Bread, Wine, Salt

Mmm . . . Monday was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, the air was warm. It was Spring Break so the boys were home and no one was complaining about school. Friends came down the hill and invited the boys to play at the playground across the street. It was the Orioles opening day and the good guys won. There was a brief moment where it felt like summer and when I remembered it was just a brief respite from the school year it was sort of a bummer. The two days that followed were cooler and more Spring-like, and I had to make the older boy buckle down and work on some homework so there was no forgetting what month it was. The biscuits that started the whole thing. So fluffy. I made biscuits last night, based on this King Arthur Flour recipe , which came out beautifully, and went well with the bean stew I made. But I noticed on the recipe that I could add up to 4 Tablespoons of sugar and make them scones.  So I made a few adjustments and made scones this morning, bec...

Muffins can be tricky business. They're great things to make fresh for breakfast, because they're small and bake quickly. On the other hand, they go from deliciously moist to dreadfully over-baked in the time it takes you to finish typing a status update.  Add in all the usual pitfalls of quick-breads and you really need a good recipe and good technique to make good muffins. It started with Christine's pumpkin bread recipe , which I stole shamelessly, because in cookery it's not stealing, it's sharing. It's a fine pumpkin bread recipe, not a thing wrong with it. But I have never been one to leave well enough alone. Perhaps because I don't want to feel like I'm making someone else's recipe, because I want to prove I'm a special baking snowflake who can fiddle with baking recipes. So I fiddled. And the first time it was all wrong. The bread was overly dense and a bit sad looking at the top. Multiple slightly sad, if still edible, attempts f...

A quick car-less update: I have walked fourteen miles in the past three days. The vests are very reflective, so are the straps on big boy's backpack. On Wednesday, when dance classes were over, I picked up the small boy and said "Are you ready to walk home?" "Yes!" he answered with great enthusiasm. "Mommy, will you carry me?"  His enthusiasm wavered when I explained that I would not be carrying him all the way home. The reflective vests were the source of much excitement, and might have kept the boys cheerful all the way home despite the pouring rain, but big boy slipped on the wet pavement and banged up his head and his knee. Neither was serious, but they did away with all sense of adventure. It's been better since then, because it hasn't rained and there's been less walking. Walking means we can stop at the signs and trace the letters. And we can use parking lots to practice balancing. I have  a dinner meeting t...

I had this idea in my head that I wanted pumpkin granola muffins, with the granola acting as a less-sweet streusel topping. I borrowed Maud's pumpkin bread recipe. (It's not on her blog. You should harass her about that.) The muffins weren't a disaster. Muffins rarely are. But they weren't great. No one loved them. The recipe uses one half of a can of pumpkin, so then there was a half can of pumpkin in my refrigerator, mocking me and my failed muffins. (We'll ignore what else might have been mocking me recently. This is about muffins. Whatever else is wrong it seems only fair that I should be able to produce a decent batch of muffins.) So I went back and tried again. I swapped out some oatmeal for some of the flour, added in crystallized ginger and walnuts. In the process I discovered what might have been a critical error in the last batch.) And then I put it in oven, told facebook all about it, and waited.     Unlike the other things I've been wai...

If you were to invite me over to your house and then leave me alone, to chase after some child who is raiding some other child's couch full of animals , for example, then I will eventually end up digging through your cookbook collection. You're welcome to come over and dig through mine as well. They're in the cabinets above the stove. I borrowed Maud's copy of Avoca Cafe Cookbook (more correctly the Irish version thereof, a couple of weeks ago, because I wanted their baked lamb with cumin, cardamom and coconut milk recipe, thinking it might be similar to a dish I ate in an Indian restaurant years ago. I cannot resist an interesting bread recipe, so when I saw the lovely picture of round loaves of seeded bread on page labeled “Multiseed brown bread with fruit” I knew I had to try it. Now, as it turns out the picture had nothing to do with the recipe, but I liked the ingredients in the recipe too, so I decided to give it a shot. The first four ingredients...

Lunch in the Park , a novel about love and family, is available for sale in multiple electronic formats at Smashwords , for the Kindle at Amazon.com and for the Nook at BN.com Wherever you buy it, it is DRM-free . The delicious recipes that Kate and Jeff cook up are right here on my blog. I hope you'll read Lunch in the Park , you'll love it, and you'll feel the overwhelming urge to write a review on one or more of the sites above. And of course I'd love to hear from you here on the blog, too.  Have I told you the story of the “as good as store bought” lemonade? No? Years ago we were invited to a Fourth of July Picnic. We brought food of some description, and a gallon of homemade lemonade in a jug that had a previous life as a gallon of distilled water. One of our hosts was a big lemonade fan, and after drinking a glass checked the label. When I told him it was homemade he said “It's as good as store-bought.” I lifted my chin a bit and sa...

