Bread, Wine, Salt

I had several days where things just went wrong in the kitchen. J from A Half-Baked Life came down with her family to visit. I had planned soup and rolls for lunch but both failed. The rolls didn't rise as they should have, and the soup was a disaster. I couldn't serve it, so lunch was out instead. On Christmas day I kept the dinner plans simple, with eggnog and cookies planned for dessert. The red wine gravy for the Beef Wellington failed. (The Beef Wellington itself was lovely, and I'm sure the gravy was my fault.) Both cookie recipes I mixed refused to roll out and cut out properly. Despite my best efforts at tempering the eggs the eggnog curdled. I served a friend's gift of Austrian Christmas Bread and the box of chocolates my mother brought. I used a stick blender to revive the eggnog, and there was enough rum available that folks didn't seem to mind. I had planned roasted balsamic carrots with Christmas dinner, but I realized far too late that I di...

Years ago, when my parents married, my mother asked my father what he would like her to make for Christmas. He asked for Julekake, a Scandinavian Christmas bread. It was common in the bakeries in my father's childhood Chicago, but it was more difficult to find in the small Army towns where my father was posted, so my mother found a recipe, and baked her own. We ate it with eggs or bacon or sausage every Christmas breakfast of my childhood. My mother baked simple round loaves studded with raisins and candied cherries. When I grew up I swapped out dried cherries for the candied ones. I baked it in the oven of my boyfriend's apartment before I went to share Christmas with his family, inhaled the scent of them to make it Christmas when the traditions around me were not my own. I've discovered that the fruit is not mandatory, though I'd never leave it out. A braid is traditional, and I'll make a braided loaf when I have time, though for gift giving I ...

I will be back tomorrow with bread for Christmas breakfast, but I have been muttering to myself all morning and I have to share with you lest the nice people at the craft store have me arrested later today when I start screaming "I mean, what is it all FOR anyway?" in the trim aisle. I have pretty plates covered in pink flowers.  I inherited them from my grandmother.  I store them in weird plastic pouches which have the appearance of quilting.  Just recently I had the good sense to label the weird plastic pouches so that I don't have to open 10 of them before I find the soup plates. Because, you see, I sometimes have to find the soup plates.  Sometimes I have people over for dinner, on Christmas, or on random Tuesday night.  Sometimes I have enough of my everyday dishes and I just use those.  Sometimes I need more dishes, or I'm feeling fancy.  Once I pulled out my pretty pink-flowered dessert plates and the spare yellow-flowered dessert plates ...

Waffles have become a Saturday morning tradition at my house. We have waffles, fruit, and sausage or bacon. Normally I make buttermilk waffles which are lovely things. When you have one really good waffle recipe, do you need another? No, but I don't need another pair of shoes either, and that has never kept me off of Zappos. The thing about baking bread is that before you know it you've started buying yeast in bulk, and then you've got this big container of yeast in your freezer and you start looking for excuses to use it. I have a friend who swears by his yeasted pancake recipe, and I have every intention of trying it as soon as he actually shares it with me. (I just emailed him about it, in fact.) I've been playing around with things that you can mix up when things are quiet and then bake when you're ready. Waffles that rise overnight seem like just the thing for busy Saturday mornings. You do most of the work Friday night after you've...

I kind of hate pizza delivery. It's never fast enough, it's never very good, and if you're ordering for a crowd it's always about compromise. Have you ever had pizza with someone who wanted exactly what you wanted? I also prefer baking with whole grains most of the time. Some pizza places will offer a whole grain crust, but they're not serious about it, so it's terrible: more biscuit or cracker than yeasted dough and too sweet. Blech. This dough makes it easy for me to make pizza at home because it takes just a few minutes to mix up and then it sits in the refrigerator waiting for me. The only downside is that you can't start when the craving hits and have pizza half an hour later. The obvious solution is to eat pizza once a week, and make a new batch of dough while you're cleaning up. I'm not from New York or Chicago and I do not claim to be a pizza expert. There are plenty of pizza experts out there who will teach you how t...

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.   When my husband read the Dinner chapter of Lunch in the Park his response was “It made me hungry.” He tried to tell me it was because I had written the scene of Jeff cooking so well, but the fact is it doesn't take much skill to use words like “ginger” and “garlic” to make someone hungry. When I announced on Google+ that I was thinking of put Kate and Jeff's recipes here the response was “ooo, ginger beef?” So here is Jeff's ginger beef recipe, a big hi...

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.   Sometimes I'm here talking about food.  Sometimes I'm chasing my kids around.  Sometimes I'm serving women in labor . If I'm not doing any of those things I might be checking in on the lives of the fictional people who live in my head. Before you run away, no, I'm not hearing voices.  I've just always have a story or two that I'm writing in my  head.  If I have a few minutes I try to get the story out of my head and onto paper.  Sometimes ...