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These pickles are infuriatingly beautiful. Our distinctly red exterior white interior radish has made love with it’s brine and they have become one. Why am I always giving vegetables human tendencies? Probably the same reason everyone I meet gets associated with an animal. I’m a pro at this, go ahead send me your photo to analyze, not my fault if your totem is a turkey. My infant son has no animal, so far hes gone from alien to peanut. Really why do little babies resemble peanuts SO. Much. I digress. Love these purdy pink pickles, they are some special and unique. Coriander, all spice, habanero chile. Zing! Jamaican jerk spice inspired pickles to the core. I hope you love them as much as I do, and desire to eat them on everything. They are quite satisfying with any fattier cut of meat or something rich and cheesy.

Apple cider vinegar was my choice as it is so healing and delicious. In the past when I was vegetarian I suffered from low HcL (hydrochloric acid) which is the healthy stomach acid that does the great initial job of breaking down our food. Funny enough, the condition of acid reflux is typically cause by low HcL. Products like (insert chalky sweet candy like substance here) actually exacerbate the condition and make matters worse over time. The best remedy is truly, apple cider vinegar, with each meal until your stomach acid is able to regulate itself to a point where you don’t experience the reflux effect. Tantalizing stuff right? Long story short, that’s just one of the therapeutic uses ACV has.

Now I know you must be wondering if you could pickle these using the wild fermentation technique, aka, substitute vinegar and sugar for a salty brine and allow to ferment at room temperature for several weeks, resulting in a delightfully probiotic super powerful veg substance. The answer is yes. But you need to consider the intensity of the spices won’t be quite the same since they aren’t heated in any matter. However an equally flavourful addition would be some fresh garlic and pepper corns or caraway seeds or hot chilis. Today I am hooking you guys up with 2 recipes for these spicy pickled radishes, one wild-fermentation version and one quick pickled vinegar version, yeehaw!

I am convinced this is the best pecan pie I have eaten, or made. It’s chewy inside, with crunchy pecans on top. The flavor is mildly sweet to bring out the taste of the nuts, and to keep you coming back for seconds. Sarah's Pecan Pie - best pecan pie recipe

I made this pecan pie for a Christmas dinner with family friends, and the response from the mommies was astoundingly pleasant (rare! These ladies aren’t usually into desserts because they’re not healthy). I had brought a blueberry cake and this pecan pie, and at the end of the night, this pie was definitely the winner.

Initially, I had made pecan pie earlier in the week (chocolate bottomed!). But it was so sweet, my mother banned me from making pecan pies the rest of winter break. Luckily I had already made two pie crusts, so under the argument that I had to use the second crust, this pie was born. In response to her complaint about the sugar overload in pies, I made this pie without adding sugar.

Doesn’t that just sound gross? I thought so at first. Except it tastes even better without the 1 cup of sugar I almost dumped into the filling. The maple syrup is naturally sweet and gives this pie a delicious sweet taste that isn’t too overwhelming and keeps people coming back for seconds.

The three eggs in the pie also give the filling a spongy texture, the perfect contrast to the crispy top. To keep the pie edges from overbaking, I first baked with foil on the pie edges. I’d read about this in cookbooks – and it worked wonders keeping this crust from being over cooked.

Formal education is useful, I guess, and so is a good upbringing, but all I really need to know I learned in France. Let others write odes to kindergarten; I owe it all—or a lot of it, at least—to Paris, plain and simple. It was there that I had my first taste of love, sweet, delicious, and doomed. It was there that I learned how to live with a family of strangers and, later, how to live alone. It was there that I learned how to love a city, its cement, its splendors, and its subway. And it was in France, dear reader, that I learned to swallow the bitter pill best known as endive—not a life lesson, perhaps, in the strict sense of the term, but a promising turn for a palate.

