April 15, 2024 We scoot down the neighborhood streets on our annual pilgrimage to the massive cherry tree from which are, generously, strung three swings. Opposite, someone has thoughtfully placed a bench for parents to sit and enjoy the scene. Every April these blossoms explode into magnificent pink pom poms, lush, fragile, effervescent. They are extravagant and short-lived, exploding from bare...
February 25-26, 2024 I habitually ask for bread when we eat out, which isn’t often, not because I want the bread as much as I do the sauce. It is not generally considered restaurant manners in our culture, although I’ve certainly done it, to full on lick a plate prior to it being cleared, but when so much of the flavor is trapped in streaks on the pottery set before me, one could be forgiven for...
February 4-5, 2024 Brioche is a physically and emotionally demanding project, a labor of love. I bequeath it upon my loved ones on special occasions, a long holiday weekend or a beloved teacher’s birthday. It’s what you do when you want to wow someone. I once blew my daughter’s friends’ minds when, on my turn in the gymnastics carpool, I doled out slices of freshly baked brioche to...
February 4, 2024 The bowl of my 2006 KitchenAid mixer is filled with flour, milk, sugar, levain. I turn the mix speed to “stir,” the lowest it can go, and it spurts to life. But brioche dough needs more than “stir” to past the windowpane test. When the mix speed passes 2, the machine begins jumping around the counter, making its way perilously close to the edge. The dough...
February 4, 2024 In my culture, you got married after college, and then you got a KitchenAid, the holy grail of kitchen implements reserved for those elevated to the status of wife. I did not follow this plan. I remember declaring defiantly that when I graduated from law school, I would buck the system and honor my achievement by buying my own. Several years out of college, and a law degree, but...
January 17, 2024 For years I said I was a cook, not a baker. I don’t do well with precision but I’m great with improvising. There you go. When did this change? I attribute it, at least the sourdough part, to Michael Pollan’s chapter on bread in Cooked, whose rapturous account of the glorious, almost holy, nature of the transformation of flour and water into bread gave me shivers...
February 5, 2024 I had an order to start fulfilling the same night I had to take my son to urgent care with a severe case of please don’t let it be pinkeye, a play for the preventative doctor’s note a parent seeks to keep their kid in school rather than being sent home mid-day by surprise. It wasn’t pinkeye. It wasn’t an infection either, deduced by another doctor brought...
January 14, 2023 I went hunting for ways to use up bananas that didn’t involve bread, and naturally found my way down a rabbit hole of puddings. I’m not southern, but I’ve lived around enough of them in DC to understand the value of a good banana pudding, and to know I wasn’t willing to work that hard. No buying Nilla wafers, no baking my own. I wanted something less than...
January 23, 2024 When someone is hurting, or celebrating, or the source of help or hope in your life, don’t you feel the urge to do something about it? Words like “I’m sorry,” “hooray,” or “thanks a ton” float up naturally like bubbles, but as quickly can burst with hollowness, as you push up against their limits. Don’t you ever just feel the...
January 17, 2024 Photo by Curtis Yee, @supercurtisman A friend offered to bring cake to our weekly small group meeting, but held off when she heard I was planning to bake a cake. “My dessert can wait til next week. I can’t say no to a Jeannie Rose cake!” I replied, “It’s mostly an excuse to use up some clementines that had gotten too hard to peel. Cake is like the...