Category: Cooking
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Aunt Moya’s Rhubarb Cake
If you have someone you love and they say they don’t care for rhubarb, this is the gateway baked good to lure them into a lifelong affection for the ultimate pie plant. From this delicious brown-sugar and rhubarb cake, to a strawberry rhubarb pie, to rhubarb sauce on ice-cream, the path is paved with deliciousness.…
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Pollo a la Crema
One of the First Reader’s favorite dishes at a local Mexican restaurant is Pollo Azteca, a creamy dish with chicken, mushrooms, and a hint of spice. Ok, more than a hint. I decided I wanted to try and replicate it at home – for one thing, we can’t manage eating out very often for time…
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Pizza Pinwheels
Sometimes I just riff on old familiar recipes until I come up with something that really works. This is one of those times. I was making pizzas for dinner, when I started. Only there were some wrinkles: I couldn’t use tomato sauce, because two of the kids won’t touch it; and I couldn’t have them…
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Russian Cupcakes
Ok, they aren’t really Russian. They are triple chocolate, with buttercream frosting. The Russian part comes in how they are decorated… The latest cake decorating rage is these single-tip flowers. I was curious, so I used some of my art money (I only buy art supplies when I sell art, so it’s a self-supporting hobby)…
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Cheesecake Brioche
The other day the First Reader was looking at something in the bakery section at the grocery. He does this often, and it’s a toss-up whether we buy it, or I say ‘I can make that for you?’ depending on the schedule. So the Brioche/Danish thing he was looking at stayed on the shelf, and…
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Splendid Spices
I had a moment of anxiety recently, when I discovered that my husband’s favorite flavor of cake was getting hard to find in cake mixes. Carrot cake doesn’t equal spice cake, although we do like it, and Butter Pecan isn’t right, either, although it’s good too. Spice cake on Amazon was nearly six dollars a…
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Can I buy a Vowel?
We were looking for a recipe the other day. I had a chunk of pork loin in the fridge, we’d just had pork chops… so the First Reader popped it into google. I was lying on the bed and reading over his shoulder, sort of. He started cruising websites for recipes, until he found one…
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Tradition is Hard
Last night, I finished the work in progress. Tanager’s Fledglings is a bouncing baby manuscript weighing in at 101589 words, the biggest rough draft I have ever completed. It took two years, from the nucleus that was a short story about a boy, a dog, and a spaceship, for this book to develop. Life was…
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Science Experiment: Yeast
My son decided he wanted to take part in the science fair at his school. The Little Man is in 6th grade this year, and they had just been discussing cell structure in classes, so when he asked me a few weeks ago for help with ideas on what to do, I suggested yeast among…
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Hearty Oaties
The First Reader’s favorite cookies are, surprisingly, almost healthy. Almost. But not all the way there. Oh, and the other thing about these? They must never, ever have raisins in them. Raisins are evil deceptions for people expecting chocolate chips. A while back I ran out of butter, but wanted to make cookies, so I…
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Hot Soft Pretzels
The other day the First Reader had mentioned pretzels. And he wasn’t talking about the hard ones I buy in bulk for kid snacks. I knew what he meant… the warm, soft, delicious things that most people associate with overpriced mall vendors of dubious origin. I’ve made soft pretzels before, and they aren’t difficult to…
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Date-Walnut Muffins
When you start out the day with a vista like this, cold, gray, and a layer of fresh snow on frozen ground, but not enough to be a glistening white blanket of winter wonderland… that’s when you need something special. I was standing in the kitchen contemplating what to do for breakfast when the First…