Sweet Tomato Chutney

Perfect for dipping!

It being that time of year, we’d hoped to bring you a recipe for Pan de Muerto, but we weren’t super happy with the recipe we tested. Maybe next year. Instead, we’ll have something completely different.

The other night we decided that we’d have something simple for dinner, something a bit lighter, yet something tasty. We’d had a larger breakfast out, and we just couldn’t face eating a large dinner, so we decided on Crispy Cauliflower Nuggets. With some sort of dipping sauce. We could have gone with something easy, such as chipotle mayonnaise, but we remembered this recipe we wanted to try.

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Buffalo Sauce

buffalo sauce

buffalo sauce
You can make this sauce in less time than it takes to read about it!

We’ve been to Buffalo several times, and we’ve seen quite a number of Buffalo (really, Bison) over the years, but we’ve never previously made Buffalo sauce. We’ve just never needed it, that is, until now. Just last week, or perhaps the week before, we saw a recipe that called for Buffalo Sauce, and, while we could just buy some at the store and be done with it, we figured it wouldn’t hurt to see if we could make it ourselves. It turns out that we can, and you can, too, fellow Scratcher. Just follow along.

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Coconut Curry Simmer Sauce

coconut curry simmer sauce

coconut curry simmer sauce
Our simmer sauce and a few veggies make a quick meal.

Just the other day we were in the store looking for coconut. We use a fair amount, mainly in our Best-ever Scratched Granola, which we make roughly every two weeks. As you’d suspect, that coconut is the sweetened flaked variety. But, on this shopping trip, we saw some Bob’s Red Mill unsweetened coconut that was being discontinued, with a sale price to match. We figured that it wouldn’t hurt our Best-ever Scratched Granola to have something more natural, plus unsweetened coconut might get us to make something savory.

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Ad Hoc’s Chocolate Sauce

Ad Hoc chcolate sauce

This has to be a quick post today, as we have a bunch of stuff we need to do outside the home. So, forgive us if it seems abbreviated.

Ad Hoc chcolate sauce
Shiny sauce is smooth sauce.

This week, we need to bring a dessert to a dinner meeting. We knew about it far in advance, giving us plenty of time to decide on what to make. With the heat of summer, we decided to bring the ingredients for ice cream sundaes. Now, we know we could run out and buy the stuff, but it’s not too bad to make some of the ingredients in the kitchen. Let’s run down what we need. Ice cream: Check, we’ll make Triple Vanilla Ice Cream. Fruit sauce: check, how about Cherry Compote? Nuts: check, simply chop some peanuts. Whipped cream: ah, you caught us, we bought a can of the squirty kind. Chocolate sauce: check, this recipe.

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Blueberry Mostarda

blueberry mustarda

blueberry mustarda
Great with Brie!

Just yesterday, our neighbors called, asking if we could use some blueberries. They were going out of town, and, rather than letting the berries go to waste…. On top of that, we’d just bought blueberries this week; they’re starting to come into season, so we have a bunch of blueberries to go through. Fortunately, we hit the stacks and found a couple of recipes that will help us use them. First up, Blueberry Mostarda.

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Cherry Mostarda

cherry mostarda

Cherry MOstarda with goat cheese
Wow! Cherry Mostarda is really good!

It’s cherry season, and, while we love fresh cherries, we also like to see what we can make from them. Sure, there’s a lot of desserts made with cherries, but what about something savory? Today, we decided that we’d try making some cherry mostarda. Now, we don’t know about you, but we’ve never even tasted this Italian condiment, so we figured we’d scratch up a small batch for testing purposes. Sound interesting? We’ll show you what we did.

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Oven-Roasted Tomato Sauce

oven roasted tomato sauce with pasta

oven roasted tomato sauce with pasta
Best and easiest tomato sauce ever!

We’ve known about this recipe for years, and, all that time, we’ve wanted to make it. So, what stopped us? Simply a lack of ingredients. We just didn’t have all the ingredients; specifically, we were lacking fennel. Normally, when we get fennel, we make up a small batch of Fennel Gratin, which we think is nearly the best way to eat fennel, but, last week when we went through the line at the CSA, we selected a nice large fennel with the idea of making Thomas Keller’s Oven-Roasted Tomato Sauce.

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