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1 week ago | 
pressherald.com | Christine Burns Rudalevige
The idea for this column germinated in three places. The first was in my social media feed as I watched all the reels of pastry chefs cutting rhubarb stalks and arranging them into intricate, geometric springtime tarts. The beauty of rhubarb makes me smile every spring.
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2 weeks ago | 
culturecheesemag.com | Christine Burns Rudalevige
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Grease a 9-by-13-inch baking dish and set aside. Bring a medium pot of salted water to a boil. Cook noodles according to package directions until al dente. Drain and return pasta to the pot. Toss with a pat of butter to prevent sticking. Set aside. Melt butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Stir in flour and season with salt and pepper. Cook until bubbles start to form, about 2 minutes. Add heavy cream a little at a time, whisking to combine after each addition.
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3 weeks ago | 
culturecheesemag.com | Christine Burns Rudalevige
| It takes time, money, and a tightly held quota to push cheese over the US-Canadian border“You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.”Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef and writer of unvarnished truths about American restaurant culture, penned that sentence about culinary hero Terrance Brennan. Bourdain credits Brennan as the first American chef to get serious about serving a continental cheese course.
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3 weeks ago | 
culturecheesemag.com | Christine Burns Rudalevige
| Discover the sweet science of infusing honey with herbs, spices, and creativity for the ultimate flavor boost. Straight out of the hive, honey packs a powerful punch. As a sweetener, it’s 25 percent more potent than granulated sugar. It offers a range of floral notes derived from the blooms honeybees visit as they collect nectar. When busy bees predominantly tap clover or alfalfa, their honey is light in color and mild in taste.
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3 weeks ago | 
pressherald.com | Christine Burns Rudalevige
“The cultured butter is going to be OK. But what about this fancy caviar I got for Christmas?” my bestie Elizabeth asked. She had the unenviable task of emptying the refrigerator that had conked out on her while we were on a girls’ hiking weekend. Nothing in the defunct freezer drawer in her suburban Boston home was salvageable.
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1 month ago | 
pressherald.com | Christine Burns Rudalevige
I am a pushover for a pretty savoy cabbage. It’s the Brassica oleracea with the dark green, crinkly, puckered leaves that get paler as you peel them away, working your way to the creamy core. This cabbage is sweeter and milder than most of its red, purple and Napa cousins. But when I bought a big, beautiful head of Savoy last week at my local Hannaford, I’d forgotten my husband was headed out of town for five days.
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1 month ago | 
pressherald.com | Christine Burns Rudalevige
Are you as sick of roasted root vegetables as I am? Well, that means it must be late March in Maine again!While I am as grateful as the next locavore for the Maine farmers using high-tunnel greenhouses and aquaponics systems to offer us salad greens, tender spinach, crunchy baby cucumbers and cherry tomatoes throughout the winter, I also feel a responsibility to eat up the root vegetables still sitting in their storage cellars during mud season.
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2 months ago | 
pressherald.com | Christine Burns Rudalevige
I have a soft spot for warm maple syrup. When I was 8 years old, my Girls Scouts Brownie troop visited the Milk Brook Sugarhouse, a wooden shack nestled in a working grove of sugar maple trees in Lenox, Massachusetts.
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2 months ago | 
pressherald.com | Christine Burns Rudalevige
My two cents on soaring egg prices spurred on by the avian flu? 1) Use only one when in the past you’d have used two. 2) Buy them from a trustworthy local farmer instead of at the supermarket. After all, if you are going to drop $7 on one dozen eggs, why not head to the farmers market and keep that cash circulating in the Maine food economy? Eggs secured, it’s time to learn to use them in the kitchen more judiciously.
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Feb 13, 2025 | 
pressherald.com | Christine Burns Rudalevige
The focused information sessions are the big draw for me at the Maine Agricultural Trade Show in Augusta every January. In the civic center’s breakout rooms (named after Maine counties), I’ve learned about farm succession, farm-to-school food distribution efforts, and the cover crops best suited to pull carbon out of the air and sink it into healthy soil. But I always make plenty of time to walk the trade show floor. It’s fun to see little kids get excited about the big tractors on display.
