More Holiday Cookies

This is the gingerbread recipe I’ve been making since I can’t even remember when, probably college or just after.  Its origin is in a long-gone December issue of Vegetarian Times, but I’ve made so many changes along the way that at this point I think it’s fair to call it mine.
Although there are a lot [...]

Read Full Post »

Hurry Up and Wait

I’m starting to suspect I’m the winter equivalent of Typhoid Mary.  All too often have I moved somewhere and it’s suddenly weather they haven’t seen in over a decade, and I regret to say it’s happened again.  Sorry, Pacific Northwest.
Part of me opens the door to the whole three inches out there and wants to [...]

Read Full Post »

More North and South Stories

Thanks to multiple rounds of entertaining over the Thanksgiving, I only had about a cup of cranberry sauce left this time around. This was just the right quantity to allow me to write a tidy little epilogue to my American story about the melding of my Southern Hemisphere roots, my New England sojourn, and all [...]

Read Full Post »

And So It Begins

Well, that didn’t take long.  Despite my good intentions, despite the fact that it’s only been two months, and more importantly, despite my student budget, I bought another cookbook.
Oh, I could protest that it was just a lucky find on the bargain table (always a bane to my willpower), that I’ll stop after just this [...]

Read Full Post »

When Life Gives You Figs

His Lordship’s father has quite the green thumb, and grows a variety of fruit in a backyard micro-orchard.  Each fall, he has a bumper crop of figs, which he painstakingly stems, halves, and dries.  Since fig season immediately precedes His Lordship’s birthday, around this time each year we receive a care package bearing a card [...]

Read Full Post »

A Cookie Long Overdue

It recently occurred to me that although I’ve made plenty of cookies with chocolate, including several takes on chocolate chunk biscotti, I have never actually put up a recipe for plain old American chocolate chip cookies.  It’s about time I rectified that.
These are not my trademark chocolate chip cookies, which are a kitchen-sink affair involving [...]

Read Full Post »

One for the Road

My house is a hollow wreck of a corpse.  Everything we want to keep but won’t need for the next year has been packed and put in storage, and almost all the furniture we don’t want to keep has been sold off.  A handful of boxes full of winter clothes and other need-but-not-immediately items have [...]

Read Full Post »

The End of An Era

It’s my last week at work, which means this was the last round of Sunday baking for the office.
I’ll miss doing it, and I hope that they’ll miss it (and me!) at least a little bit.  It was nice to have an excuse to bake, and rewarding to be able to give my coworkers something [...]

Read Full Post »

Alton, We Need to Talk.

Didn’t I just equate your lava muffin recipe with divinity?  Haven’t I been your biggest fan since your very first episode, in a burning-adoration-from-afar, entirely nonthreatening, restraining-order-free, totally un-Kathy Bates way? Didn’t I even forgive you for the exercise in self-indulgent whimsy that was your functionally useless book, the first cookbook I have ever in [...]

Read Full Post »

One World, One Dream, One Cookie

I didn’t set out to make a cookie appropriate for the Olympics; I just wanted to get rid of an entire unopened jar of Chinese toasted sesame paste. Serendipitously, though, these actually would be a suitable addition to a Beijing Games-watching party. Full of toasty sesame flavor and not overly sweet, a couple [...]

Read Full Post »