I am big fan of slice-and-bake cookies. Their make-ahead and make-as-you-need-them approach makes me happy in a holiday season crowded with recipes and goody-making possibilities. I’m also a big fan of shortbread, and if the shortbread comes in slice-and-bake form (as many of them do), I’m even more enamored. [I] […]
Sometimes I am a rebel. When the rally cry is pumpkin spice, I start to think about sweet potatoes. Or should I call them garnet yams, which is what the red-skinned, orange-fleshed creatures most of us call sweet potatoes really are (the jewel sweet potato is another version of the […]
I first learned of black and white cookies the way many Americans who don’t live in New York (where the cookie is well-known), learned about the black and white cookie — from a “Seinfeld†episode. Jerry Seinfeld, waiting with his friend Elaine on her quest for a chocolate babka at […]
Somewhere between light and dark, summer and autumn, the living and the dead, lies a season long honored and celebrated. As the veil between this world and the next thins, the days shorten into a period of long hours of darkness. Somewhere between a cookie and scone, lies something called […]
Summer crawled along this year, dimmed by our lengthy pandemic status and an early wildfire season. By the time my birthday — as well as that of my blog’s — rolled around, celebrating — as it has felt for much of the last year — seemed a bit ridiculous. The […]
One of the many things I miss about my mom is her knack for picking good recipes. She didn’t enter into this lightly. Not one to squander either her Ingredients or her time, she would consider new recipe possibilities at length and intently and would usually back a winner. Sometimes, […]
Even reclusive people — homebound due to a pandemic — can go stir-crazy. I’ll admit, as a recluse, I was likely not as opposed (though still as discombobulated, mentally) by the imposed exile to which we had surrendered in March. I’m fortunate I can work from home (and am rarely […]
Come August, I almost always get a bout of “cornostalgia.†Never heard of it? I hadn’t either, since I just came up with the term that has me dreaming of rusty tassels, rustling long green leaves, shimmering gleams of blonde cornsilk covering kernels in shades of cream to gold. [I] […]
My first bite of madeleine, a yummy little shell-shaped pound cake/cookie, did not release a flood of remembrances, as it did Marcel Proust in his writing about the bakery treat in “In Search of Lost Time†(1913): “…my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing […]
I’d read the recipes, been intrigued by the videos and even heard out the positive proclamations by a co-worker, but there was still no real way I could be sure that any avocado, of any kind, could be turned into chocolate pudding. A chocolate-y paste maybe, but certainly nothing to […]