Sweet Amandine

Okay

2013-04-18T12:07:00.000-04:00

How are you, friends? I hope well. Many of you wrote to check in on us after the bombing here on Monday, and we so appreciate it. I wanted to stop by today to thank you, and to let anyone who might still be wondering know that Eli, Mia, and I, and all of our Boston family and friends are, thankfully, okay. Shaken and sad, but okay.

Our thoughts are with those who are suffering. I hope with all my heart that you are not among them.

I'll have some cake for you soon. For now, I'd like to share a piece I wrote for Tablet Magazine about running, fear, and Boston that appeared on Tuesday morning.

Also, The One Fund. If you're so inclined, I hope you'll join me in donating to help the victims and families of the attack.

Sending much love your way. xo.

Long live the oatcake

2013-03-03T22:30:00.000-05:00

Calling all people out there with kids and full-time jobs who manage to blog one, two, three (!!!) times per week: Kindly pull up a chair. I bet you're the same people who return e-mails immediately and never run out of dish soap. On all accounts, I have a lot to learn. You'll teach me, yes? In exchange, I offer Heidi Swanson's Oatcakes. You know they're something special when I say it's a fair trade.

I wasn't in the market for an oatcake - for any cake at all, really - when I pulled Heidi's book, Super Natural Every Day, from the shelf and sat down to my Grape-Nuts and tea. I was just there to visit page 1, home to the following words:

I live in a modest six-room flat with twelve-foot ceilings on the second floor of a Victorian apartment in the middle of San Francisco. And by "middle" I mean that if you threw a dart at the center of a map of this city, you'd likely hit my house. My street dead-ends into an east-sloping neighborhood park, and when you stand at the front window you can watch a parade of pugs and pinschers, big kids on dirt bikes and small kids on scooters, dealers, joggers, and the occasional flute player go by. There are times when two girls set up a music stand in the shade and practice trombone.

Over breakfast, I always try to read something that reminds me of what words can do. Before I pick up my manuscript each day, it helps to see proper evidence that writing is, in fact, possible. There are some bits of texts that I return to, and this paragraph is one of them. (Also in heavy rotation right now: anything by Mary Karr or John McPhee.) I so admire Heidi's economy of words, the precision of her images, the way she sets us down right in the middle of her home, her city, her world, to take it all in alongside her. I'd like to stand there at that window for a while.

Anyway, I was just passing through Heidi's pages that morning, not even planning to turn on my oven, when my finger found a sticky tab I'd placed who knows when. Suddenly, I was face to face with a recipe for oatcakes, ones that looked nothing like the round, flat discs I normally associate with that word. The only oatcakes I'd ever known were plush-looking crackers that crunched, more savory than sweet, but just barely. When I lived in the UK, I ate a lot of them, mostly because I was 22 and they were cheap - you could get a whole package for under a pound - and with jam and cheese they could pass for lunch. (Molly posted a recipe for that kind of oatcake not long ago.)

Heidi's, as you can see, are different, muffin-like in shape, and almost a cookie in substance. She packs them with walnuts and flax seeds, and sweetens them with sugar and maple syrup. I cut the sugar in half after my first go-around, and still find them sweet enough to call a treat. Let me be clear: There is nothing delicate about the Heidi Swanson Oatcake. The oats on top harden into a helmet of a crust that I like to break off bit by bit and save for last; the interior crumb, while softer, is dense and made for chewing. I couldn't be happier about that. These (almost 18!!) months since Mia came along have been the hungriest of my life. Long live what fills me up for more than a blink of an eye! Long live the oatcake.

Have a bang-up week.

Heidi Swanson's Oatcakes
Adapted from Super Natural Every Day by Heidi Swanson

I've only tried these with walnuts and flax seeds, as Heidi recommends. It's a winning combination, but I think I might swap in coarsely-chopped sunflower seeds for the flax the next time around, just for a change. The recipe printed below includes only half the sugar of the original recipe. As I mentioned above, I think they're still plenty sweet this way. Note: I follow the weight measurements listed below; the volume measurements are Heidi's, and I have not tested them.

[Oh, and a question! I bought coconut oil for this recipe for the first time and I'm fascinated by the stuff. What else can I do with it? If you have suggestions, do tell...]

300 grams (3 cups) rolled oats
225 grams (2 cups) spelt flour or whole wheat pastry flour (I use spelt)
½ teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons salt
45 grams (¼ cup) flax seeds
85 grams (¾ cup) chopped walnuts, lightly toasted
70 grams (1/3 cup) extra-virgin coconut oil
85 grams (1/3 cup) unsalted butter
¾ cup maple syrup (I use Grade B)
35 grams (¼ cup) sugar
2 eggs, lightly beaten

Position a rack in the top third of your oven and heat to 325 degrees. Butter a 12-cup muffin pan.

Stir together the oats, flour, baking powder, salt, flax seeds, and walnuts in a large mixing bowl.

Put the coconut oil, butter, maple syrup, and sugar in a saucepan over low heat and stir, just until the butter melts. Let cool slightly, so that you don't cook the eggs in the next step!

