[I]’m highly suggestible when it comes to baking. Give me an appealing recipe, an enticing photo, a whiff of a good baking idea, and if I have a little time to myself (or even if I don’t), I’ll assemble the ingredients and be on my way. You don’t need a […]
[W]hen I was a kid, I had all the cool chores. I got to shell the peas, gathered to the brim of a bottomless five-gallon paint bucket. I got to guard the rows of cabbages with a swatter, set to strike down any moths fluttering along. I got to lie […]
“If my life wasn’t funny, it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.†— Carrie Fisher [S]ometimes, after a crap-ass year, you just need to have some fun. That is not a terribly positive beginning (was it the term “crap-assâ€?), and I apologize. But I speak the truth in […]
[M]y mom’s got a thing against muffins. She won’t make them. She won’t eat them. This stems from a traumatic period in her childhood, where her obligations as a member of 4-H pushed her to the brink after years of being chained to an oven, churning out muffin after muffin. […]
[I]t was long ago when I first ran across a recipe for “Welsh rarebit†or “Welsh rabbit,†as it is sometimes called. As a girl who studied cookbooks, I couldn’t have been that old, but I was certainly intrigued and excited by a melty cheese sauce dish that was named […]
[B]eyond some of her work and her unforgettable image — dark-haired, piercing-eyed, flower-crowned — I didn’t know enough about the Mexican artist and icon Frida Kahlo until the 2002 biopic “Frida,†starring Salma Sayek, in a stirring performance examining her life. That movie, for me, ignited an admiration for the […]
“To eat good food,†says Italian chef Primo in the 1996 film, “Big Night,†“is to be close to God.†[A]nd truthfully, over the 20 years since I first saw this movie, I have said, again and again, that my idea of heaven was the kitchen where Primo, played by […]
[I] have always been able to make sense out of things (somewhat) by writing about them. Even still, lately, I have had trouble writing. It made no sense and yet perfect sense that on a rainy November evening, while I received the news of a loss of life as close […]
[R]ecipes can come from surprising sources. The backs of boxes or packages, coupon inserts, obscure Internet sites and offbeat cookbooks. If you had told me even a year ago that, upon seeing a copy of “The Disney Princess Cookbook,†(2013) I had gotten for my nieces that I would have […]
[I]’ve long been obsessed with cream puffs. I learned to make them as a child, watching my mother and then whipping them up myself. It’s a strange process, puff-making, strange in its doing and even stranger in its simplicity. I continue to be baffled that the same ingredients, cooked in […]
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