BOOKSHELF « A Woman Sconed

Bread of the Month: Crowning cinnamon rolls

By rahoward, on February 15th, 2021

My mother’s basic yeast roll recipe, I knew, had the potential for versatility. From it, she herself made lofty loaves, giant fluffy dinner rolls, gooey cinnamon rolls and those irregularly shaped little planks — cut with a sharp knife from a huge bowlful of raised dough and deep-fried — that she called “skunks,” . . . → Read More: Bread of the Month: Crowning cinnamon rolls

Cookie of the Month: Seeking peace, via chocolate

By rahoward, on January 31st, 2021

In a year like the last, in a month like the last, what is (still) really needed is some kind of peace. Something to settle us, even momentarily, into a state of calm and content, lifting our worries and maybe even providing a bit of hopeful bliss.

Enter Dorie Greenspan’s World Peace Cookies, . . . → Read More: Cookie of the Month: Seeking peace, via chocolate

Rounding up a variety plate of fudge

By rahoward, on December 15th, 2020

My late Grandma Mae was the first and one of the only people I knew who made fudge from scratch. She was more known and revered for her peanut brittle (see my blog post of December 2010), but along with her famed peanut confection, laid out in dishes every year were also samplings . . . → Read More: Rounding up a variety plate of fudge

Cookie of the Month: Looking to THE cookie

By rahoward, on November 7th, 2020

I first learned of black and white cookies the way many Americans who don’t live in New York (where the cookie is well-known), learned about the black and white cookie — from a “Seinfeld” episode. Jerry Seinfeld, waiting with his friend Elaine on her quest for a chocolate babka at a bakery, gets . . . → Read More: Cookie of the Month: Looking to THE cookie

Scone of the Month: Befriending figs and pistachios

By rahoward, on October 4th, 2020

Amid the dominating voices (and recipes) screaming “PUMPKIN SPICE!” and “APPLES!” this fall are the softer whispers of two other seasonal flavors: figs and pistachios. I’m seeing a lot of fresh fig recipes as figs come into their full ripening, and pistachios, too, are an early fall crop. The two are found all . . . → Read More: Scone of the Month: Befriending figs and pistachios

Easing into a peach pie

By rahoward, on September 29th, 2020

One of the many things I miss about my mom is her knack for picking good recipes. She didn’t enter into this lightly. Not one to squander either her Ingredients or her time, she would consider new recipe possibilities at length and intently and would usually back a winner.

Sometimes, surprisingly, her intended . . . → Read More: Easing into a peach pie

Produce-ing out of the box

By rahoward, on September 13th, 2020

Even reclusive people — homebound due to a pandemic — can go stir-crazy.

I’ll admit, as a recluse, I was likely not as opposed (though still as discombobulated, mentally) by the imposed exile to which we had surrendered in March. I’m fortunate I can work from home (and am rarely bored here), and . . . → Read More: Produce-ing out of the box

Scone of the Month: Sweetening with fresh corn

By rahoward, on August 22nd, 2020

Come August, I almost always get a bout of “cornostalgia.” Never heard of it? I hadn’t either, since I just came up with the term that has me dreaming of rusty tassels, rustling long green leaves, shimmering gleams of blonde cornsilk covering kernels in shades of cream to gold.

I wanna make things . . . → Read More: Scone of the Month: Sweetening with fresh corn

Cookie of the Month: Marveling at madeleines

By rahoward, on August 21st, 2020

My first bite of madeleine, a yummy little shell-shaped pound cake/cookie, did not release a flood of remembrances, as it did Marcel Proust in his writing about the bakery treat in “In Search of Lost Time” (1913):

“…my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not . . . → Read More: Cookie of the Month: Marveling at madeleines

Going ‘green’ with an invisible ingredient

By rahoward, on August 18th, 2020

I’d read the recipes, been intrigued by the videos and even heard out the positive proclamations by a co-worker, but there was still no real way I could be sure that any avocado, of any kind, could be turned into chocolate pudding.

A chocolate-y paste maybe, but certainly nothing to match the chocolate . . . → Read More: Going ‘green’ with an invisible ingredient

“People ask me: "Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do?" . . . The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.”
--M.F.K. Fisher

"It was in a yellow limestone church in Stockdale, Kansas, a crossroads town, that I sat dreaming during summer Sunday sermons, not of heaven or hell, but of the good dinner to come."
--Clementine Paddleford