[I]’ve been thinking a lot about stars lately, in part, because of the season, but even earlier in the year than that because I noticed a very bright star in the sky that I’ve come to look for every morning. Sometimes this star is companioned by a crisp slice of […]
[I] don’t know that everyone goes through a cookie period, but I did. It was extensive, lasting from the ages of 7 to 18 and boy, was I prolific. Like many little girls, the first recipe I asked if I could make was chocolate chip cookies — the Tollhouse recipe […]
[I]s it strange to crave ice cream in the fall? Is it odd that, as everything is cooling off (sort of), I want cold, cold items, as if to hasten my beloved chilly temperatures? Apparently not. Recently Saveur magazine posted an array of autumn-inspired flavors imbued with apple, ginger and […]
[I] anticipate my monthly bread adventures the way others look forward to road trips or nights on the town. I enjoy those things, too, but the plotting and planning of a bread-baking day has my mind aswirl and my excitement on the rise, especially when I embark on a recipe […]
[I] put up my tree recently, and as with many a Christmas tradition, this ritual sent me back — footsteps clearly marked despite the drifting snow of thoughts flurrying in my mind — to trees of the past. Of prickly cedar trees whose feathery branches could barely bear the weight […]
[I]’m not the only soul who feels light-deprived this time of year. Though I love the wee hours of the morning when I’m in the dark, pondering, and feeling as though I have the world to myself, I still find every December to be a race against the dark, from […]
[I]’ve long been intrigued by Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Halloween is my favorite holiday and in its truest respect, it honors the night that is not only the fine dividing line between seasons, but the barrier — at its thinnest — between the living and the […]
[O]ne of my earliest kitchen memories is of lying on the linoleum floor, being fanned. Not fanned exactly, but taking full advantage of the warm, sweet wind made by my mother waving a cookie sheet back and forth to cool it before she loaded it with a new batch of […]
[W]e come to find things in a seemingly roundabout way…or do we? Perhaps it is true that there are no accidents and that coincidence is not merely that. What led me to a most delicious pie recipe was my mother, whose fancy and instinct was successfully piqued as she nosed […]
[M]y recollections of gingerbread begin with a very special kindergarten teacher who brought both her morning and afternoon classes TO HER HOME for a day of sledding and making gingerbread. She had the dough already made and allowed us all — snowy and unruly — into her kitchen (somehow we […]