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 …
Quick and easy
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 …
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 …
January is always the toughest month for me for cooking. There’s a post-holiday malaise that hangs over the kitchen. I try to balance the excesses of December with austerity, but it’s hard to get excited about much of the seasonal produce when the pickings are slim. Oh, I like root vegetables and cabbage and squash but sometimes …