Listen. I don’t claim to know a thing or two about cooking or baking or sauteeing, about chiffonade techniques or a parboil. If you point me in the direction of a culinary kitchen, I will be unable to name approximately 84% of the available trappings. Basting and barding and blanching? Foreign languages. But food placing?
Holiday excitement hit early in these parts. We started our annual Christmas puzzle in October (I know, I know) and have gone through no less than three sacks of flour since. The garden rosemary is dwindling; the cinnamon restocked twice. For two weeks now, I’ve passed the hallway and smiled at the quiet glow of
I don’t know what came over me exactly. I just know that, somewhere in the nostalgic depths of my mind, there is an image of an aproned mother in pearls and lipstick pulling a loaf of homemade, freshly-risen, flour-dusted bread straight out of the kitchen oven. My mother didn’t bake bread. I don’t even think
Boone Pickens perhaps said it best: When you are hunting elephants, don’t get distracted chasing rabbits. This week’s rabbit: Stranger Things. I’m not a TV watcher by nature, but every now and then, a show will grip my immediate community so tightly that it becomes a focal point for conversation after conversation, theories and recaps
Bang trims, watercolors, mango slices. Musical reenactments in the sunroom, her stage. She wants to know how to spell Gaston, needs to borrow a tote as a prop, asks me to put ‘Kill the Beast’ on repeat. For a bit, I say, sliding the door shut. She remembers candied pecans and puzzles from last winter,
“So there you have it: two things & I can’t bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them?” ―Richard Flanagan There is something to be said for living life with open shutter
I grew up as far away from the kitchen as possible, knowing full well there was likely to be a mother stirring a skillet of Tuna Helper in need of someone to set the table (kids are the worst, man). And so, without a solid memory bank of practice, my food knowledge and stovetop creativity
This summer wasn’t a summer of reading for me. It was a summer of shooing away a toddler from outlets, of teaching a 5-year-old the differences between a redwood and a willow. It was an outside summer, a keep-em-busy summer, a run-em-wild summer, and on most nights, we all fell into bed with dirty feet