The Complete Guide to Pickling

I’m excited to officially announce that my first cookbook is coming out. Read more about The Complete Guide to Pickling at TwiceasTasty.com.
After a lot of hard work for the past several months, I’m excited to officially announce that my first cookbook is coming out: The Complete Guide to Pickling. It’s packed with essential information and 125 flavorful recipes, including homegrown classics and international flavors. You’ll find straightforward and scrumptious recipes for quick, fresh, and fermented pickles, as well as sweet and fruity pickles, hot sauces, relishes, salsas, krauts, chutneys, and more.

This month’s posts will focus on the book, including sneak peaks at recipes, bonus info about the project, and a new digital recipe collection that uses the pickles.
Read more about my new cookbook

A Little Sweetness

Recipes with a little sweetness use what’s in season and in your pantry. Learn more at TwiceasTasty.com.
I’m going to keep this post short, because my mind is still buried in pickles and my forthcoming cookbook. You’ve been hearing about it vaguely for months, and official announcements, giveaways, launch party invites, and more are on their way to newsletter subscribers and blog followers in the coming weeks. (But since you’re reading this, you may want to check out the preorder page on Amazon.) And next month, I’ll be sharing recipes directly from the book.

In the meantime, I thought a break from pickles might be good for me—and you. So this month, I’ll be sharing some sweeter recipes that use what’s in season and in your pantry.
Read more about a little sweetness

One Prep, Two Meals: Grilled Peppers

Grilled peppers upgrade many quick, easy meals. Get one prep, two meal recipes at TwiceasTasty.com.
If you search through the blog’s recipe index, it quickly becomes obvious that grilling and smoking are my favorite ways to prepare peppers. Sure, raw peppers add a crisp, sweet flavor to everything from salads to summer rolls. But quickly cut free their cores and place them on a hot grill, and you have an immediate upgrade to salsas, sauces, kebabs, black bean burgers, and even canning projects. Set them on a grill over low heat and smoking woodchips, and you can smoke chilies until they are dry enough to store for winter use or just enough to puree them into my favorite chili paste.

For many of these uses, I’m grilling bumper crops of peppers until I run out of coals. But you can enjoy the same intense flavor with just a pepper or two for a weeknight meal. Better yet, make room for just a little extra veg and you can prep two meals at once. I lean toward pasta on the grilling night: I multitask by cooking the pasta while I’m prepping or monitoring the grill, and then I make a creamy sauce base while I’m waiting for the peppers to cool enough to peel. The next night, all I need to do is chop up the grilled veg before stirring it into batter for savory pancakes.
Learn to make Creamy Grilled Bell Pepper Pasta and Grilled Pepper Pancakes with Goat Cheese

From Garden to Oven

You can put the heat on unexpected spring vegetables, like lettuces and radishes. Get garden-to-oven recipes at TwiceasTasty.com.
When the first vegetables grow big enough to harvest from the garden, I’m usually focused on enjoying them raw and fresh: leafy greens and herbs, green onions and garlic, radishes and peas. But as the recipes I’ve shared this month have shown, you can think beyond salads, garnishes, and snacks and actually cook these vegetables, whether they’re wilted over pasta or baked into a quiche.

You may already serve some spring produce, like asparagus and rhubarb, hot and sizzling. But it may never have occurred to you to put the heat on other vegetables, like lettuces and radishes.
Learn to cook spring vegetables and make Balsamic-Roasted Radishes

Quiche

Quiche is a bit more work than frittata, but it has its upsides too. Get quiche and frittata recipes at TwiceasTasty.com.
When I prepared to share this recipe, I was surprised to realize it would be my first quiche on the blog. It’s one of my favorite springtime dinners: the hens are back to a full laying schedule no matter how cold it was over winter, spring greens and herbs are ripe for the picking, and asparagus is growing by inches every day.

Quiche is a bit more work than frittata, because you have to make and roll out a crust. It also takes longer to cook, because you’re letting the eggs slowly set up in the oven. But it has its upsides too. Because the eggs cook slowly, they come out more like custard, whereas frittata has a tendency to set up more like hard-scrambled eggs and can burn on the bottom of you aren’t careful. The pastry helps to hold everything in place, which can make it easier to enjoy leftovers for a quick breakfast or pack them for lunch. And then there’s the pastry itself: if you’re making one crust, it’s the perfect excuse to double the recipe and bake a crumble-top pie. If you can’t justify a whole pie to yourself, the trimmed edges of the quiche crust can be rerolled into one of my favorite childhood snacks.
Learn to make Spring Vegetable Quiche and a bonus snack

Spring Greens

Hearty spring greens are delicious raw but can stand some heat. Get spring green recipes at TwiceasTasty.com.
Even in my cold mountain climate, harvesting from the garden has begun. After a winter of eating home-preserved food, I’m ready to start savoring fresh produce in my meals—and of course squirrel away tasty morsels for next season.

