Bread, Wine, Salt

I have a new post up about one of my local farmers' markets at The DC Moms .  Do you shop at producer markets? At three o’clock in the afternoon, when the market opens, it’s a great place to get fresh produce, meats , cheeses, breads and other goodies. RPFM is a producer only market, so you can chat with the farmers about what they sell.  It’s also a good place for an afternoon pick-me-up: iced coffee from  Zekes , or fresh lemonade from Migue’s Donuts, or  ice cream from Simple Pleasures . I hand my kids a few dollars and make them order their own treats, after we’ve rehearsed the “please and thank-you.” They like to help pick out berries, corn,  greens , melons, and apples as they come into season.  If there’s something perfectly ripe they want to eat it right away . . . 

Last week we had dinner at a friend's house. She made salmon, and Husband, who is not always a fan of fish that is not in the form of fish fingers (hold the custard) discovered that he could eat salmon and like it. Later that week as we were discussing what dinners we might eat, he pulled some salmon fillets out of the freezer and said I could do something with them, if I wanted. This dovetailed nicely with some rice cooker related research I'd been doing so I knew right away what I would do. My rice cooker is not currently big enough for salmon fillets (though I expect to change that soon enough) so I baked the fish instead, along with the rice and dandelion greens because why make more work for yourself that you have to? The brown rice takes a long time to cook, so keep the salmon in the fridge until just before you need it.  Keeping it cold will prevent it from drying out during baking. Lemon-Thyme Salmon with Brown Rice and Dandelion Greens feeds 4-6 Ingredients: ...

My author page is where you'll find fun tidbits like the alternate ending to Lunch in the Park.  Come check it out.

The Gladiator Arena I am a slacker-parent. In the years since I first claimed my slacker title, Lenore Skenazy created the term “ Free-Range Parent ” which not only sounds better than “slacker,” it comes with a whole philosophy attached, which you can debate with the other parents at your parenting group, proving that even if you’re not climbing the slide with your kid, you spent real time researching the reasons why you shouldn’t climb the slide with your kid. Sometimes I do call myself a free-range parent, but the truth of the matter is I’m a slacker. I would rather sit on the park bench and read a book, or commit that cardinal sin of parenting, play with my smart-phone, than climb the slide or push my kid on the swing. Back when my kids were in the “stick everything in their mouth” phase, I did put down my book long enough to take the mulch out of their hands and redirect them, but that’s about it. If my kid climbs too high on the playground climbing structure, or c...

Years ago, when I was first dating the man who would eventually be smart enough to marry me, that man had a roommate who never cooked. Instead he went home every weekend, ate his mother's cooking, and brought back enough dinners, each packed it its own tupperware, to feed him until the next weekend. My boyfriend liked to mock him for it, but I tried a more encouraging approach. I told him that if he made his own dinner, just once, I'd make him a blueberry cobbler. I don't know why I said blueberry cobbler, but I did, and it stuck. Not long after I made the promise, the roommate cooked himself his own dinner, and I was called on to make blueberry cobbler. Grab a spoon. That story has nothing to do with this recipe, except that I was thinking about it while I assembled this morning's breakfast last night. My boys were going to gymnastics camp today, which meant getting them up and fed earlier than usual, and I wanted their bellies full of food which would last the...

Judas made a very common mistake. He assumed that our love for God and for our neighbor was a zero sum game, that we had to choose between God and our neighbors because we couldn’t love both, not really, not enough. Now, as we know from this reading and others, Judas wasn’t doing a good job of loving God or his neighbors. The name Judas has become one of our cultural references. I could stand up here and call someone a Judas, and you’d all know what I mean: a traitor. Jesus used that kind of reference all the time. His words as we have them were written down by men who knew about farming and fishing, and about the Torah. The disciples were Jews, which means they would have studied the Hebrew scriptures, would have the words of the scriptures written on their hearts and their minds in ways that we modern Episcopalians mostly don’t. So when Jesus says “The poor you always have with you,” we hear a sentence standing on its own. “The poor you will always have with you.” And it’s not a ...

Brown-Butter Swiss Meringue Buttercream I have come here today to confess to Almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters that I have sinned.  In full knowledge of the importance of birthday cakes , I did willfully try to get away with making a pound cake for a friend's birthday because I didn't want to be bothered with frosting a layer cake. My feet were only set back on the path to righteousness by a stern rebuke from my friend's husband. (Okay, not a stern rebuke, but "statement of my friend's mild preference" seems sort of anti-climactic, doesn't it?) And, as it turned out, a different friend of mine had spurred a thread about brown butter over on Facebook and I had filed away the phrase "brown-butter buttercream" for future use. So I decided that if I was going to frost a cake I was going to do it with style. The first step is to brown the butter, which is a simple matter so long as you're willing to hang around the kitc...