Okay, it is Friday, so we might as well take a moment to be moved by something, don’t you think? Here, then. Read this poem by Barbara Ras. It’s long but…soldier on, I believe in you.
Read moreMISO BUTTER BISCUITS
This week has been pretty excellent in the “spontaneous cooking” realm. I’ve gotten into a good groove these past months of balancing planning and impulse—I plan ahead just enough to have rough outlines of what to cook and eat, and then I fill in the rest in the moment.
For example, I’ve been making lots of big lunch salads with cooked black lentils, but every day it’s a little different. Maybe I’ll have cold lentils over arugula with minty yogurt and warm sautéed zucchini, or I’ll have warm lentils stirred into carrot ginger soup. Yesterday I piled lots of greens into a bowl, then warmed cooked lentils in a skillet with cubes of roasted sweet potato, some olive oil, and a dollop of miso paste. I spooned that over the greens, then in the still-hot pan, I poured more olive oil and added a few handfuls of breadcrumbs, toasting them for a minute while shaking the pan. I poured that over the salad and voila. Lunch.
Read moreMISO BANANA BREAD
When the pandemic really began to spread, I—like many of us—briefly lost my mind in the grocery department and rushed to buy an absolutely nonsensical collection of items. Now that shopping has resumed some semblance of normalcy (although I still have yet to go to a grocery store!), I’ve returned to buying groceries in my ordinary manner. I buy a mix of staples (things I use with regularity) along with fresh items like produce and meat and eggs and so on.
Read moreSOUR CREAM BANANA BREAD
Remember small talk with strangers? Cocktail parties and the attendant chit-chat you’d make as you sipped a glass of Chardonnay in someone’s living room, or nursed a too-strong gin and tonic amidst a group of friends at a bar? Dinner parties where you politely conversed with the people on either side, finding out that the man to your left is an accountant who builds wooden canoes in his spare time and that the woman to your right only likes to humble brag about her three children?
Read moreTWO-BANANA BROWN BUTTER BANANA BREAD
Wait a second, you’re thinking. She just posted a rye banana bread recipe. This girl is either floundering under the waves of early parenthood and actually losing her mind OR she is strangely fixated on banana bread.
And I’d ask you: can’t it be both? Just kidding! Not floundering! I promise. But to be honest, some days I do arrive at 5 PM and look back with wonder at the morning, thinking it must have been weeks ago that I woke up, not mere hours. There is a lot more occupying my mind—and my hands—these days, in the nicest way possible, and it is not inconceivable that I would forget about having just posted a similar recipe. Just as I might forget to switch the wet laundry to the dryer, or be unable to remember where I put the stamps, or completely lose track of my phone for the one millionth time.
Read more