Impatient for Orange Peels

The standard recipe for candied orange peels takes over 2 hours. My inner child is whining. Following up from my microwaved kumquat marmalade experiment, which worked beautifully, I decided I could probably do something similar to candy orange peels. The result is not perfect by professional confectioners’ standards, but it was done in 15 minutes from peeling oranges to dredging-and-drying, and the taste is not bad, not bad at all.

Honeycake for a Sweet New Year

Rosh Hashanah starts this evening and we need a honeycake–it’s traditional, plus I like it. Right. But traditional recipes call for boiling the honey with strong coffee (which takes a while), cooling it (which takes even longer), triple-sifting flour and baking soda and sugar and spices of various kinds, and then alternating between adding dry stuff and the honey-coffee mixture to some beaten eggs and oil. This is much more of a pain than it sounds in so few words. Picture wax paper and bowls all over the counter and the kitchen table, and a huge stack of stuff to clean afterward.

Canteloupe Ice or, I Conquer my Fridge

Don’t exactly know what to call this–it’s something between a sorbet and a granita, and it’s got only three ingredients–an extremely ripe canteloupe (no spoilage though) that had been sitting in my fridge for more than a week, the juice of a fairly large lime, and roughly chopped leaves from a sprig of rosemary. I [...]