Lunch in the Park , a novel about love and family, is available for sale in multiple electronic formats at Smashwords , for the Kindle at Amazon.com and for the Nook at BN.com Wherever you buy it, it is DRM-free . The delicious recipes that Kate and Jeff cook up are right here on my blog. I hope you'll read Lunch in the Park , you'll love it, and you'll feel the overwhelming urge to write a review on one or more of the sites above. And of course I'd love to hear from you here on the blog, too.  "Kate was in the kitchen making banana cranberry bread, which she had learned to make from her own grandfather in his long ago kitchen that always smelled of coffee and baked goods.” Lunch in the Park, New Year's Eve Kate's grandfather taught her to make the bread as she stood on a kitchen step stool pushed up to the counter so that even as a small child of three or four she could help measure and mix. This recipe does actually come from a grandfather , ...

"But", you say, "St. Paddy's day was Thursday. I won't need this recipe for another year. You have terrible timing, blogging person." To which I reply: "You only want fresh bread with dinner on St. Patrick's day?" You might also complain about the lack of raisins. Then I'd say something about not wanting raisins in my dinner bread and you'd tell me that all the soda bread in the store has raisins and do I hate Ireland or St. Patrick or what? Then I'd ask you what Ireland has to do with anything. Did I say Ireland? Did I say it was Irish Soda Bread? No, I did not. I said soda bread. I might also cast aspersions on the authenticity and quality of the "Irish" soda bread in the store. But we should really skip all of that because we'd just end up mad at each other when really all I want to do is give you a loaf of this lovely simple bread and tell you to eat it with some nice butter, preferably unsalted ...

( Full recipe with vegan variation here. )

Another potluck, another dish shared and this time Husband was so pleased with it that he requested it again. (I would say that he even went to the store to pick up a missing ingredient, but he loves going to the store, so that doesn't signify.) Once you've decided to take the plunge and cook some beans, you may find yourself wondering how to turn them into to chili, and then you'll remember that the crazy woman who talked you into cooking dried beans in the first place promised you a recipe. And then you'll come looking for it, and so I figured I'd better get it up here. This is a great potluck recipe, because it comes together quickly once the beans are cooked (and if you use canned I promise not to tell, just be sure to rinse them well.) the cornbread topping makes it easy to transport without any sloshing and dribbling, and it's easy for folks to serve themselves so they don't hold up the line. The chili itself is vegan, and you could easily s...

If I could only take one thing with me to a desert island it would probably be my cast iron skillet. It would be useful for bashing the local fauna on the head and for cooking said fauna over an open fire.*  Though I am not on a desert island my cast iron skillet is still in daily use, and has developed such a lovely patina that I don't need to grease it to cook an egg so long as I have properly preheated it first. There are a few tricks to cast iron, and anyone who loves their cast iron will tell you what they are and they'll all be different and you'll get confused. Here's what I do with mine: cook with it often, scrub with hot water and a plastic scrub brush, heat it dry on the stove-top, repeat. It is a frying pan. Its ancestors helped tame the West. You don't need to coddle it. My favorite (right now) use of my cast iron is cornbread. There are two basic forms of cornbread: Southern and Yankee. Southern cornbread does not have sugar in it. Yankee...

“All else” here means me. There are days when I simply cannot do anything right. Sometimes a few of those days string together and I begin to wonder why anyone (kids, husband, friends, dogs) keeps me around. I could wallow on those days (weeks) or I could throw my shoulders back and do something I know will not be a disappointment. So sure, the world doesn't really need another banana bread recipe. My friend Justine just posted one the other day ( with chocolate chips! ) and if you Google “banana bread recipe” you get “about 3,330,000 hits.” But I needed something to work, and this always does. There are two basic tricks to quick breads and muffins, first, don't over mix. Once you add the dry and wet ingredients together, stir just enough to get the flour wet, and then stop. Second, watch the bread, not just the time. For reasons known only to my oven, a recipe that took 45 minutes one day will take only 35 minutes the next time, and an overbaked quick ...