Lately, early on weekend mornings, Dan has been taking our dog, Inka, to the lake. He gets to spend some time at the beach before it gets crowded, when it’s still possible to appreciate the quiet of the lakefront, and I get some much appreciated morning quiet time at home when I don’t have to …
Breakfast
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 …
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 …
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 …
Sometime early in our relationship, when we had been dating for perhaps several months, Dan and I started making scones. It was an almost weekly occurrence, a satisfying project that could be completed in under an hour, proof that we had done something productive in the course of an otherwise relentlessly lazy weekend. I no …
When I lived in Italy, the one meal that became a repeated source of disappointment was breakfast. Don’t get me wrong, I was entranced by the dainty cups and spoons, the mysterious drink requests (caffe normale con un cubetto di ghiaccio [espresso with one ice cube?]), the sometimes oddly tetrahedral or cylindrical sugar packets, and …