use real butter

Recipe: rugelach

As a scientist and as a lover of the outdoors, I own a lot of field guides because I always want to know what rocks, flowers, trees, bugs, birds, weather phenomena, and critters we encounter.

just a small sampler of my guides

Recently I added another field guide to my collection, but this one won’t help me too much in the backcountry. It’s not quite like the others…

well, hello there

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Recipe: basic pizza dough

Whoa, it’s been a while! But I’m finally back to my Daring Bakers Challenge, this time with pizza thanks to our awesome hostess, Rosa of Rosa’s Yummy Yums. I was thrilled that she picked a nominally savory (you could make it sweet, and I’m sure Tartelette did!) recipe.

the daring bakers: we knead to bake!

The only pizza dough I’ve made is the recipe out of the KitchenAid recipe book. You know the one I’m talking about – the book that comes with the KitchenAid stand mixer. It’s a good recipe and we have taken to making thin crust pizzas with it. This month’s challenge was a little different. For one thing, it required cold water instead of warm water.

cold water

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Recipe: apple tartlets

I typically encounter few problems when cooking or baking things that I eventually post on Use Real Butter. There may be some recipes that I merely feel “meh” about and hold off posting those for times when I’m out of posting material. And then there are times, like this past week, when I try a recipe and it didn’t come out as I had hoped. This actually happened with TWO such recipes and the end results are kind of important to me (okay, okay, I AM OCD). I even told Tartelette I wasn’t sure I wanted to bother redoing them this weekend. But redo them I did… and with the proper results. That makes me feel better.

Most of today was spent working on a rather odd project that I’m pretty sure not a one of you has ever embarked on making before. More on that tomorrow. I’m quite jazzed about it.

The other day I had a few Granny Smith apples lying about with no designated purpose. I didn’t think too much about them until I was working out and the thought of caramelized apples bounced into my head. I tossed about the idea of a deconstructed apple crisp, but I’m not as keen on deconstruction as say… reconstruction. If you will recall the apple cranberry crisp from not to long ago, I went for the same theme, but different presentation.

the oatmeal streusel topping pressed into tartlet pans

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