Author: Chef M

Florentines, one of my favorite treats when I go to France, are great cookies composed of caramelized nuts and dried fruit and chocolate. I kept asking Sebastien to do a Florentine, and when I brought in a traditional Florentine mold, which gives the chocolate a wavy texture, he finally got the picture and caved. Of course, we make so many now that my little mold is impractical, so we use a plastic comb from a specialty store or the kind sold in the tile section of Home Depot and other stores for spreading adhesive. Buy one with rectangular, not triangular,…

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Cheesy Fondue is perfect for cheese lovers. Melted cheese is great in any form: pizza, grilled cheese, quesadillas you name it. This fondue simply enables you to take that love to a new level. If you’re like me, this is the recipe for you. This also works great over a low campfire, but use a Dutch oven and double the ingredients.

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Puerto Rican pasteles are a traditional holiday dish in the tamale family, with a dough made from Paleo friendly starchy tropical fruits, vegetables and roots. This is Milagros’s family recipe, passed down for generations. Different families have different traditions for both the dough and the filling. They are labor intensive to make but many hands make light work. It is not uncommon for families to pile together in the kitchen and make these in huge batches. They are excellent for batch cooking and store well in the freezer for six months. Unwrapping these is like opening a special present!

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Peanut butter cookies fall into two camps: There are the cookies that are sweet and chewy but have minimal peanut butter flavor (which is obscured by significant amounts of sugar and butter), and there are the crumbly, sandy cookies that have strong peanut flavor owing to lots of peanut butter and not very much flour. We wanted a peanut butter cookie that was the best of both worlds—crisp around the edges and chewy in the center, with a buttery, sweet, and deeply peanutty flavor. We added peanut butter to our dough until we reached 1 cup; any more and the cookies…

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While we love a plain waffle, with its crisp exterior and custardy interior, it didn’t take much arm twisting to convince tasters to try a pumpkin version, with its sunset-orange color and aroma of autumn spices. Canned pumpkin puree proved a delicious way to bring nutrients such as vitamin A, fiber, and iron into our morning baking, along with a sweet, earthy flavor. However, pumpkin also brings moisture, which initially thwarted our efforts to get a crispy edge. Blotting the puree with paper towels helped eliminate excess moisture, producing a thick, not overly wet batter that crisped up while retaining…

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Smoothies became an important part of my life a few years ago when I was lucky enough to receive a Vitamix, a blender with a really powerful motor. I tend to be very ad hoc about putting ingredients together, but I definitely take advantage of summer berries from our Saturday Barossa market and try to have properly ripe bananas on hand, which I peel, cut into chunks and freeze. Frozen fruit not only adds flavour, it instantly creates an iced drink. I like to keep a good supply of coconut water, which I buy by the case to be more…

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It’s a ritual for me, that each summer, when the apricots are everywhere in the markets and it starts to get warm, I make this tart. There is something delicious about it; almonds and apricots are made for each other.

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Fried eggs make this a wonderful breakfast or brunch dish but it’s a delicious lunch or dinner, too. Sorghum an ancient, gluten-free cereal grain with small, round seeds maintains a slightly chewy texture when cooked. I highly recommend searching it out, but if you can’t find it in your local health-food market, use one cup of brown rice instead. Stirring the chia seeds in at the end, rather than cooking them in from the beginning, ensures that the mixture doesn’t become gummy.

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