse a bunch of other spirits, but really there’s only so much the two of us can drink (and I generally shy away from the hard stuff). Unfortunately for us, alcohol gifting isn’t the easiest thing to do. We travel a lot for the holidays. We’ve actually never spent Christmas eve or day in our apartment though this year we might get a few hours on Christmas Day night. So toting around bottles of alcohol on the train, or worse, plane, in addition to our other Christmas gifts does get a bit cumbersome. If people chose to visit Brooklyn for Christmas, I guarantee there would be many more alcoholic gifts! Hmm…maybe that’s the type of persuasion I need to start using.

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