Category: family favorites
-
Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bundt Cake & How Recipes Work on This Site
Perhaps you’ve wondered about the timing of recipes, how I get the photographs, if I plan everything out. Perhaps not. But if you’re wondering why this photograph showcases 1/2 of a Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bundt Cake I can tell you it is because we ate the other half. Last night. For dinner.* So that’s all… Read more
-
Peach Scones (with or without Roasted Ginger) & BF Skinner & Books
I had two buns in the oven – no, no, NOT another human baby. Book babies. I have a novel for adults that I’ve just edited and a novel for teenagers (which I suspect will cross over to the grown up side, too). Finishing a book is always an odd sensation – relief, happiness, and… Read more
-
Chicken and Vegetable Pot Pie with Buttermilk Biscuits & Random Bedtime Routines
This is a typical bedtime scene: Julia (age 7 3/4): Can I have a song? Me: Which one? J: Met my old lover in the grocery store. [my husband is apparently working his way through the entire 1970s singer-songwriter genre, a guilty pleasure of mine while driving, so I knew she meant Same Old Lang… Read more
-
Toffee-Dark Chocolate Matzo Crunch & Loving the Rainbow
So, my latest novel, co-written with the witty and wonderful Brendan Halpin, is nominated for a Rainbow Award. Exciting news! But not for someone who decided the LGBTQ subject of the novel and the award is enough to end our Facebook “friendship.” Okay. I wonder why this person friended me in the first place. I… Read more
-
Deep Dish Salmon, Kale, and Potato Pie & Revisited Recipes
Spring in the UK comes early, and when I brought my daughter to see her godmother in London it was a flurry of blossoms, green stubbled grass, and muddy tromps in borrowed boots. We had a gaggle of kids, and the kind of laughs that are only shared with very old friends, wind-red faces from… Read more
-
Passover Leek, Kale, and Bok Choy Gratin & Freedom ’12
As we prepare for family and discussions of religious, political, and intellectual freedom, my family celebrates the year marker of a different kind of freedom. Freedom from the Year That Was, moving past a dark time and into the spring. My son returns to school, the crocuses bloom in the yard, the weather goes from… Read more
-
Vegetarian Boston Baked Beans & Bad Songs to Sing at Bedtime
If there’s a skill of mine that will never be rewarded financially, and in fact only serves as a road trip plus or game night choose me incentive, it is my ability for lyric recall. All that brain space that is supposed to be taken up by useful facts and figures is chock full of… Read more
-
Mussels, Clams, & Shrimp Mariniere & Nightlights
“I have an idea,” says the 4-year-old. “I could go back inside you where I lived before I was born. But this time, I would like a nightlight.” PS Yes, the kids asked to have this for dinner. They ate it and loved it…until the very end when my daughter began examining each bite… Read more
-
Barley, Kale, and Onion Risotto & Celebrity Sightings
Do you ever have days in which everyone you see resembles someone you know? Half of my time is spent bumping into people now and at least half of the time I have no idea how I know them. There are too many options now – did we go to high school together? Graduate school?… Read more
-
Old Fashioned Pineapple Upside Down Cake & Upside Down Cooking
I have a thing for upside down cakes and inverted dishes. Possibly this is because they tend to be simple affairs with layers of freshly rolled dough covered layers of cheese or caramelized French toast with vanilla beans. Or it could be the childlike glee that fills the room when one takes a cake that… Read more
-
Brown Sugar Swirl Bread &Questions
A collection of recent questions from the kids: When you are alone during the day and I’m at preschool, are you lonely? Is it true that one day the earth will run out of water? Do you love Daddy more now or more when you first met him? Why do I have to wear underwear?… Read more
-
Crispy, Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies & Molasses Chocolate Chip Cookies & A Tale of Two Cookies
Faulkner wrote “between grief and nothing, I will take grief.” Given the choice, I would choose chocolate chip cookies. If we had the time and calorie deficit, we could debate for hours over dough, chip size, semi-sweet? dark chocolate?, how much brown sugar versus white, whole eggs or yolks, letting the dough rest overnight or… Read more
-
Honey-Soy Shrimp & Keeping Bees
“Do you make your own honey?” someone asked. I was at a book signing and had finished telling a story about taking the four kids to pick berries and how they help make raspberry jam. “Oh, no,” I said and when the person looked surprised I had to explain. Here is what I do: I… Read more
-
Best Split Pea Soup Ever & Terrible Band Names
So the kids are talking at dinner, each one suggesting names for bands they haven’t created and which I am pretty sure no one wants to join. Jamie, almost a teenager says, “The Communists.” Daniel, 10 and still way into Star Wars, suggests, “Luke’s Dilemma.” Julia, 7, says, “Painted Pony.” When her brothers groaned, she… Read more
-
Molten Butterscotch Cake (Steamed Treacle Pudding) & A Very British Afternoon
My best friend from high school, T, and I just met for the ultimate British sport: Tea Brewing. The fact that we and our families met in Central Mexico for this match is of little consequence. After a ranch outing and horseback riding in ravines, milking goats at our friend’s farm (and eating the cheese… Read more