Archive for the 'comfort food' Category
Coconut Ice Cream
August 11th, 2010by Caroline
Even though it has been cold enough all summer in San Francisco to turn on the heat, one recent day we also turned on the ice cream machine. This recipe comes from The Ultimate Ice Cream Book, by Bruce Weinstein, and it is absolutely fabulous.
1/2 cup shredded sweetened coconut
1 c sugar
3 large eggs
1 t [...]
Baccala!
July 29th, 2010by Caroline
Our stay in Portugal was planned as a respite, a no-agenda, unscheduled interlude without a lot of sight-seeing. It’s not that Lisbon and Sintra don’t offer a lot to see, but we know that with kids you can only be a tourist for so long before rebellion sets in and you risk finding yourselves [...]
A Bad-Good Day
July 19th, 2010by Caroline
When my friend Ursula moved to Portugal for a year and said she had room for us all to come stay, I started looking into airfares. When she started posting pictures of Portuguese pastry on her website, I booked the tickets. She wrote me about her favorite pastry shop in Lisbon, and said we [...]
Home and Away
July 15th, 2010by Caroline
For the third summer in a row, people we love were in Europe, offering us a reason to visit and, even better, a place to stay. There is always a moment (sometimes quite a long moment) when, contemplating a trip like this (3 cities and 17 days), paging through guidebooks and counting up the [...]
Moon Pies for Rocket Boys
June 10th, 2010by Caroline
It’s all about rockets in our house lately. The boys are reading about Apollo 11 and the other moon missions, drawing rocket pictures, building cardboard and foil rockets, and making plans for their future lives as rocket scientists.
I play along as much as I can, but my kids understand two fundamental things about me: [...]
Farm Morning
May 18th, 2010by Caroline
Henry James famously wrote that “summer afternoon” were the two most beautiful words in the English language, but to me, the words “farm breakfast” are equally sweet and evocative. They make me remember childhood Saturday mornings spent rereading Farmer Boy’s descriptions of maple sugar pancake stacks, or my mom’s stories of summer mornings [...]
Al Fresco Dinner with Cuban Black Beans
April 29th, 2010by Lisa
We’re having a mini-love affair with all things Cuban in our home, which began with Picadillo and may have reached its peak when I read Pete Wells’ piece about scorching but not ruining a batch of black beans.
These beans take some time, but they are surprisingly easy to make and they are completely, fantastically [...]
Thousand Island Dressing
April 16th, 2010by Lisa
It’s a snack food, a packable lunch dish, a side dish, an appetizer, an all around helpful thing to have in your kitchen. It’s lightening fast to make. It’s completely addictive. It’s a way of getting your kids to eat more raw vegetables. And even you won’t be able to stop eating it with [...]
Strawberry Clafouti or, Trying Again After a Recipe Failure
March 25th, 2010by Caroline
The pudding wasn’t setting.
I’d had my doubts about the recipe. It seemed to call for way too much sugar, it called for milk instead of cream. But, I had it in my head that we should have fresh vanilla pudding to go with our strawberries.
I know, I know. There’s nothing wrong with ice [...]
The Real Thing
February 12th, 2010by Lisa
I have never brought a bottle of soda into the house. Occasionally when my father or father-in-law are visiting, they buy their own diet soda, but I can safely say that nothing with corn syrup has ever been brought into my house by me or my husband.
This is not to say the kids haven’t [...]