I first made my acquaintance with rosemary early in life. As children, we were often sent to fetch rosemary and thyme from the bushes of same that grew along the avenue which lead to our house. It was important to learn to distinguish the two and not return with the wrong one! The rosemary, though, I only ever remember being used with meats and in savoury dumplings for beef stew. Much later, I developed a liking for slices of courgette fried with rosemary and finished with a splash of lemon juice. Then, a few years ago, MGH gave me a little rosemary plant which, despite massive doses of neglect, has thrived in my garden, but was only pressed into use in the kitchen occasionally and, even then, always for savoury purposes.
Category: Nuts (Page 2 of 2)
Tassie: noun (plural: tassies)
- (Scotland) A cup or goblet for drinking wine.
- A small tart or miniature pie.
From French tasse, meaning cup, and from Arabic tassah, a bowl or basin for drinking.
My internet travels had lately brought me to a recipe for pecan tassies, taken from Gourmet Magazine’s favourite cookie recipes 1941-2008 by way of the Cooking… by the Seat of My Pants blog. Tassies, in the miniature pie sense of the word, were entirely new to me, but the description piqued both my interest and my tastebuds, in an anticipatory kind of way.

Just some of the bunch...
Uh oh. The latest rash of flour purchases has finally pushed (the contents of) the baking cupboard over the edge. Jostling for position on the top shelf now are all of the following:
- plain white flour
- self-raising flour
- strong white bread flour
- wholewheat flour
- rye flour
- buckwheat flour
- 2 different kinds of maize flour
- corn starch
- tapioca starch
- rice flour
- manioc flour
- chickpea flour
…not to mention the cornmeal, oatmeal and 5 different kinds of sugar. Ok, so it’s not quite the equivalent of Imelda Marcos and her shoe fetish but it does tell me that I need to get to work further down the baking production line!
Whaddya Sayin’?