The Green City Market is finally back outside, which means my Wednesday mornings are occupied with shopping for local produce. It’s been a late spring rendering the early markets a little more sparse than usual. The first week there were almost more storage apples and overwintered potatoes and frozen berries and pickles and preserves than new crops …
Special diet
This granola has been a breakfast staple for me for years. I’ve made more batches of it than I can count. It has evolved slowly as I’ve figured out how to make it the big-clustered, not-too-sweet, crunchy-but-not-so-hard-it-scrapes-the-roof-of-my-mouth cereal I crave. There are, if I count correctly, approximately eleventy-billion versions of granola out there. People add …
I fell hard for the passion fruit caramel combination the first time I tasted it in a sauce I drizzled over a burnt sugar cake. The only problem was that it was so good that it outshone the (very good) cake. I was seriously tempted to ditch the cake and drink the sauce. The bright, tropical passion fruit is …
Another banana bread? Yeah, I know. I just wrote about the double chocolate one last week. But this one is different. It’s more of a breakfast bread. It eschews chocolate in favor of whole grain oat flour and toasted walnuts and a more restrained use of butter and sugar. It fits a classic banana nut …
April is a Janus-faced tease. We all know that it’s Eliot’s cruelest month, but perhaps Robert Frost best articulated the month’s contradictions in his poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time”: The sun was warm but the wind was chill.You know how it is with an April dayWhen the sun is out and the wind is …
It was 70° on Saturday. Then on Sunday it turned cold and misty. And today it was colder still with a forecast for snow. It’s springtime in Chicago. A season that always seems intent on doubling back on itself a few times before it settles in for good. It’s a good day for simple comforting …