Warming the House and My First Blogiversary

Posted by Margot
Aug 22 2010

In celebration of the first anniversary of Sour Salty Bitter Sweet this coming Friday, I’m posting a recipe every day this week. Many of them are also a way of celebrating the bountiful produce of late summer and recording for posterity the things I made for our housewarming party this weekend:

tomato in three forms, basil in two, zucchini in one--it's clearly AugustRoughly clockwise from the bottom left:
Sweet tomato shortbread squares with candied basil
Curried zucchini fritters with ranch raita
more tomato squares
Kale chips with nutritional yeast and chili powder
Basil pesto, parmesan shaving, & roasted cherry tomato canapés
more kale chips
Spiced tomato jam and aged gouda canapés
Taffy apple cream with apples, peaches, pineapple, and blueberries
Sourdough-risen baguettes
Aged gouda and fontina
Deviled eggs with saffron aioli 

Whether you’re a regular reader or this is your first time here, thanks for visiting. I’m never quite able to give this blog as much time as I wish I could, but what time I have been able to spend on it has been richly rewarding, and that’s largely due to you. Your theoretical presence is what makes me write things in the first place, and I really enjoy the conversations I get to have with you in the comment threads, over e-mail, and IRL. I try not to be too much of a traffic whore, but this makes me happy:

the dramatic spike is from the day in February when Brian linked to me; since then, it's settled into a pretty steady rate of 400-500 visits per week

Sorry, no cake. But there can still be singing:


“Happy Birthday” by Sufjan Stevens

To start off Blogiversary Week 2010, here’s a brief pictorial preview the planned “festivities”:

Monday: Sourdough-risen Baguettes

instead of dusting the whole wheat baguettes with flour, I coated them in rolled oats. fiberlicious!

Tuesday: Spiced Tomato Jam 

tomato, ginger, jalapeno, sugar, and spices ready to simmer

after an hour and a half, looks almost like strawberry preserves

Wednesday: Taffy Apple Cream

a brown sugar and cream cheese dip lightened with stabilized whipped cream so it could be used for fruits other than apple slices

Thursday: Deviled Eggs with Saffron Aioli

saffron poaching, egg yolk waiting

de-yolked, waiting to be re-yolked

 Friday: Curried Zucchini Fritters with Ranch Raita

is it just me or do most fried things taste way more like "fried" than whatever they started off as?

Saturday: Sweet Tomato Shortbread Squares with Candied Basil

the 1.5 lbs of tomatoes from the garden I used to make the juice for tomato curd tomato curd just after being poured on top of a simple shortbread crust

               the second attempt--the first try didn't work so well

I’m hoping there will be something in there that you enjoy—they’re definitely all things I’d make again. Meanwhile, I’m still wading through a century’s worth of research on weight-loss dieting for the next entry in the series about calorie counts on menus, but I hope to get that distilled into something publishable this week, too.

So here’s to a year of cooking and eating critically! May there be many more.

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I can personally attest that

Submitted by TeacherPatti (not verified) on Sun, 08/22/2010 - 17:01.

I can personally attest that every single dish was absolutely scrum-dittily-umptious! Thanx again, Margot :)

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