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 …
Special diet
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 …
This ginger syrup is a favorite for me. It makes the best ginger ale. It’s sweet and spicy and complex. I used to imagine ginger ale was one of those mysterious beverages that required a lab or a factory or complicated equipment to produce. (I used to feel the same way about tonic.) It turns …
Orgeat is a funny word. I remember seeing it for the first time in a row of bottles of flavored syrups available to add to lattes and cappuccinos and Italian sodas at an independent coffee shop in the 90s, the kind of place that had lumpy couches and open-mic nights and a patina of patchouli-scented dinge. …
When I get overwhelmed by things beyond my control, I distract myself by turning my attention to the simple and the routine. Exercising, walking the dog around the neighborhood, cooking the kind of nourishing meals that I know so well I can make them without thinking. Which brings me to this cabbage. Cabbage. It’s such …