Kitchen reunion

I am back from about a month of traveling - Thanksgiving w/ family, and then to Kampala for work. Both trips were great, but it is really nice to be back in my kitchen (although I still need to buy dinner plates and a couple of saucepans - oh, the things that go missing during a move!)

The first night I was back, I made the good old buckwheat granola standby and a stew of lentils, butternut squash, and kale - a little flat, more vegetables or some decent stock would have been a good idea. But after all the restaurant meals, something homemade and dowdy is a nice contrast.

I have also been hustling to make some holiday presents - viz, strawberry jam with cardamom, turbinado sugar, and Meyer lemon juice (scrumptious, although instead of using half as much sugar as fruit by weight as is standard I used a quarter, so the set is exceedingly soft but the taste is a little more nuanced; if one were feeling punctiliously accurate, one could describe the end product as more a fruit suspension in syrup than a jam) and a variation on this quince-orange marmalade (skipped the cardamom, used blood oranges, doubled the lemon juice b/c was using leftover Meyers) that is very fine indeed - lots of layers of flavour, and very pretty besides.