In the hottest days of summer, we’d make ice cream. We had an old wooden ice cream machine—the sort that looks like it belongs in a scene out of The Music Man or Meet Me in St. Louis, with a silver hand crank and a spindly metal handle and a red medallion on the front that spelled out the words White Mountain. It held four quarts of ice cream: first you’d make the custard base, then pour it into a narrow metal canister which fit inside the wooden bucket. You’d pack the space between the canister and the bucket walls with ice and rock salt, then fit the crank on top and get to work.
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I was planning to write about icebox cakes today, but as I sat down outside with my tea to start writing, I couldn’t summon the words. The temperature dropped overnight and there’s a gentle but firm breeze; the sky is overcast and the humidity has abated for now—it feels strangely like fall, or rather, like that brief string of days that teeter between summer and fall, when it’s warm enough for shorts but there’s a definite crispness to the air, as if the promise of sharpened pencils and new notebooks and apple cider and woodsmoke and flannel shirts and Halloween candy is hiding just around the bend.
Read moreSTRAWBERRY CHIA PUDDING
On Sunday I find myself sitting outside at the patio table with a mug of English Breakfast tea, doctored with a liberal amount of oat milk and Savannah Bee Company honey. The air is humid and pregnant with the promise of a thunderstorm—the word that comes to mind is languid. Every so often, a few drops of rain sprinkle the surface of the table and I duck inside before realizing it’s a false alarm.
I used to love reading the “Sunday Routine” column in the New York Times, in which they’d profile a prominent city citizen about their Sunday habits. I do realize that I am neither prominent nor a city citizen any longer, and you didn’t actually request to hear the details of my Sunday, but here we are, so let’s hope you’re a curious and captive audience!
Read moreOATMEAL BREAD + A PERFECT PB&J
The school I attended through third grade was right next to a shopping center with a supermarket and a scattering of generic suburban stores: a Jo-Ann’s Fabrics and a dry cleaners and a bagel spot. We often stopped there for groceries after the 3 PM school dismissal. Other details from that age are hazy, but I can recall the layout of the store in precise and specific detail, right down to the orientation of the checkout counters and the location of the tin of bacon bits in the salad bar.
Read moreROASTED PEACH SCONES
Some days I wake up and check the news (note to self: maybe just stop doing this), and it feels as if the entire world is being dismantled, piece by piece. This is most certainly not a bad thing entirely—there are so many customs, rules, institutions, and systems that don’t serve us well. It’s as if we’ve pressed pause on the world and started pulling everything apart, erasing some things altogether and re-building others and questioning every single thing in between. I have a niggling sense that no longer can you assume anything will carry on as it has been, both in a big picture sense and in our own little lives.
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