break-ie

sweet potato ginger bread

August 13, 2010

I’m getting more engrossed in Stephan Pyles’ The New Texas Cuisine. This recipe comes directly from the book. He calls for pumpkin but recommends sweet potatoes as an alternative if pumpkin isn’t in season. I made this quick bread following the directions but ran into some problems. I think that I ended up with too [...]

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Rainier cherry almond cake

July 26, 2010

Whenever we go food and cook ware shopping in the Richmond District, we try to go to Green Apple Books before hitting Richmond New May Wah and Kamei House Wares. They’re all near one another on Clement Street, which makes it convenient so long as we’ve scheduled enough time. Time is an issue as we [...]

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biscoito de polvilho azedo AKA sour manioc biscuit

July 9, 2010

Growing up in the countryside in Brazil was not fun in the sense that we didn’t have a bakery to go to every morning to get bread. On the other hand, it was great because my mother liked to bake. She had a rustic wood burning oven built outside the house near the kitchen in [...]

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oven-baked sweet potato chips

May 19, 2010

Eat your sweet potatoes! They’re tasty (and sweet). They make a perfect side dish for almost any meal: breakfast, lunch or dinner. They’re good snacks, too. Plus they’re nutritious with loads of vitamin A, complex carbs, protein and so on. This oven-baked sweet potato chip recipe is really easy to make. It’s delicious and has [...]

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walnut raisin bread

April 19, 2010

This recipe is in latest issue of bon appétit, in the reader’s favorite restaurant recipes section. I love making recipes from magazines. I think that it’s a real test of the magazine’s quality if it turns out well in my kitchen. I’ve dropped several food magazines (that shall remain nameless) after trying a few of [...]

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doce de abóbora em pedaços

April 2, 2010

Doce de abóbora em pedaços or “sweet pumpkin in pieces” is a common roadside snack that you might see while travelling in São Paulo state on the way to Minas Gerais in Brazil. There’s another version that uses green papaya instead of pumpkin. The secret ingredient is this chemical called cal virgem. We bought some [...]

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true blood: freshly squeezed blood and Texas orange juice

March 29, 2010

I never really liked canned or bottled juices. They always seem to taste a bit too sweet for me. Orange juice is especially tricky: often it comes with additional, unwanted pith and peel flavors, which makes it bitter; and it either tastes like plastic or metal from the container. Not good. So over the weekends [...]

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melão pele de sapo

March 9, 2010

I’ve been putting off writing about the “toad skin” melon since we got back from Brazil a few weeks ago as I’ve been trying to figure out what we’d call it in the U.S. No such luck. According to the Cambridge history of the world of food, there are hundreds and hundreds of kinds of [...]

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sweet guava memories

February 22, 2010

Guava is a very popular fruit in Brazil, particularly in my home state of Minas Gerais, where it’s grown all over. As a kid I remember climbing guava trees in the woods behind my house and gorging myself on those delicious, flavorful fruits. Mmmmm! Guava can be pinkish-red or white. They have a “tropical flavor:” [...]

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suco de carambola AKA starfruit juice

February 8, 2010

While visiting Vitória north of Rio de Janeiro, the thing that I look forward to the most (after the company, of course) is suco de carambola or starfruit juice. Starfruit were simply not that common during my childhood in Northern Virginia. Sure they were around occasionally, but were really expensive, often a few dollars each. [...]

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