In our current social climate, this may be the first time you’re growing your own food, focusing on eating locally grown food, and thinking of saving your harvest for future enjoyment. If so, welcome to the club! You’ll find various ways to eat and preserve many delicious foods on the blog. I’m also continuing my sourdough starter giveaway all month for those who want to enjoy freshly baked bread with their garden goodies. In this post, I highlight some of my favorite early garden treats: spring greens.
Learn to make spring green meals and Wilted Arugula Pasta

Homegrown Hints

These gardening resources and ideas may help as you’re getting your hands dirty. Learn more at TwiceasTasty.com.
If you’re back in the garden this month—or starting a new one—you’re not alone. The Economist reports that 45% of Britons are gardening during the lockdown, and Burpee says it sold more seeds in March than any time in its 144-year history. It’s going to be a tasty season for homegrown food.

Instead of planning meals to eat on our standard spring sailing adventure, we’ve been staying home and preparing the garden. Early seeds are in the ground (greens and peas), and cold-hardy brassica starts are being tested by cold nights. We jumped the gun a bit on starts for heat-loving greenhouse plants and have fingers crossed. It’s shaping up to be a good season.

The ins and outs of growing your own vegetables is a whole other blog, but here I pass on a few resources and ideas that may help as you’re getting your hands dirty. I’ll be sharing recipes this month that use spring crops, whether you have a container garden on your patio, raised beds in your backyard, or a weekly delivery box from a local farmer.
Read more about homegrown hints

Adapting Dinners

What happens when you combine an unfamiliar ingredient, Web access, and creativity? Gluten-Free Cauliflower-Crust Pizza and other adapted dinners. Learn more at TwiceasTasty.com.
I have a confession: I often cook without recipes. Even when I use them, I alter this and change that to fit what’s in my cupboard and what I think I want to eat. And I rarely make a dish the same way twice. I mainly develop and write out recipes so that I can share my favorite foods more easily with you!

So almost every recipe on Twice as Tasty can be adapted and even free-formed. There are some exceptions: You’ll have greater success with sourdough baking and cheesemaking if you follow the recipe as closely as possible, particularly as you’re learning. For canning and fermenting for long-term storage, using the given ingredients and instructions ensures food safety. But when it comes to adapting dinners and other meals, you can typically use your judgment and experience in deciding how closely you’ll follow a recipe—like I did for my latest adaptation, Gluten-Free Cauliflower-Crust Pizza.
Learn to adapt dinners and make Gluten-Free Cauliflower-Crust Pizza

Adapting Breakfasts

Working from home, my first meal of the day is healthy, varied, and enjoyable. Get breakfast recipes at TwiceasTasty.com.
If you’ve been staying home these last few weeks, one of the biggest changes to the way you eat may be at breakfast. If you have a job outside the home, or kids to get to school, or a daily routine that start with a gym or other leave-the-house activity, you likely rush out the door with little thought for breakfast—or perhaps no food in your belly. Cooked breakfasts, and particularly family breakfasts, might be reserved for weekends or even holidays. If you want to turn staying at home to your advantage, using it to break old habits and improve routines, I can’t think of a better place to start than the first meal of the day.

That doesn’t mean you need to wake up in the morning ready to spend hours slaving in the kitchen while your family eyes you hungrily. If “slaving” is the word that comes to mind over preparing any meal, then something is out of sync. And just because you’re at home doesn’t mean you have any more time to cook breakfast than you would normally. But it does mean you have access to a fuller kitchen than is found in your car or corporate office, and you have at least some ability to stock it with a wider variety foods than will fit in your day bag or desk drawer.

As someone who has worked from home for years, I’ve found plenty of ways to make my first meal of the day healthy, varied, and enjoyable. Here are some of my go-to breakfasts at home.
Learn to make pantry breakfasts and Improv Smoothies

Staying Home

Be happily occupied in the kitchen and well fed at every meal. Read more about eating well while staying home. Learn more at TwiceasTasty.com.
So much has changed in the last few weeks. As our personal worlds narrow to our homes and backyards, many of us are changing what and how we eat. Most of us are spending more time in our kitchens, cooking more often and trying new recipes. I had no trouble scratching my original plans for this month’s blog posts to focus on eating well while staying home. But with such wide variation in what’s available in stores, in backyard gardens and from local farmers, and in pantries, it’s hard to know what I should emphasize. So I’m spreading my net wide, hoping that you’ll each find something on Twice as Tasty that makes your life a little easier and more enjoyable.

Like you, I have been focusing on staying home and have been spending plenty of time in the kitchen. On the downside, we canceled our sailing adventure planned for this month. On the upside, I’m busy writing my first cookbook! Focused on pickles, it’s scheduled for release before the end of the year. Read on to discover how you might win a copy, as well as to learn more about eating well while staying home.
Read more about eating well while staying home