And just like that, Twice as Tasty is 2 years old. Well, not just like that. The time between birthdays is the journey between destinations, more crucial than either endpoint. Like any journey, this past year revealed curves in the road, surprises around corners, and steps into unfamiliar territory. As the Twice as Tasty blog and community expand and grow, I’m embarking on new adventures and tackling ongoing challenges. Whether you’ve just found the blog or have been part of the core group of supporters, I hope you’ll be as excited as I am about the successes of this past year and the path that’s forming for year 3.
Read more about what’s new at Twice as Tasty
Category: Workshops
Preparing for Holidays
All last month, I was undecided about which recipes and ideas to share in November. I was traveling in several regions and climates, wearing everything from four layers of long johns and raingear to tank tops and summer dresses. And meals featured the fresh strawberries I associate with spring, the Dungeness crab of fall and winter, and everything between.
Shortly after I returned home to Montana, Mother Nature decided the blog’s November theme for me. After just a couple of days in my own kitchen, snow began to fall and winter was suddenly upon us. Instead of digging the final carrots and potatoes and cleaning up garden beds, I was curled up by the woodstove, reading food books and thinking about the coming holiday season. For me, that means planning to gather with friends and family, making lists of gifts to create, and of course, deciding what we’ll eat.
Read more about preparing for holiday gatherings and meals
Favorite Books: The Science of Food
If you looked at my book purchases over the last couple of years, you might think I started Twice as Tasty as an excuse to expand my food library. I’d be hard-pressed to dispute it. As my partner and I increasingly returned to basic ingredients and making what we eat from scratch, one of my greatest joys has been learning from people with far more experience, training, and knowledge about food. Although there is a wealth of helpful information online, many of my favorite sources sit on a shelf, ready to be pulled open when I’m looking for answers or ideas.
Earlier this year, I shared some of my go-to books on canning. They’re the inspiration for many recipes on this blog, and my favorites tell me not just how to best can something but also why the process works. When I want to write about other kitchen processes, I often have a different stack on my desk: books on the science of food.
Read more about my favorite resources on the science of food
Grilled Tomatoes
I grill a lot of vegetables, from asparagus to tomatillos, but I probably spend the most time grilling tomatoes. Not only are they delicious on a skewer with other vegetables for dinner, but they’re also fabulous when pulled off the canning shelf or from the freezer. And the process for grilling large tomatoes is easy: slice them in half, sear them cut side down on a hot grill for a couple of minutes, and then flip and cook a few more minutes until soft.
Those of us with large gardens quickly come up with enough grilled tomato batches for canner loads of salsa, Bloody Mary mix, and pasta sauce. But in recent years, I’ve been running a small batch to freeze in cubes—the perfect size to drop into a soup, spread on a pizza crust, or simply dip into with mozzarella-stuffed breadsticks.
Learn to make Grilled Tomato Pizza Sauce and Stuffed and Grilled Breadsticks
Grill It, Roast It, Smoke It
And just like that, September is here. Long before I’m ready for summer to be over, the month that signals the start of fall rolls in. But even though a few of August’s garden-fresh favorites are finished for the season, September’s list of harvestable fruits and vegetables is the longest of year, with the last of the summer beans, berries, and corn bumping up against the first of the fall greens, plums, and winter squash.
If August is the month for enjoying fresh fruit and veg, September is the month for adding a bit of charred, caramelized, and smoky flavor to the produce on the table. We’ll be grilling, roasting, and smoking all month at Twice as Tasty—mostly thanks to some incredible response from recent Twice as Tasty workshops.
Although my September schedule is quickly filling up, it’s not too late to get in on the current lineup or featured workshops locally. And Twice as Tasty will be on the road again in late October! For more details, click here.
Read more about grilling, roasting, and smoking
Refrigerator Pickles
I don’t advocate small-batch canning, but I am a fan of quick and easy pickling that fills your refrigerator one jar at a time. If your only experience with pickling is opening a store-bought jar, then refrigerator vinegar pickles will convert you to homemade. Even if you grew up in a household that put up shelves of pickled vegetables every summer, like I did, refrigerator pickles have surprising benefits.
