I have a new coffee table. Big and square, it’s exactly the right height to rest my feet on while I sit on the couch. I have a new dining table, too, and in the kitchen cabinet there’s a new mixer—one of those fancy standing mixers with an attachment for mixing bread dough. Of course, in the two years I’ve lived in Abu Dhabi, I’ve made bread exactly three times, …
cooking
if this is how a twelve year old gives compliments, how will he do insults?
Yesterday around dinner time, I asked Liam if he wanted chicken in a tortilla or just plain chicken with rice (I know, what a dazzling array of options. Don’t tell Ina Garten; she’d just feel threatened). Liam, sprawled on his bed in his fuzzy bathrobe, surfaced out of the book he’s reading (The Name of the Wind, which is apparently the Best Book Ever in the History of Words). “You …
Monday Listicle: Food
Mid-December and the madness is upon us: students trapped in end-of-semester zombie-state, with circles under their eyes down to their jawlines; piles of (as yet ungraded) papers; emails from Grandma asking what the boys want for Christmas presents; a round of holiday parties (some a pleasure, some an obligation); and of course the requisite dementia-inducing Christmas music being piped into all the malls. The cognitive dissonance of standing in the …
food for memory
I left most of my cookbooks in New York when we moved out here. With epicurious and all the other food websites (dinnerdujour, anyone? or the fantastically named ezrapoundcake?) I figured I could use that space to pack more of Caleb’s important Sticks and Rocks. I did, however, bring my binder. A binder with recipes in it, not women (thanks Mitt, for an image that will never, ever die). At …
Sometimes chili is chili. Sometimes it’s a metaphor.
I cook at lot in the fall. Something about that first chill in the air that makes me want to get all Ma Ingalls and make big pots of rib-sticking food, much of which I freeze for the winter months. Of course Ma Ingalls didn’t have a freezer but you take my point. So. I decided to make chili. And also a squash-apple-curry soup. Because even though it’s 85F and …