A Honey of a Cookbook

Marie Simmons, photo by Luca Trovato

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

As soon as I got off the phone with Marie Simmons, I headed to the kitchen, made a slice of toast, slathered it with butter and drizzled it with honey. The rich and creamy butter melted and merged with the mellow sweetness of the honey…and rekindled a childhood taste memory.

I confess I’m not much of a honey user. There’s no particular reason; I just don’t think of it. We always buy lavender honey when vacationing in Provence and Lehua honey when in Hawaii. And the rest of the time, we always have some kind of honey at home, but it often sits on the shelf until a recipe I’m making actually calls for this natural sweetener.

My interest in honey was triggered when I was invited to an education panel in San Francisco recently, hosted by the National Honey Board, at which Marie, an award-winning food writer and the author of Taste of Honey, c. 2013, (Andrews McMeel Publishing), was speaking. Delighted to be seeing an old friend again, I called Marie for a preview.

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Exploring Black Garlic

By Katie Barreira

This week I picked up a head of black garlic. I had never cooked with this type of garlic before, but had tried it in some great dishes (including a dessert panna cotta!) and I couldn’t wait to taste the unique, fermented ingredient on its own.

I knew that the aged head would be softer than raw garlic, but I wasn’t prepared for the plump, gummy clove that emerged from the flaky skin. I took a bite; the texture was smooth and toothsome, like that of a cooked beet and the flavor was much more mellow than raw garlic, with a licorice-like sweetness and just a hint of pungency.

A little pressure under the flat side of a knife and the clove yielded into thick paste that could be stirred into all sorts of things, so that just what I did!

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Think Delicious, Nutritious Summer Salads

By Sandy Hu

With warmer days ahead, it’s time to start thinking salads. Here’s one that’s simply delicious, a perfect melding of sweet, tart and peppery flavors. It’s also highly nutritious, too, with some of nature’s most healthful ingredients: watercress, strawberries and California almonds. And, as an added bonus, this salad takes just 10 minutes to prepare.

If you don’t have a whisk for the Honey-Balsamic Dressing, just combine the dressing ingredients in a screw-top jar and shake it. It won’t incorporate as well as a whisk but the dressing will be just fine for the salad.

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Here’s to Worker Bees

From Katie Barreira

As our nation breaks on Monday to celebrate the achievements of working people, let’s take a moment to honor the eponymous laborer of the natural world: the worker bee.

The National Honey Board reports that, “honey is made in one of the world’s most efficient facilities. The 60,000 or so bees in a beehive may collectively travel as much as 55,000 miles and visit more than two million flowers to gather enough nectar to make just a pound of honey.”

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