As a child, I was more picky than pleasant at the dinner table. Though there were few foods that I would wholly refuse, endive was one of them, along with bananas, mushrooms, and asparagus. My father, on the other hand, loved the stuff, and as fate would have it, he also loved grocery shopping. At least one out of every three trips to the store—which worked out to be quite a lot, in our house—would bring an attack of the small white torpedoes, cold and foreboding, sheathed in hard, squeaky leaves. He’d slip them into salads, where they’d lie in wait, caustic, amidst soft, ruffly lettuce leaves. Ever the inventor, he’d fashion from them bitter, bone-white spoons for scooping up salads of shrimp, peppers, and pesto. I learned from an early age to stealthily avoid endive, but it seemed to follow me—first over land, and then overseas .

So it was that at a modest table in southwestern Paris, I was cornered, conquered, and, at the tender age of twenty-one, taught to love endive. Maybe it was a simple matter of maturation, of taste buds and passing time, but there, confronted with an empty plate, a full bowl of salad, and the eyes of an entire host family, I was forced to reconsider. I scooped a spoonful of endive and apple onto my plate, the thin slices pleasantly indistinguishable under a nubbly coat of coarse-grain mustard vinaigrette. It was cold, crunchy, sweet, tart, and tangy, a small wintery welcome. It wasn’t love, but it was likable enough for a second helping. Repetition, it seems, works as well at the dinner table as it does in the classroom, because by the time a caramelized endive and goat cheese tart landed on my plate sometime the following spring, I was set to automatic swoon. Soft and burnished, the endive was mild and sweet, and propped against a cushion of pillowy cheese, it went down without a hitch .

I learned my lesson well, because it still does. I throw endive into salads alongside apples, pears, and pungent blue cheese. I sneak it into a bastardized Balthazar salad, where it folds itself happily alongside fennel, frisée, and radicchio. And it should come as no surprise that I often give it a good braise, my default treatment for misunderstood vegetables and other misanthropes.


With a good, steamy bath, endive melts into a soft, silky tangle. Its bitterness settles into a subtle complexity, an earthy sophistication smoothed by the velvet hand of heavy cream and a salty slap of prosciutto.


Braised into submission, it shares the plate quite nicely with roasted chicken or pork loin, but I’ll take my endive on its own, as a light but rich winter supper, with bread for sopping up the creamy pan juices and a simple green salad to start. There is no bitter pill that can’t be made better by braising—which is, if you ask me, all I really need to know anyway .

With the possible exceptions of war, loss, loneliness, homelessness, natural disasters, incurable diseases, hunger, heartbreak, income taxes, yeast infections, and the horrifyingly botched haircut I got last October, there is nothing worse than a bad recipe. Nothing. That’s a strong statement, I know, but test it for yourself—or sit back and wait, because a bad one is bound to find you—and you’ll no doubt agree. There is nothing worse than a recipe that goes all wrong, or that never quite makes it to right. Disappointment, dear reader, is a total dud of a dinner companion.

For the most part, I try to forget about the flops, the bummers, and the busts. They’re pretty few and far between, anyway, and often easy to sniff out. And when a bad recipe does manage to sneak past the guards, in most cases no permanent damage is done—unless, of course, the culprit calls for caviar, truffles, or gold leaf. By dint of willful memory loss or welcome amnesia, I return to the kitchen largely unscarred, day after day .

But the few calamities that do linger, however, tend to involve baking, a strict science in which the simplest mistake or misdirection is magnified exponentially by the oven’s heat and a hungry sweet tooth. Take, for example, the towering lemon meringue tart that wept—nay, sobbed—onto my kitchen counter so aggressively that I had to position it atop a protective layer of newspaper as though potty-training a puppy. Or the Bundt cake that called for combining melted chocolate with cold milk, a recipe that I followed with no small degree of skepticism and which rewarded my efforts with an oddly freckled, strangely greasy crumb. Or, say, the chocolate red velvet cake with chocolate icing that I made for a recent dinner with friends, touting a confidence-inspiring cup of buttermilk, two sticks of butter, and plenty of bittersweet cocoa. Baked, frosted, and plated, it could be called red only if eaten while wearing rose-tinted lenses, and it was tragically short on icing, its bare sides gaping, parched, pathetic. It’s bad enough that my date lives on the opposite side of the country; taking disappointment to a dinner party doesn’t make things any better preamp.

