Carol Egbert

My thoughts often turn to tea, a cup of tea, a pot of tea, a tea cup, a tea pot.  You might enjoy an image I discovered this morning. Here’s the link. 

I drink English Breakfast tea  with lime.  Char, my friend with a green Aga, served Irish Breakfast tea with thin slices of lime studded with a four whole cloves. … read more

I’ve traveled to Brighton, a seaside town sixty miles south of London, to visit my son Matthew while his wife, Alison, is in Australia on a business trip. Weekday mornings we take the train to the university where Matthew is teaching and we work – he writes and I write. We meet for mid-morning tea, lunch and mid-afternoon tea before heading home. During, between and after meals, our conversations regularly turn to food.

Matthew and Alison have a “veg” box from Riverford Farm delivered every Thursday. The organic vegetables and fruit come in a reusable cardboard box and are accompanied by seasonal recipes and news from the farm. The “veg” box, augmented with a bit of meat or fish, milk, cheese and eggs and miscellaneous items like fresh ginger and hot peppers from the grocer at the train station, is the center of their healthy and sustainable diet. This week’s box had leeks, cabbage, broccoli, carrots, parsnips, fennel, potatoes, onions and baby bok choy.

On Thursday, we had “veg” box stir-fry and bok choy with black beans for dinner. Here’s how Matthew did it: … read more

I found concord grapes in the market last weekend and they transported me back to my childhood and Ruby’s grape arbor. Ruby was a gardener and a cook who lived next door.

Concord Grapes Carol Egbert

She showed me how to use small clippers to harvest the bunches of fragrant, purple-black grapes. We sat on her back porch and watched birds feasting on grapes as we separated the ripe grapes from the stems, leaves and spider webs. Ruby always used the grapes we gathered to make enough grape jelly for a winter’s worth of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. … read more

Last week, everywhere I went, people were talking about peaches, not just any peaches, but Pennsylvania and New Jersey peaches.

My peach extravaganza began by dropping three peaches into boiling water for a minute, then immersing them in cold water, slipping off the peel and slicing them into two bowls. I added a squeeze of lemon juice and a rounded teaspoon of sugar to each bowl and invited Charles to share a mid-afternoon snack in the garden. Perfection!Time to move onto peach pie. The lattice vs. streusel debate had me thinking. I remembered a recipe for a sour cream apple pie with a streusel topping and decided to adapt it. Here’s how I did it: … read more

I write recipes as narrative because that’s how I taught my sons to cook and until the about a 100 years ago that’s how recipes where written. BUT, some of my favorite readers and cooks have said that they get lost  in the narrative and wish that there were a list of ingredients.

SO,  change is coming. The blog entries will still be written in my familiar style, BUT at the end of each entry you will see a line that says:

Download and print cookie recipe with an ingredients list here.

When you click on that line it will link you to  a  single sheet recipe that you can download and print.

I’ve just begun to add these links but eventually all of the blog posts will have a link to a printable recipe. … read more