I’ve mentioned before that one cornerstone food from my childhood was peanut butter. And what goes better with peanut butter than a good old reliable saltine cracker, another touchstone food of youth. In my early childhood, when our house was free of junk food like chips, Cheetos and Doritos, saltine […]
My late Grandma Mae was the first and one of the only people I knew who made fudge from scratch. She was more known and revered for her peanut brittle (see my blog post of December 2010), but along with her famed peanut confection, laid out in dishes every year […]
[I] was but a wee lass when I started making toffee. My sister, about five years older than I, was in her early days of home ec class (do kids still take home ec class?) and came home one day with some stapled sheets filled with all sorts of candy […]
[I] made the Vanilla Bean Caramel Apples from the Baked Sunday Mornings recipe roster a little ahead of schedule. It was mid-October, and I was in full fall-enthusiasm mode. It had been many years since I had made caramel apples, and I was itching to get to it! And here’s […]
[I]’ve never made a marshmallow. It seemed like one of those impossible kitchen possibilities, like spinning your own cotton candy or pulling taffy. But I have EATEN a homemade marshmallow, made by my confectionary/culinary/baking-maven friend, Elaine, and it was a heavenly thing, a world apart from the store-bought versions. It […]
[J]ust what are sugarplums, anyway? According to Clement Moore’s classic holiday story poem, “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,†children had visions of them dancing in their heads. And sugarplum fairies flit magically in the most well-known and traditional of holiday ballets, “The Nutcracker.†When I have done my own envisioning […]
[I]f something has a flower flavor, I’m on it….like a bee. Recently I was exposed to some delightful imported Italian sodas flavored with, of all things, elderflower! I could not resist. It was a beautiful taste, slightly peachy and as soon as my little fingers could do their walking, I […]
[T]hroughout my childhood, I was treated to a tale of candy. The imagination can almost act as the proverbial “candy store,†and I was the kid who went there, as my parents recounted a magical place. Next to a local movie theater, there existed a candy store where the proprietor […]
[S]ometimes I think my fun is done. I know that sounds fatalistic. I know I have joys and things to enjoy ahead. But as far as true, hilarious, tickle-me, laugh-out-loud pleasure — like the fun of childhood — I at times feel I’ve entered into a phase of adulthood where […]
[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 […]