It’s been an interesting year, hasn’t it? I’ve been on a bit of a bender lately, getting rid of (or at least, reducing) paperwork that’s been piling up and holds little interest for me. I have so much that I had to buy more paper (as in, paper file folders) to store all that paperwork in which seems redundant, but living in a place where paper…
Boston Cream Pie is one of my favorite desserts of all time. It was one of the options in the cafeteria line at my elementary school and the one I always grabbed and put on my tray, next to my codfish sticks, boiled potatoes with parsley, and butter sandwiches on dense Pepperidge Farm-style white bread, which they served in half-portions, each rectangle slipped into a…
Persian food, like many of the foods from a region that’s often broadly referred to as the Middle East, takes cues from a variety of influences and cultures as people traverse borders and bring their delicious foods with them. Which is why the food in America is so diverse; people have gifted us with foods from their homelands, such as tacos, sushi, pizza, beer, and…
The last two cookies I’ve made on this site have been American-style, i.e.; on the larger side, with lots of flavors and other stuff going on. I like those, but I also like “quiet” European cookies, which are often simple, sometimes somewhat plain (like French sablés, or butter cookies), that let you focus on one or two flavors. Canistrelli fit that profile. Originally from Corsica,…
I became engrossed with author Ernest Hemingway watching the documentary, Hemingway by filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Hemingway is one of those legends whose name we all know, but most of us don’t know all that much about him. The documentary takes an unflinching look at him, and his legacy, thanks to contemporary writers, literary scholars, and historians, who filled in much of the…
Zoë François is the author of Zoë Bakes Cakes and even though her name is French, she’s an American cake baker. Known for a series of books on making Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, as well as books that continue that theme for making pizza, flatbread, holidays breads, and gluten-free breads, Zoë has finally turned her talents as a pastry chef to cakes….
There’s a lot of “stuffed” stuff that goes viral online and it wasn’t my intention to do a caramel-stuffed chocolate chip cookie. Yet there I was, faced with a few batches of caramels leftover from recipe testing that didn’t quite make the cut, and wanted to put the caramels to good use. So why not?
A few desserts on this blog stick with me, often because I posted them a while back, but discovering that I’d like to tweak them a little to reflect my current tastes. As anyone who cooks or bakes knows, things change over time. New ingredients get introduced (such as bean-to-bar chocolates) and we learn better or faster ways to do things the more we make…
It’s funny some of the dos and don’ts that people have come up with around food. Things like that you shouldn’t wash button mushrooms, that you should drink red wine with cheese, and that you shouldn’t let soap anywhere near your cast iron skillet. Nope, nope, and nope. Not sure where these things get started, but people grab the ball and run with it without…
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