Culinary Adventures with Camilla

When one of your best friends since high school turns fifty - and there's a hoshigaki workshop at a local farm on her birthday weekend - you know exactly how you are going to celebrate. Okay, she isn't technically a high school friend, but she's married to a high school friend and quickly became one of us as soon as we met her! Beware: When you spend time with friends from high school, sometimes it's as if all those years in between vanish. We were listening to 80s hits in the car on the way to the farm and our jokes were pretty juvenile...lots about balls and, well, I'll just leave this one here from our stop at a succulent garden shop on the way home. Three of us were independently taking photos of these while the fourth told us 'dirty old ladies' to knock it off. Then we posed for a group photo and threatened to gift these to each other for Christmas.  Okay, enough of our antics and back to these Japanese balls: hoskigaki . Hoskigaki  are dried, preserve...

Last week I stopped by the Serendipity Farms ' Friday farmstand and saw these Pink Pearl apples. These are my favorite - not just because they are gorgeous, but because they are so sweet and tart at the same time. I love them. As I schemed about what to do with my haul, my family suggested everything from apple chips to apple tarts. Done and done. But first: chips. It's been years since I've owned a dehydrator. So, I have figured out how to make dried fruit chips in my oven. Lots of trial and error. I tried lots of different kinds of apples, different temperatures, different thicknesses of apples, and different baking times before I came up with this recipe. I like to use a chai spice blend, but if you don't have that, you can make your own with sugar, ground cardamom, ground cloves, ground ginger, ground cinnamon, ground black pepper, and some vanilla bean powder. As I mentioned, I've tested different apples, but these Pink Pearls produce m...

I was slacking on my photo-taking. By the time I looked back at the dish, only five small raisins were left. I'll definitely be making this again! For our Sankt Hans Aften picnic celebration, I found a recipe for Icelandic rhubarb raisins. Though I am not a huge raisin fan, the rhubarb part of the recipe intrigued me. And, given how quickly these were devoured, they were a hit! The recipe I found said to do this in the sun, covered with a thin cloth to keep the dust and bugs away. I used my oven! No bugs there... Ingredients rhubarb organic granulated sugar Procedure Slice your rhubarb into 1/2" to 1" pieces and place them in a small mixing bowl. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and preheat the oven to the lowest setting yours has. Mine was 170 degrees. F. Add enough granulated sugar to the bowl to coat the rhubarb pieces completely. Place them on the prepared baking sheet and stick them in the oven. Bake them until they are dried a...