But every bad recipe brings to mind a good one, and if you’re anything like me, you maintain a small arsenal, carefully collected in an accordion folder, for just such occasions. This week, that failed chocolate cake calls for a foolproof chocolate cookie, a recipe that I stumbled upon a few years ago, repeated religiously for a month or two, and then tucked away for safekeeping, sufficiently convinced of its success.


Crisp, crackly, and feather-light, these cookies call to mind the shiny, shattery topcoat of a good brownie, conveniently baked in individual portions. Thin and delicate, they conceal a chewy center, rich with cocoa but surprisingly subtle in sweetness. Each bite brings a meaty walnut under the tooth, and amongst the nooks and crannies, cocoa nibs sound a quiet note of bitterness, a contribution that brings complexity without stealing center stage.

With the possible exceptions of love, lust, lotteries, fireplaces, forgiveness, warmth, health insurance, and refunds for horrifyingly botched haircuts, really, there is nothing better than a good chocolate cookie jimmy choo handbags.

Maybe you've lost your job. Maybe you didn't get the promotion you were hoping for. Maybe your sweetheart broke up with you. People say "Don't take it personally" and "Don't let it get to you," but that's very hard to do.
 
If you're feeling disheartened, what are some strategies for making yourself feel better about yourself? It's pretty clear that repeating "I'm the greatest!" or winning a trophy along with every other second-grade soccer player isn't a good way to build healthy self-esteem.
 
At the same time, it's a rare person who isn't sometimes – or often – plagued with painful self-doubt. When you're feeling lousy about yourself, what can you do to feel better?
 
Here's the secret. To build your self-respect…do something worthy of your respect. To like yourself better…do something that makes you likable. It's tempting to think that support and encouragement from other people will reassure you, but A) often that doesn't work and B) often you can't winkle other people into giving you a pep talk Wine Dinner.
 
Here are some strategies to try:
 
Do a good deed. This is as selfish as it is selfless; you'll benefit as much as the person you're helping. I had a friend who went through a period of tremendous rejection: she was fired from her job, she didn't get into the graduate program to which she'd applied, and her boyfriend broke up with her. Everything worked out fine in the end, and I asked her how she got through such a tough time. She said, "I was practically addicted to doing good deeds for other people. It was the only way I could make myself feel like I wasn't a total loser." Along the same lines…
 
Make small gestures of good citizenship. Bring your old magazines to the gym so other people can read them. Offer directions to someone who looks lost. Sign up to be an organ donor. My current favorite: picking up trash that other people have left on the subway.
 
Keep a resolution. Not only will you benefit from exercising or cleaning out your garage, you'll also get a boost from the mere fact that you made a commitment and stuck to it.
 
Become an expert. There's great satisfaction in mastery. Pick a subject that interests you, and dig in deep: the American Revolution, Photoshop, knife techniques. This can be hard, because learning something new can also make you feel frustrated and stupid, but if you push through, you'll give yourself a huge boost. Be sure to pick something that honestly engages you: become an expert on The Sopranos, if that sounds enticing, but don't decide to learn about wine just because you think other people will be impressed. You're much less likely to stick with it, so you won't benefit as much Visualiser.
 
Boost your energy. Studies show that when you're feeling energetic, you're much more likely to feel good about yourself. Most important: get enough sleep. If you need an emergency energy fix, take a quick ten-minute walk （outside, if possible, where sunlight will also stimulate your brain）, listen to some great music, or talk to a friend.
 
Challenge yourself physically. This strategy doesn't work for me, but I know that many people feel great after para-sailing, white-water rafting, bungee-jumping, or roller-coaster-riding. For the less daring, a great run, bike ride, or spinning class can do the trick cheap otterbox cases.