Los Angeles Times The Los Angeles Times ran a roundup of homemade food-based gift ideas on Wednesday that might be just the ticket for saving money while coming up with a thoughtful present: 1. Make a batch of grissini grissini (homemade breadsticks), flavored with rosemary or black pepper, wrapped in parchment paper and tied with a bow.2. Cut out cinnamon marshmallow stars with cookie cutters, then pack them, dusted with powdered sugar, into a tin.50. Use a new apron to wrap a loaf of cranberry-orange bread, a sachet of loose-leaf black tea laced with dried orange peel, a cinnamon stick, whole allspice and some star anise. Suggest a time to drop over for a spot of holiday tea. Are...
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Where to go self-harvest raspberries, tomatoes, pears and the season's first apples....
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Regina Schrambling, on tricks to cooking for two: "The best thing about dinner for two is that you can brave dishes that would be too labor-intensive and time-consuming for a crowd. You can fry up little corn cakes to top with smoked salmon and crème fraîche, or skillet-roast a whole duck cut in half, or sauté two skate wings that can go from skillet to plate without waiting for four or six more to be cooked. But when you want a night to remember, you can pull out more stops and spend a little more money. In polling coupled friends on their ideal menu with wine but no cliché roses, I found the ingredients and dishes always differed, but the...
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Regina Schrambling on the third Identità Golose, The taste of things to come: At a most unusual chefs' conference, great ideas trumped pomp and pretention: "There were chefs quoting Kandinsky and Lars von Trier as comfortably as they evoked Escoffier. There were chefs filling balloons with spices to pop over dinner plates, and chefs demonstrating how to flavor the bread crumbs so ubiquitous in Italian cooking with lime zest and syrup. They were using all the new-wave toys — agar-agar and sous vide and digital thermometers and no end of Pakojets — but they were also sharing discoveries as basic as this: Baking butternut squash or sweet onions on a bed of rock salt will concentrate the flavor and texture."...
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