November 27, 2009
It never ceases to amaze me just how fast the biggest meals go rushing by before our very eyes. As cooks we spend days, even weeks choosing our menu, shopping for our ingredients, and stocking our fridges to the gills with containers filled with our raw materials. We cook and cook our hearts out until the last guest has taken his seat at the table, the last bowl of soup placed upon the serving plate.
And then, for one exquisite moment, not a word is spoken and the only sound that can be heard is that of silver brushing against china. For those of us who love entertaining, this is the payoff for all of our toils.
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November 24, 2009
Last year at this time, I was fretting over the crusts for my Thanksgiving pies. Would they be as flaky as they were tasty? Would they live up to the high standards of my soon-to-be mother in law’s beautifully set table? And, the ever-popular, who the heck has time for all this nonsense anyway?
During that time, when my fascination with making pie evolved into a love for doing it, I also started to appreciate why so many people would rather just not even bother.
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November 6, 2009
I spend a lot of time mulling over the following question: If [insert friend's name here] were a cake, what kind of cake would [he/she] be?
Those of us who enjoy baking celebration cakes understand the weighty significance of this question, with its myriad of factors to be weighed. Taste is an obvious one, our goal being to avoid flavors that exercise the recipient’s gag reflex and focus squarely on those that cause he or she to roll around and salivate like a dog.
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October 31, 2009
**Please consider (Please? Please!) taking a moment to vote for this recipe at the holiday bake-off on Bon Appetit.com (click here). You will find it, appropriately, in the “miscellaneous” category, where you need only click on the picture to vote. Vote early, vote often!**
I think that we’ve all grudgingly accepted the fact that the holiday season seems to kick off just a little earlier each year than it did the year before, but today I stopped in my tracks and laughed at the absurdity of the Halloween and Christmas candy displays propped up side by side in the drugstore isle.
To a certain degree, the joke was also on me, because as I left the drugstore on this fine, balmy day in October, I was heading home to my kitchen to test a new holiday recipe that won’t be making its debut for another month. Certainly, I must be the most organized, efficient, forward-thinking domestic goddess that ever walked this Earth, no?
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October 4, 2009
As part of my lifelong quest to win my parents’ approval of every single life decision that I’ll ever make (yep, totally healthy), I figured the time was long overdue for my family to meet Brian’s, and so my parents flew down from Maine (and my sister from Vermont) for just one night to attend the epic meeting dinner with my new, soon-to-be family.
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September 3, 2009
While no one has ever accused me of being a diet food guru, there are some recipes out there with a combination of ingredients so unhealthy, they cause me to cringe when I read them.
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August 21, 2009
With all of my attention, love, and affection (for food, at least) directed at bread baking these days, it might seem that I’ve strayed from my first love, pastry.
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August 12, 2009
I’ve seen a few different methods out there designed to skirt the issue of making pie crust from scratch – some good, some bad, and some that are, well, not even something that I would consider to be food (I’m looking squarely at you, shortening).
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August 9, 2009
This afternoon our good friends Morgan and Angela stopped by to pick us up for brunch, but before we left the apartment, Morgan opened up a giant backpack and started pulling out artifacts from some of their recent travels that they’d picked up as gifts for us and had forgotten to bring along the last million times we’d hung out.
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August 5, 2009
As you can probably imagine, we’ve been swimming in bread for a month or so now. For the first few days we embraced the romance and luxury of having freshly baked baguettes in the house with crust that is only rivaled by the product of Parisian corner bakeries. We made more than a few dinners of nothing but cheese, red wine, and this bread. We ate these dinners on our porch, as if we were on vacation.
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