Archive for the 'caroline' Category
Cooking with Ben
March 11th, 2010by Caroline
I love Pete Wells’ Cooking with Dexter column, and this week’s installment spoke to me particularly. Wells, apparently, is a perfectionist, and his occasional cooking missteps make him storm and stomp – unless his five year-old son is around. Then, because like any parent Wells likes to model more constructive behavior, he checks his [...]
Social Shopping
March 5th, 2010by Caroline
I love peeking in other people’s shopping bags and baskets. The other day a fellow Trader Joe’s shopper snagged my cart by accident and as I wheeled hers up and down the aisles, I marveled at what different groceries she found — it was as if we were shopping in different stores — but [...]
California out the window
February 25th, 2010by Caroline
Every Sunday morning, just two blocks from my house, our neighborhood farmer’s market lets me witness the seasonal cycles of California produce and other farm products. Valentine’s Day was the last day for satsumas, for instance, so I bought several pounds for our trip; the woman who sells me eggs explained she’d run out [...]
Road Food
February 22nd, 2010by Caroline
There’s nothing like a road trip to create some powerful family food memories. It’s been about forty years, but everyone in my family still remembers our road trip from Tokyo to the mountain village of Nojiri and our stop at a roadside stand for snacks. My oldest brother picked out what he thought was [...]
Pasta with Beets for Valentine’s Day
February 14th, 2010by Caroline
There was a time when Valentine’s Day had me making heart-shaped chocolate sandwich cookies, or even, just a few weeks before Ben was born, brownie ice cream sandwiches (I’ll never forget the lady who saw me standing in the ice cream aisle — I was looking for flavor inspiration — and commented, “It’s a [...]
Classic Oatmeal Cookies
February 9th, 2010by Caroline
There is nothing remarkable about this cookie recipe except, perhaps, that I have been following it faithfully for over 35 years, and if you read this blog periodically or know me at all, you know that I am always tweaking recipes for baked goods. But why mess with a classic? This is the recipe [...]
Pear Bread
February 7th, 2010by Caroline
The other day I saw a bus ad quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s line, “There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat.” I was so surprised to see Emerson’s words on the side of a bus that it took a while before I stopped to think [...]
Chard & Walnut Lasagna
February 1st, 2010by Caroline
It seems amazing to me that three and a half years ago, I began a blog post, “Ben’s not a picky eater…” What happened?! One day he was eating toasts spread with goat cheese and eggplant caviar and then, one by one, foods started to leave his diet. I wonder sometimes about the impact [...]
A Good Way to Start the Week
January 11th, 2010I will stop with all the cookie recipes soon, I promise, and get on to other topics, but I couldn’t resist writing about this one which I first spotted on my friend (and Mama, PhD contributor) Sheila’s blog: Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies.
Now, normally I am a big fan of flour in baked goods. You can [...]
Hickory Puffs
December 30th, 2009My dad and sons added a new cookie to their repertoire this year, one I grew up with thanks to the nut-gathering efforts of my dad: hickory puffs. Now, most Californians don’t know about hickory nuts; the trees grow in New England and Wisconsin, and the nut shells are so hard and the nutmeat so [...]