Discover Big Picture Farm caramels made by a family farm in Vermont.
They are creamy, sticky, buttery, redolent of caramelized sugar, and come in some surprising flavors.
Big Picture Farm caramels, of which I received a sample, are made by a family farm in southern Vermont using milk from their herd of adorable goats.
The farm is completely solar-powered. Its 100 acres are grazed by the goats on a rotational basis to maintain soil health. The caramels also make use of local ingredients from their fellow farmers.
Owners Louisa Conrad is a photographer and mixed-media artist, and her husband Lucas Farrell is a writer and poet. And it shows.
Yes, there’s a lot of garlic in this veggie-bean soup, but you’ll welcome it, I promise.
If I told you this soup takes more than two heads of garlic to make, would you balk?
Fear not, though, because that copious amount won’t result in a dish (or home-cook) that reeks. The garlic taste is prominent to be sure, but it’s not aggressively sharp or overwhelming pungent. Instead, it gives this vegan bean and veggie soup a deep, delicious flavor that you taste and feel all the way to your core. In other words, the kind of soup your body craves especially at this time of year.
“Jeremy Fox’s Yellow Eye Soup” is from the new “The Bean Book” (Ten Speed Press, 2014), of which I received a review copy.
It was written by Steve Sando, the founder of Napa’s Rancho Gordo, a specialty food company known for growing and sourcing heirloom beans prized by discriminating chefs and home-cooks around the country; and Julia Newberry, general manager of Rancho Gordo.
Husband and wife, Ajay Walia and Reena Miglani may have had successful careers in tech and finance. But ever since earning MBAs in Chicago, they always knew that some day they would open their own restaurant after growing disenchanted by the Indian food they found then in the Windy City.
In 2003, they made good on that, opening Saffron in San Carlos in 2003. That was followed by the fine-dining Indian restaurant, Rasa in Burlingame in 2016, which held a Michelin star for 10 years. Although Rasa morphed for two years into another outpost of Saffron, it returned in force in October 2024.
Now, the couple has broken from the mode of Indian cuisine to open their first non-Indian restaurant: Amara in Belmont, which serves Mediterranean fare.
The restaurant had a soft opening in late-December, when I was invited in as a guest during a “Friends & Family” night to try some of the menu offerings and to offer feedback. The restaurant, located in the Carlmont Village Shopping Center for easy parking, will have its grand opening on Jan. 21.
The bar.The dining room.
The dining room, done up in serene teal and white, evokes the seaside. Come late-spring, the restaurant will open its garden with seating overlooking a man-made stream with a footbridge. In total, Amara boasts 220 seats — more than Rasa and Saffron combined.
Syrupy Indonesian soy sauce flavors this saucy pork dish.
After indulging in so many mammoth feasts this holiday, I always long for simple comfort dishes come January.
“Kecap Manis-Braised Pork” fits that bill with tender chunks of pork and potatoes simmered in sweet, aromatic Indonesian soy sauce known as kecap manis that gets spooned over fluffy white rice.
This simple, homey dish is from “Mortar & Pestle” (Weldon Owen, 2024), of which I received a review copy.
It was written by Patricia Tanumihardja, a Virginia food writer who was born in Jakarta, Indonesia and grew up in Singapore; and Juliana Evari Suparman, who was born in Bekasi, Indonesia and now lives in Seattle where for many years she operated her own restaurant and catering business.
Because Indonesian cuisine is not nearly as well known as many other Asian ones, the two were inspired to write the cookbook to shed light on their native country, which consists of an astounding 18,110 islands, forming what is the largest archipelago in the world (3.8 million square miles) to form a single state.
