I have prided myself on trying new recipes in this blog space. It’s as if it’s a better gamble or a more promising adventure if I have not made something before. We always have our eyes on the new, unnamed, undiscovered proposition. Sometimes, though, with recipes, you shouldn’t turn your […]
I’ve mentioned before that one cornerstone food from my childhood was peanut butter. And what goes better with peanut butter than a good old reliable saltine cracker, another touchstone food of youth. In my early childhood, when our house was free of junk food like chips, Cheetos and Doritos, saltine […]
This year I got the jump on holiday cookie baking in November. This wasn’t just me working early for cookie’s sake. I had a deadline in mid-November for a column I was writing on slice-and-bake cookies for Kansas Country Living, so by late October/early November, I was making cookie doughs […]
[D]espite my misgivings about all things pumpkin spice (which is mainly due to its too-earliness, if anything), I know that a little pumpkin — and its accompanying spice — can conjure up something delicious. Sometimes, on the way to one thing, another is discovered. This was the case for my […]
[B]y August, after a long summer, I’m beginning to crave a taste of fall. Not in the pumpkin spice sort of way (did those PSL’s come out even earlier this year?), but more in the direction of an apple kind of craving. I saw a recipe for an apple cider […]
[M]y idea of blondies (bar cookies, not actual blondes) was that they were simply chocolate chip cookie dough, spread into a pan and baked. Not necessarily so, as I discovered when I checked into recipes for them. Had I ever really made an actual blondie? I realized I had not. […]
I started seeing peach cobbler recipes everywhere not long ago, even in my dreams. While a true peach cobbler is definitely on my horizon (it ranks at the top of all cobblers for me), I settled on a little twist — in the form of a muffin — to tide […]
[I]’ve written before about how peanut butter was the nutritional foundation of my youth. For a time, early on, it’s all I would eat. My mother, concerned about my gaunt frame and lack of interest in other foods, took me to the doctor. “All she wants to eat is peanut […]
[I] would wager that, in the spring, when grocery shoppers across this country get a hankering for strawberry shortcake, strawberry pie, strawberry…anything, that don’t give a moment’s thought to the fact that most of the strawberries they’re buying come from the productive fields of California, from Oxnard to Watsonville. My […]
[O]f all the unrest in recent years, the war in Ukraine has unsettled me significantly. Perhaps it is the timing. As we just seemed to be stepping forward, out of the shadow of a horrifying and destructive pandemic, we began to witness new horrors waged on a particular people, who […]