The disadvantage of refrigerator pickles—that they aren’t sealed in heated jars and thus shelf stable—can be an advantage in freshness and crispness. Small-space gardeners or CSA members can put up a jar at a time as produce ripens. Even expansive gardeners can use fridge pickles to test new flavor combinations. Cucumbers are ideal refrigerator pickles, because they soften so quickly when heated. You should still only use pickling cucumbers; the thick-skinned slicing cucumbers you find in grocery stores and even lemon cucumbers are really only useful as fresh pickles. After years of pasteurizing summer squash, I’ve switched from the canner to the fridge to keep the pickles’ crunch.
Learn to make Cucumber Refrigerator Pickles and Cumin-Spiced Zucchini Refrigerator Pickles
Pick a Pickle
Almost every vegetable garden explodes in July. My first July harvest included the last of the spring greens and asparagus, midcycle broccoli and garlic scapes, and the first snap peas, carrots, beets, and bulb onions. The harvest will go straight into our mouths, but as the yields grow jugs of vinegar and a box of salt will be front and center, ready for pickling.
All of my recently harvested vegetables can be pickled, along with snap beans, summer squash, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, garlic, cabbage, and even fruit. That’s the beauty of pickling: it lets you preserve any low-acid vegetable safely. And like many of my favorite processing techniques, it’s endlessly variable. Various pickling techniques let you preserve everything from a single cucumber to a box of cukes. You can flavor them to fit any meal: American dills or bread-and-butters with burgers, Japanese kyuri asazuke with sushi, Indian kheer uragai with curry—and that’s just a few variations on cucumber pickles.
Read more about quick and easy pickling
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (aka the Garden)
It’s early May, and the growing season looks so promising: You’ve weeded beds, added compost, and attached hoses. You’re buying starts and scattering seeds. Your garden looks neat and orderly, the rain’s handling your watering, and after winter’s gray you’re thrilled by the first daff blossoms and garlic shoots.
Fast-forward to late July, and it’s a different story. Your garden has exploded, or perhaps imploded. Weeds threaten to outpace desirables in every corner. Early plants have gone bitterly to seed, and late ones are suffering heatstroke. One day your basil gets a sunburn; to compensate, you overwater and drown your tomatoes. You’ve got 6 activities crammed into every weekend, and your planned garden-fresh dinner is supplanted by takeout. You look out the window, afraid to go deeper into your neglected garden. Why did you do this again? Here’s my secret to enjoying this personal jungle.
Read more about my secret to enjoying this personal jungle
Cheese and Yogurt
Queso blanco, paneer, whole-milk ricotta, farm cheese, lemon cheese—they’re the same cheese by different names. Even where recipes for them may vary, they share two features: all form curd through the addition of an acid, and all coagulate because they are heated above 176°F, the temperature at which the milk protein casein “sets.” This makes Lemon Cheese, my preferred name because I like to use lemon juice to form the curd, surprisingly simple and easy to make. This recipe is also a great first cheese because you need few special tools or ingredients: just cheesecloth, a thermometer, and ideally cheese salt. You can make about 2 pounds of cheese from a gallon of milk, but I prefer to use some of that gallon to make yogurt.
Learn to make Lemon Cheese and Fresh Yogurt
New Workshops and a Road Trip
People love to gather in kitchens. Whether you’re feeding a family or hosting a party, the scents of good food being prepared draw people to the room. It’s part of what makes a Twice as Tasty–catered house concerts special: live music in an intimate setting is coupled with delicious appetizers and the scent of baking cookies for intermission. It’s also what is making Twice as Tasty workshops so popular: instead of trying to keep people from hovering while you cook, you gather your friends in your kitchen. Then I teach everyone how to prepare a fabulous dish, make a favorite from scratch, or use a new technique.
Twice as Tasty workshops have been so popular that I’ve taken them on the road. My recent road trip to the Pacific Northwest was such a success I plan to repeat it in the future. Workshops are always available locally in Montana’s Flathead Valley.
Read more about the current topics and scheduling a workshop
