About Savour Fare
Based in Los Angeles, Savour Fare is the home of Kate, a working mom who is low on time but high on life. I hope this site helps you find ways to make your life richer, easier, more beautiful and more delicious. You can read more about me and the site here and feel free to email me with any questions or feedback!
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When I was a kid, we mostly ate salads. My dad was not a vegetable-lover, and with a few notable exceptions (artichokes and asparagus) we primarily consumed our vegetables raw. As a result, I held a deep-seated prejudice against most forms of cooked vegetables. I rejected red peppers. I scoffed at spinach. I pooh-poohed [...]
My personal favorite take on a bunny cake (or a birthday cake, or a Sunday afternoon for no reason layer cake) is an orange layer cake with orange buttercream frosting. I love chocolate cake, and won’t turn up my nose at a good coconut cake, or carrot cake, but when it comes to layer cakes, orange cake might just be my favorite. Orange cake seems to magically straddle that divide between those who prefer what my friend Mike calls the “brown” flavors (caramel, nuts, chocolate) and those who prefer a fruitier touch. I’ve been making this particular cake quite a bit lately (layer cake happens to be a pregnancy craving) and it’s easy to throw together, with a nice orange flavor and a moist crumb. [...]
I used to be afraid of pie. The rules about cold hands and precise handling, the rolling and the cracking and the patching and the shrinking – it all gave me hives. But now? I’m over it. I can honestly say that I make a pretty darn good pie crust. What changed? 1. My tools. I swear by my French Tapered Rolling Pin , for fuss free rolling. 2. My techniques. I roll out between sheets of parchment or plastic wrap. I use this method for making pie crusts in the food processor, but it’s even better if I keep back about a third of the butter and mix it in by hand before I add the water, rubbing it in with my fingertips, flattening globs of butter into flakes. Then I add the water by hand, too. 3. My ingredients. I get better results if I use European butter — my favorite is Kerrygold Irish butter. It has a higher fat content than most American butter, and a better butter flavor. Shortening and oil may yield a more tender crust, but what you’re giving up in the butter flavor is, IMO, not worth it. 4. My attitude. This is the most important piece. Pie crust doesn’t intimidate me any more. I just make it, chill it, roll it. If it cracks, I patch it. If it shrinks, I shrug it off. Pies don’t have to be perfect. In fact, they’re better if they’re not. And nobody refuses homemade pie. This rice pie is a creamy pie that’s part of the traditional Easter meal in parts of Italy. And it could be an Easter dessert for you. The ingredients are easy to find and relatively inexpensive. It slices beautifully, and travels well, and tastes best after chilling and then about an hour out of the refrigerator. Best of all, it’s glorious homemade pie with homemade pie crust, and you really can’t go wrong with that. [...]
I have vivid childhood memories of dyeing Easter Eggs. We always made my family’s traditional Craftsman flower eggs, but I also spent many a spring break waiting impatiently for the eggs to take on a deep color sitting in vats of vinegar with those little Paas tablets. Now that I am the mom, I try to recreate for the Nuni some of my own childhood joys, so I buy dozens of eggs each Easter, ripe for the decorating. What I am faced with as an adult that I didn’t realize as a carefree kid is that after the fun of the Easter Egg hunt comes a long slong of trying to use dozens of hard boiled eggs. There are only so many plain hard boiled eggs you can eat, though a dash of tabasco helps matters immensely. Likewise, egg salad, although a love of mine, can quickly grow tireseome. Enter deviled eggs. [...]
Bread pudding. The words themselves are hardly inspiring. Stodgy, pedestrian, British, with those overtones of school dining halls and hospital food. There are some truly execrable bread puddings — dry, almost crusty, with little discernible flavor other than that provided by a few sugary raisins, and no give. And frankly, most bread puddings I’ve had in even the best bakeries and restaurants have been in this mold — cut into neat squares and utterly unappetizing. But a good homemade bread pudding is a different beast. This is spoon food, creamy and gooey and served warm from the oven in a bowl. Bread and milk and eggs and sugar combine to form an alchemy — no longer distinct elements but something altogether new and wonderful. Comforting and exciting all at once, bread pudding has the potential to hit exactly the right dessert spot. Bread puddings can range from the basic bread and butter pudding, also known as “make a dessert from things in your pantry” to the very fancy indeed. This one is somewhere in between. It is an easy bread pudding, make no mistake about that. And most of the ingredients are in my pantry, but the basic sandwich bread and milk and eggs is kicked up a notch — the bread is a brioche (the best bread for bread pudding hands down, if you can find it), spread with a sweet and tart raspberry jam. The custard is thickened with cream and scented with the floral aromas of Tahitian vanilla extract and Amontillado sherry. And to top it off, the pudding is taken from the pedestrian to the porsche with a topping of creamy, dreamy, meringue, browned to perfection. [...]
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