Summer announced itself today in the form of hot, humid, heavy air that greeted me as I pushed open the front door with my bike at 8 AM. Although it’s gotten warm, the mornings have still retained a cool freshness that I associate with spring. But today heralds the arrival of summer weather in earnest: the kind of heat that allows for a t-shirt and shorts even at night. The kind that makes you want a cherry-lime popsicle and the smell of hot asphalt and the juice of a ripe peach on your fingers.
Read moreBLACK SESAME SWEET ROLLS
They say good things come in three, and that’s certainly true for language. Consider some wonderful trios of words: I love you is the obvious one. But also it’s snowing outside, come December, or a package arrived or let’s get ice cream. Oh wait. That’s four words.
Read moreEARL GREY TEA CAKE
My mother drinks tea every morning. She steeps a bag of English breakfast or PG Tips in a tall, narrow Mason jar of boiling water. One shelf of the walk-in pantry is lined with smaller Mason jars, each full of cloudy amber-colored honey collected from the bees on our farm. Into her tea goes a large spoonful of that honey, then a generous glug of half-and-half, which swirls elegantly into the dark liquid, unspooling in curls and ribbons and turning the tea the antique-y white of heirloom bone china.
Read moreSOURDOUGH FOCACCIA
A few things I’ve learned lately—some small and some big—might be useful to pass along to the world at large (that’s you). We’re always learning, aren’t we? At least, I hope we are. I hope I’m able to remain open to adapting, to changing, to letting in new ideas and habits and ways of being. I hope I become more and more flexible as I move through the world. If nothing else, the present crisis has forced me—and most of us—into this by necessity. We can’t hold onto, or replicate, the same patterns of our lives, and so we adapt to new ones.
Read moreCardamom Sourdough Banana Bread
What’s the mood in your kitchen these days? Are you experimenting more? Baking bread when you never did before? Making cakes for absolutely no reason and then, obviously, eating them all while pretending you’re really just “sampling” a few bites here and there until BOOM…the cake pan is scraped clean? Maybe you’re really quite sick of cooking altogether and feeling as if life is one giant parade of dirty dishes begging to be washed. Maybe you’re somewhere in the middle: just getting by, cooking the same general things, riffing more simply out of necessity and lack of normal grocery access. Maybe you’re getting adventurous with more time at home to finally cook your way through Ina Garten’s Instagram feed—massive cocktails and all—and discovering that you can, in fact, make anything from fresh gnocchi to biscuits to a killer chocolate cake all from scratch.
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