The act of getting dinner on the table every night is a slog. It’s not that cooking is particularly difficult or that there isn’t plenty of joy to be found in the creative alchemies of the kitchen on a lazy Saturday. But most cooking, the relentless, everyday kind, is a chore. And not just a …
Summer
I’ve spent the afternoon curled up with my dog on the couch, basking in the gentle glow of the lights of the Christmas tree, with my “Mopy Holiday” playlist featuring some of my favorites like The Pretenders “2000 Miles,” Joni Mitchell’s “River,” The Pogues’s “Fairytale of New York,” and Laura Marling’s “Goodbye England (Covered in …
Every September, I look forward to the baskets of fragrant grape varietals that Klug Farm brings to the Green City Market. Canadice, Einset, Interlaken, Jupiter, and Thomcord grapes bear little resemblance to the blandly sweet red and green grapes that you find at most supermarkets. And unlike Concords, they don’t have pesky seeds. They’re complex, …
Plums are farmers markets’ harbingers of fall. They come in with the peaches and the berries and go out with the apples and the pears. When plums show up, summer heads out. This raspberry plum crisp is a sort of summer’s last hurrah. It’s comfort baking at it’s simplest and best, like a light sweater …
There’s something about baking in the morning in the summer. Something about the quiet. The gentle sunlight. The way that puttering around the kitchen gives me a sense of purposeful ease. There’s a tactile pleasure in it. And a tangible satisfaction in feeling like I’ve accomplished something so early, which lets me off the hook …
It may not be obvious from the multi-day layer cakes and precisely-scaled candy projects, but most days, I am a lazy cook. Like most people with full lives, cooking doesn’t always make it to the top of my priority list. There are plenty of days when the question “what’s for dinner?” gets answered by ordering …