This recipe for homemade ricotta cheese was adapted from Grace Pilato’s at About.com  It was perfect for my pasta dishes and the one that yielded the most cheese from a gallon of whole milk. Instead of distilled white wine vinegar, I used apple cider vinegar and I didn’t notice any difference in taste nor yield.  [...]

Another dessert for my Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24 Cooking with Edible Flowers entry.  Adapted from a sicilian style cheesecake from allrecipes.com, this version flavors with lavender buds and then bake cheesecake crustless.  The cake was then drizzled with lavender honey and decorated with crystallized violets.
Ingredients:

2 lbs ricotta cheese (you can use homemade ricotta cheese)
2/3 cup [...]

Dolma or stuffed grape leaves is a popular Middle Eastern delicacy that has numerous variations today. Meat is normally used in making hot dolma and cold dolmas generally are without. I adapted a recipe from Claudia Roden’s book The New Book of Middle Eastern Food and replaced the grape leaves with nasturtium leaves.  The resulting [...]