Ten Ideas To Spice Up and Sweeten Winter.

By Karen and Erica

Are you searching for new and different tastes while you continue to eat most meals at home? We are. Here are some new finds.

• A huge hit over the holidays! Urbani Truffles and Luke’s Organic have teamed up to make White Truffle and Sea Salt Potato Chips. Fantastically good. Serve alone or with a sour cream dip. You will need more than one bag even if you are serving only yourself.

• Tamarind Stir Fry paste. We are experimenting with tamarind. Here’s an amazing treat: cashews with tamarind and mint.

• Yotam Ottolenghi not only has a cookbook empire, but he sells some pretty excellent products, too. His Seeds for Salad really jazz up the greens. He’s also big on preserved lemon, which he mixes with chilis and olives. His website offers lots of other recipes, too.

• Key West Spice Company has zingy spice mixes that make you feel sunny. We like all of them. Our favorite is Key Lime Seasoning, fabulous sprinkled on avocado toast. Island Barbecue is delightful too, as we hibernate on our island—cold and snowy Manhattan.

• Another key lime spice mix is Tajin. It’s been around for a while, but to us it is new. Seems like eons ago—but was only a year—when we first had it on some potato pancakes at a vegetarian restaurant in Miami Beach. So good.

• Going in a completely different direction is sichimi togarashi, a spicy Japanese mixture. Sprinkle it on fish and popcorn and when making croutons with stael bread. Kalustyans is our go to source for this and so much else. Everything is online, but if you don’t go in person you will miss half the fun—the aroma of all those spices, and the thrill of discovering exotic things you have never heard of before.

• We have fallen for pomegranate molasses. It is gloriously rich and dark red, but not sweet. Combines especially well with walnuts—in a salad, or a chicken stew. You can make it yourself, but we buy it because we are lazy.

• Winter calls for sweets, too, of course. McClaughry Farms has some special blackberry honey we crave, by the teaspoon or in hot fruity tea.

• We also love blood oranges, but their season is so short. When we can’t get them, we slather Josephine’s Feast blood orange marmalade on toast. Not quite as healthy, but just as fine.

• Not at all new to us in its traditional form—icebox cake, sometimes called Zebra cake by the intelligentsia, who probably do not know what an ice box is. A crazy easy dessert that puts a smile on everyone’s face. Chocolate wafers (Famous is the gold standard, but seldom available, so try these instead) in whipped cream. Add cinnamon if you want to enhance tradition. Our really new idea—ginger wafers and whipped cream with a touch of molasses.

Go wild! Invent something new, and sunny, and lighthearted! Spring will be here sooner if you do! (Ignore the groundhog. What does he know?)