When I got home from a steak run to Dickson’s Farmstand in the Chelsea Market on March 12, our front doorknob was dripping wet. Creeped out, I rushed in and scrubbed my hands, stowed the meat safely away from Wyl-E The Cat and headed out to deliver the scones our friend/neighbor had requested from Las […]
I Tweeted that the search field almost auto-filled when I Googled “Covid symptoms negative test,” but it was only half a joke. Both of us were ailing when we were due to host a dinner party but decided to proceed. My subconscious must have been thinking “capsaicins boost immunity,” though, because I built the menu […]
Or so my consort demanded I choose, for this sweet little video. Over three+ years of baking for a neighborhood free-lunch program I have used many recipes repeatedly, but Cesare Casella’s sesame biscotti (from his True Tuscan) really are the winner for both easiness and outcome. The only tricky part is amassing enough sesame seeds […]
I had other plans for cookie-baking on this Thursday after Thanksgiving, but when I found a storage container in the refrigerator with a cupful of leftover canned pumpkin (from rolls, not pie) I had to go searching for the right recipe in our ill-fated harvest cookbook. And look what I turned up: 2 1/2 sticks […]
For the first time in decades of wrangling whole turkey dinners, I actually made a green vegetable people actually ate. Hint: It wasn’t Brussels sprouts, which can never be tricked up enough. And it wasn’t fresh green beans, which were heaped high in the Greenmarket but failed a test run the Sunday before we started […]
So we went to Maine for the third time since this #didnthavetohappen plague started, and I came back with both my second bout of Covid (not counting the Paxlovid rebound from my first)* and a pretty great new cookbook. We picked up the latter after wandering into the old mill building where we found Rabelais […]
I always follow recipes to the letter the first time I make them, even if I foresee terrible trouble, just so I know whom to blame if they don’t work. (I almost never read comments, but I know the worst start with “I substituted/tweaked.” That failure is you.) So I ordered black walnuts off Amazon […]
When I worked on a weekly newspaper in Iowa, back in the last century, we kept pretty serious tabs on crops, for obvious reasons. I’ll never forget my first trip to a hog farm after a check on how high the corn was by the Fourth of July. (You don’t need to know more, but […]
Among the many failures of corporate media coverage of this #climatecatastrophe, reporting on what’s happening with local farmers ranks near the top. You go to the Greenmarket and everything is different and no one but Greenmarket shoppers is informed why. Instead, we get stories on baking your own baguettes when the heat index is 105 […]
Twitter is not dead yet since I still get good responses every time I Tweet about how community cookbooks are often the best cookbooks. (Most recently, I was moved to type after coming back from a neighbor’s estate giveaway with a clutch of ’em but no other “keepsakes” and noting: Throw out all your shit. […]
If I were a deep thinker/writer, I’d mull on what it was like to go through friends/neighbors’ books at an estate giveaway and feel both sad they’re gone and glad I scored some new sources of recipes to keep a neighborhood church-lunch giveaway supplied. Some of the “tons of tomes,” as our real estate agent […]
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