The Stone Soup Cook

Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–I’m so glad you’re here! Today, I’m starting a new series of articles: the basic sauces of California Cuisine. In French cuisine, there are five basic, or “mother” sauces: Bechamel, Veloute, Espagnole, Sauce Tomat and Hollandaise. Established and standardized by Auguste Escoffier more than 100 years ago, these five sauces are foundational for French cuisine and are the base for hundreds of sauces and recipes in French …

Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–I’m so glad you’re here! Well, it’s been quite a while since I wrote anything about sourdough. I’m sure you can guess the reason. My last sourdough diary entry was at the beginning of September of last year. At that time, I had just lost my dad and was in flux on virtually everything in my life, still traveling back and forth to Texas and just trying …

Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–I’m so glad you’re here! Today, I’m doing one of my favorite things: a product review! So let’s get this out of the way: I received no compensation for this review and paid for the product myself. About this time of year, I start getting bombarded with emails and texts from kitchen stores advertising coffee and espresso machines–you know, those “wake up to a new year and …

Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–I’m so glad you’re here! The world seems a little fresher today: the sky is a crystal-clear blue you see after a good, cleansing rain, the air is chilly and smells fresh and sweet and it’s warm in the sunshine. I love this kind of winter day in California–it feels like a new beginning–a new day–a fresh start. A lot of us–including me–are setting goals for ourselves …

Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–I’m so glad you’re here! Happy New Year and I hope you had a very enjoyable holiday! For some, that means partying, for others, hunkering down with steaming mugs of hot chocolate and a good book. For us, it meant flying to Denver to pick up this little rescue: Meet Rocky: He’s about 8 months old, part Shih-Tzu, part Bichon Frise, part Pekingese, part Poodle and the …

Hello! Happy New Year and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook. I’m so glad you’re here! If you tuned in on the first, you saw my recipe for Hoppin’ John, which is a traditional southern dish featuring black eyed peas. A good southerner always eats black eyed peas on New Year’s Day for good luck. An even better southerner doesn’t let anything go to waste and eats those leftover black eyed peas the next day. The leftover black eyed …

Happy New Year and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook! I’m so glad you’re here and I hope that your new year is off to a great start! As I have mentioned before, I hail from the Deep South and in the south, we eat black eyed peas on New Year’s Day.  But why? I actually didn’t know the origins until I did a little research.  Here’s what I learned: Black eyed peas are considered by …

Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here! For Christmas, I served prime rib roast and with it, I served three wines. My menu consisted of prime rib, Brussels sprouts with bacon, cornbread dressing and beet salad. With each wine, I asked my guests to share their thoughts about how each paired with the food. Here are the wines I selected for tasting: Picayune 2019 Rive Gauche from the Napa Valley, …

Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here! Yesterday, I shared a recipe for salt-crusted prime rib roast and today, I’m sharing a great way to use up the leftover meat–beef burgundy: I hope you’re continuing to enjoy the holidays and spending them with people you love. It’s that time of year when I think we all think about new beginnings and resolutions. I am sort of suspicious of New Year’s …