Pay close attention or you may think this sweet pea dip is guacamole. It’s texture and color are spot on and the flavor, not quite avocado — it’s not fatty enough — is not peas either. Michael Roberts created this recipe as a self-challenge after a lady commented on how less-reputable restaurants used peas to dilute guacamole. The recipe is in Roberts’ Secret Ingredients cookbook and was posted many years ago to the Prodigy Internet service.…

Black, gray, and three primary colors. No pinks, purples, or greens. No subtle hues applied to the canvas. Mondrian set himself the challenge of creating art with a limited pallet and without recourse to the forms of nature. The juxtaposed elements of his paintings — the geometrical forms, the primary colors — provide scant material for stirring memories. A much different task than that faced by Monet, who broke with history and the studio, going outdoors to imprint nature on canvas.…

You can add tabasco sauce to a dessert. For many years I have been making an apple-pear pie for Thanksgiving where one of the ingredients is a spicy pepper and vinegar sauce. The sauce does add flavor, but most people cannot quite tell what the different flavor is. This month, Binshtok, Bean and Woolf in a Nature article offer a hint of why it may be useful to add small amounts of hot sauce to your food.…

Right after the deadline of the sixth TGRWT, the Washington Post, the local newspaper, published a recipe for apple risotto. I tried the recipe with lavender and a few small changes and it turned out really well. The day after I made the dish, my daughter ate the leftovers instead of the lasagna we had made for lunch. For this recipe I used a larger amount of lavender than I did for my TGRWT #6 submission and it did not have the soapy taste I feared.…