Adventures in joyful living
Hello, everyone. Happy Friday, happy spring, happy Cinco de Mayo, happy Coronation weekend. Just letting you know that Bernadette of Bernadette’s New Classic Recipe graciously invited me to pen a post appropriate for Mother’s Day, which in the US is the second Sunday in May. I’ve written about my mother many times, but this one […]
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Last summer, our Vermont family came to visit bearing a gift… a sweet (pun intended) looking container filled with what my beau-frère* pronounced “the best caramels and toffee you’ll ever eat.” As you read this, keep in mind that I am by no means a candy addict, unless we are talking Neuhaus chocolates, which we […]
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It’s a great thing that so many young cooks are taking up the “fresh and from scratch” cause. Some of the best recipes and tips I’ve found in food blogs have come from folks with far less “kitchen history” than my own. All that being said, I can’t for the life of me understand why […]
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It’s fall, and I’m back to making bread. I know I’m like a repeating decimal when it comes to the joys of home-baked bread, but few activities in the kitchen give me as much pleasure. l love the pungent smell of yeasty dough bubbling under the light at the back of the stove as much […]
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I’ve been erratic about writing these last few months. That tendency, to be erratic, is probably one reason why I’m never likely to write the Great American Novel. Serious writers, in my experience, are highly disciplined and highly routinized—and that’s never been quite my cup of tea. First of all, I probably ate too much ice […]
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When I volunteer to “bring something,” my contribution is invariably an “old chestnut” whose outcome is never subject to question. For July 4th, a chocolate cake seemed the logical all-American choice. Given a miserable heat wave and the three loads of wash in progress, you’d think I would simply have thrown together my go-to, never […]
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Truthfully, of my 100+-volume cookbook collection, there are only a few I actually use with regularity, primarily for baking. I’m not precise or patient enough to use recipes for everyday cooking. But one that I do use is The Roseto Cuisine Cookbook. I love this modest but mighty cookbook, last mentioned in my Easter bread […]
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The easiest chocolate cake, from my college roommate Suzie. That’s my notation on Midnight Cake in my messy binder of recipes collected over decades from friends, magazines, newspapers, and various online sources. I lost track of Suzie, one of my short-term roomies, long ago; but this chocolate cake, otherwise known as “that black one with the […]
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For all but a few of the last 20 or so years, I have faithfully used the same recipe for Easter bread, from my beloved Roseto Cookbook,* Anna Marie Ruggiero’s culinary homage to the life and times of the Italian immigrants, their children, and their children’s children, in a tiny town in the Slate Belt […]
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Yesterday I found myself cleaning out what I referred to in one of my early posts as “the graveyard under the sink”—that Netherland in the vanity where all of the once-tried and subsequently rejected hair care products, body lotions, nail polish, and so forth find their home. I purge the vanity every three months or […]
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All right, that reversion to a childhood nursery rhyme was silly, but it came to me in the middle of the night, as Miss Puppy was inching me closer to the edge of the bed. I’d been lulled into a stupor too early by whatever silliness was on the tube at the time. Now I […]
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As I write this, I’m preparing psychologically to clean and straighten out my baking pantry before the Christmas endurance contest begins. Baking Christmas cookies with my mother the first two weekends in December remains one of my favorite childhood memories. Mom gave cookies away in droves, never forgot a generous box for the rectory, and […]
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Hashtag Retired 