I’ve come to the conclusion that baking is by far harder than cooking.  When I’m cooking it’s easier to improvise as I go, tasting, tweaking, coming up with new twists on standard things without really feeling pressure. The minute I start baking I lose all self-assurance. I might not really be a failure when I’m baking–I’m [...]

Homemade gifts tend to be a theme of my December as I’ve inherited the cheap gene (thanks, Dad.) I’m also inclined to making catastrophic messes in my free time. This year I made around five batches of biscotti, salted caramels, spiced nuts, flour free peanut butter and dark chocolate cookies, and sriracha salt. The former were [...]

It’s the lead up to Thanksgiving. I should be blogging about turkey. The truth is I don’t need to cook for that holiday of champions yet. Instead I travel to western New York so that other people can do the basting, the pie making, for me. I’m grateful. Someday I may well have to host [...]

  You know what you should do after Halloween comes and goes? You should use your leftover snack sized candy bars to make cookies and then pawn them off on your coworkers so you don’t eat them one by one (which you would, you admit this freely.) I present: Salted Peanut Butter Snickers Cookies. These [...]

Clearly I haven’t been blogging much lately. I have been still creating a lot good eats–like fig and cashew granola and apple-squash curry soup–but the blog has become a wee bit dusty in the meantime. Sometimes you just need a break from things though. I learned something fundamental last night that inspired me to post: [...]

When I visited Chicago over labor day weekend there was a pizza (not deep dish, though) that started my interest in creme fraiche. In the Andersonville neighborhood there was an itsy bitsy pizza shop, recommended by the friend we were staying with, called Great Lake. It is the kind of the place that has few [...]

I don’t bake that often besides bread and a random batch of cookies when the spirit strikes. I’m intimidated by all the butter and the ingredients I don’t own like whole wheat pastry flour. But lately I’ve been feeling the need to experiment with baking realizing it is a weak spot and that maybe I do want some [...]

Making pancakes on a weekend morning always feels fancy and lazy. It means taking out the flour and spilling it all over the red tiled flour without noticing for longer than a while. It means lingering with coffee that goes from hot to cold because I’m not getting up off the couch. It means watching Disney [...]

  Garlic scapes are the cool kids at the farmers market in between late spring and early summer. Those alien-like spiral tendrils are part of the culinary in crowd. I finger their weird shapes in perplexity when they make their brief celebrity appearance at the market stalls—what do you exactly do with garlic scapes? And [...]

Wow, getting featured on WordPress Freshly Pressed this past weekend was awesome. Thanks to WordPress and all the fun people who found my humble recipe blog. I hope you found something useful here (and didn’t mind all my snarky comments.) So, ginger lemonade makes one mean mixed drink as well as a great twist on [...]