Sarah « A Season to Taste

Chocolate sheet cake

If you’ve ever needed cake for a crowd, this is your recipe. I made it recently for a baby shower with fifty people and still had cake to send home with the expectant parents. It tastes like a really good birthday cake from your childhood: sweet, moist, chocolatey, and uncontroversial. It doesn’t require sophisticated tastes […]

Mashed potatoes dolled up

Mashed potatoes evoke strong feelings: they must have chunks, or have no chunks. A ricer/food processor/drop of water must never touch them. You must you this or that kind of dairy.

One way around the whole controversy is to make a variation on the traditional dish. Everyone will be so suprised that you put […]

There's a reason she's Alice Waters

Alice Waters is pretty my much idol. She was into local food before it was a thing people were into, and now that she’s got that sorted, she’s moving on to saving school lunch.

So even though this carrot soup recipe looks ridiculously simple, you’re going to want to take her word for it […]

Not-too-sweet maple-glazed sweet potatoes

Normally I’m opposed to adding anything sweet to orange vegetables. They start off pretty sweet as is, so savory preparations usually seem like the way to go. Also, I somehow managed to grow up sheltered from the travesty that is sweet potato-marshmallow casserole. But I digress.

My point is that this recipe, despite the […]

Dilly green beans

One of my brilliant friends came up with an idea she calls “the roasted duck test.” The gist of the roasted duck test is to hold up any fancy preparation of an ingredient to a classic, simple, and really delicious one. I find it to be a good check on messing with a good thing.

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Parsnip spice muffins

I am now in the middle of my winter CSA, in that kind of scary part in the middle where you’ve gotten 2/3 of the produce but have only cooked 1/4 of it. Sure, a lot of it stores well, but it’s a pretty intimidating mountain of produce.

Every year, I find a few […]

Quinoa, or how to improvise in the kitchen

The magic line separating me from real cooks, I have long believed, is about improvisation. As I’ve learned to cook, I’ve become more and more comfortable winging it — applying familiar preparations to new combinations of things, taking “season to taste” ever more literally — but I’m not someone with a natural talent for looking […]

Cookies and comfort

Cookies were the first genre of food that I felt like I had mastered. I started making them regularly when I was about ten and I pretty much never stopped.

Cookies are a kind of traditional comfort food: even for those of us not lucky enough to be descended from a long line of bakers, […]

The beauty of scones

I love to bake in the morning. I find it tremendously satisfying to have something warm from the oven with my morning coffee, and getting dough under my nails before 8 am often seems to improve the quality of my day. Of course, I can usually only manage this on lazy weekend mornings, so that […]

It's not real blood

Honest. My kitchen did look a little like I’d some some slaughtering, but the only things harmed were beets.

I tend to get in a beet rut. They’re just so good roasted that I find it difficult to work up the motivation to try any other methods. But my winter farmshare has provided enough […]

A Season to Taste