These days, I order most of my spices from Penzey’s, and a big thank you to Alton Brown and Good Eats for introducing me to this place. Penzey’s has pretty much every spice you can imagine, and I can really taste the difference between the quality in their spices and those that I pick up at the grocery store. I also appreciate the great prices that they have on bulk spices like ground ginger, cinnamon, and chili powder, which I seem to use by the bucketful.

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Now that you’ve made your own sweet, sweet jam, wouldn’t you love to slather it on a warm and fluffy biscuit with some butter? These biscuits have been a long time in the making and, when I say a long time, I mean over a year and a half of experimenting with the recipe, using every type of gluten free ingredient imaginable, and having several results that weren’t exactly edible. I’ve learned a lot about making gluten free biscuits along the way.

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Food canning is one of those things that seems intimidating at first, but trust me when I say that it’s not difficult at all. If anything, you’re going to find yourself obsessed with making jam, jelly, and pretty much whatever other tasty foods you can find and stuff into a canning jar. Okay, maybe that’s just me, but canning really is easy and fun once you get the hang of it, and that shouldn’t take long at all.

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Though I have yet to find a great gluten free recipe for burger buns — I’m working on it — I still enjoy a tasty burger. I’ve been experimenting more with ground chicken and turkey, and these chicken burgers with spinach and caramelized oinions have definitely earned their place on my “make again” list. The spinach and onions not only keep the meat nice and moist, but they also bump up the flavor. Add more caramelized onions and a little cheese on top, some rosemary thyme oven fries on the side, and you’ve got a winner!

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A few years ago, I bought my first ice cream maker. My head was filled with fantasies of making my own custom ice cream, flavored in any wild and wonderful way that I could imagine. It was a great time, and then I actually made something. My wild and wonderful custom ice cream ideas came crashing down when I discovered that, after an overnight session in the freezer, my ice cream was as hard as a block of ice. Like, a you-need-an-ice-pick-to-get-into-it hard.

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We return to that magical June 2009 issue of Bon Appetit for this recipe for a “15 minute” spicy orange chicken. Now, I don’t know about 15 minutes — unless they weren’t including prep time — but this is still a very quick recipe compared to my regular go to orange chicken recipe. No messy breading, no deep frying, just a simple orange chicken with a nice flavor payoff for something that takes so little time. I think that it would be even better if you added some garlic and a little fresh ginger.

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