Traveling — via cookies — for the holidays

Every year, as the holidays approach, I study countless cookbooks and recipes that share cookie traditions from other places, and for awhile, I’m overwhelmed in trying to choose which cookies I’m going to make. At a certain point, it gets to be too much — I get behind, and I have to narrow . . . → Read More: Traveling — via cookies — for the holidays

Bread of the Month: Rolling with the meant-to-be

The first food gift I remember was wrapped in aluminum foil and topped with an adhesive-backed bow. Cinnamon rolls…jillions of them, all over the countertops in their silver packets, awaiting Christmastime delivery to family, friends, neighbors.

My mom got up in the wee hours of the morning to do this, because the rolls were . . . → Read More: Bread of the Month: Rolling with the meant-to-be

Turning out a new fave cookie

Occasionally (well, perhaps more often than occasionally), I become mesmerized by little cooking videos on the Internet. You know the ones, where an overhead camera view captures the step-by-step process (often sped up to keep the video short) that makes whatever is being made look like a snap. Maybe sometimes it is, but everything just . . . → Read More: Turning out a new fave cookie

Dancing with ‘sugarplums’

Just what are sugarplums, anyway? According to Clement Moore’s classic holiday story poem, “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” children had visions of them dancing in their heads. And sugarplum fairies flit magically in the most well-known and traditional of holiday ballets, “The Nutcracker.”

When I have done my own envisioning of what a sugarplum might . . . → Read More: Dancing with ‘sugarplums’

Remembering sweet treats from a sweet neighbor

I put up my tree recently, and as with many a Christmas tradition, this ritual sent me back — footsteps clearly marked despite the drifting snow of thoughts flurrying in my mind — to trees of the past. Of prickly cedar trees whose feathery branches could barely bear the weight of tinsel but whose smell . . . → Read More: Remembering sweet treats from a sweet neighbor