Pour the oil and butter mixture over the dry ingredients, give it a few stirs with a fork, add the eggs, and stir again to form a wet dough. Spoon the dough into the muffin cups - they'll be close to full - and bake for 25-30 minutes, until the edges of each cake are golden brown. Let cool in the pan for a few minutes, then run a knife around each cake and transfer to a cooling rack.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

Riff

2013-02-06T15:11:00.000-05:00

A couple of Sundays ago.

:: :: ::

It has been nearly two years since the redesign of The New York Times Magazine, but I still think of the current incarnation as "new." My favorite part, the page that I flip first to each week, is the critics' column, Riff. The column debuted in March of 2011 with Sam Anderson's essay on the art and (for him, near obsessive) practice of marginalia. It's sharp, thoughtful, funny, the perfect inaugural piece for a column serving up first-rate criticism that's relevant to the digital age. (See also the accompanying images of Anderson's marginalia from 2011 and 2012.) I hope you'll read the entire essay - it's wonderful. Here are some excerpts:

Today I rarely read anything - book, magazine, newspaper - without a writing instrument in hand. Books have become my journals, my critical notebooks, my creative outlets. Writing in them is the closest I come to regular meditation...

According to the marginalia scholar H. J. Jackson, the golden age of marginalia lasted from roughly 1700 to 1820. The practice, back then, was surprisingly social - people would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers. Old-school marginalia was - to put it into contemporary cultural terms - a kind of slow-motion, long-form Twitter, or a statusless, meaning-soaked Facebook, or an analog, object-based G-chat...

Marginalia - with its social thrill of shared immersion - is what the culture is moving toward, not away from. We are living increasingly in a culture of response. Twitter is basically electronic marginalia on everything in the world: jokes, sports, revolutions...

I've long been frustrated with the "distance" between criticism and reading itself. Most critical energy is expended in big-picture work - situating texts in history, talking about broad themes - all of which is useful but hardly touches the excitement of actual reading, a process of discovery that happens in time, moment by moment, line by line. What I really want is someone rolling around in the text. I want noticing. I want, in short, marginalia, everywhere, all the time. Suddenly that seems deliriously possible.

I love the energy of this essay. I love how gracefully the author pivots from the theoretical to the applied, how the writing is both intellectually rigorous and deeply personal. I can say the same things about the majority of the Riff columns (which almost, almost, makes up for that maddening One-Page and the departure of Virginia Heffernan), and I often find myself going back to some of my favorites. I want to list them here so that I have them all in one place, and because I think you'll enjoy them, too.

:: Steve Almond on the effective narrator.

:: Sam Anderson again on information overload.

:: And again on the "meta-memoir" by Luca Spaghetti, a character in Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. (A piece that, while quite funny, includes some serious and important observations about memoir that I still think about all the time.)

:: Hugo Lindgren, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, on his creative process. You'll forgive the nerd in me for pointing out a probable error: Mr. Lindgren attributes the wise words "Be wrong as fast as you can," to Pixar founder John Lasseter but, according to Tad Friend's 2011 New Yorker article (an incredibly inspiring read, by the way), these are actually Andrew Stanton's words. I know this because when I was getting bogged down in my book proposal, and now when I'm having a slow writing day, I return to this paragraph from the piece:

Stanton's precepts are often invoked at the studio, particularly "Be wrong fast" or "Fail early." He explains, "It's like every movie is a kid, and no kid avoids puberty. Just dive through it - get that outline that should take three months done in one, so you get the inevitable bad stuff out of the way and have more time to plus the good stuff."

(How's that to light a fire under you?)

Anyway, thanks for letting me deposit all of this here today. I'm happy to get it all down. I don't have a recipe for you at the moment, but I will tell you that we've been eating loads of this soup lately, with no plans to slow down. (Except for Mia, who's not so into soups these days. She'd rather chew.)

A lot to go on about citrus

2013-01-25T10:43:00.000-05:00

So far, 2013 has been the year of the head cold, the year of the stomach bug that took us down one by one (whoa), the year of the 2002 Honda Accord in sudden need of a new transmission, and the year of the grapefruit. You’ll understand if we focus on the grapefruit today.

I never get excited for winter citrus the way I do for summer berries or fall plums, which is odd, because once the oranges, and grapefruits, and lemons are here, I can’t get enough. When I was a little girl, my great-grandmother Edith would send us HoneyBells from Florida each year. Did you know they’re part grapefruit? And the other part tangerine. They’d come in a box with faux warnings on the outside about the extreme juiciness within, and tie-on plastic bibs, like lobster bibs, for emphasis. There were many more HoneyBells among the grassy plastic padding than there were bibs. I assumed you were supposed to wipe down your bib between uses and wear it again, so I did. We ate them with ceremony on a newsprint-covered hardwood floor, bibs tied beneath our chins, one a day after school until they were gone.

Grapefruits were for cold weekend mornings, for halving and sectioning and topping with honey or heaped teaspoons of sugar, and eating on fold-up tables in front of the TV. I’d scrape and squeeze the skins clean, move to the floor by the heat vent, pull my knees up under my nightgown and, lips still burning from the pith, watch the rest of the show from there. I ate grapefruit just like that – minus the TV and nightgown, eventually – until late 2006, when my mother-in-law Sarah taught me how to supreme. I spent countless hours that winter sliding a sharp knife between membranes and plump, pink vesicles, transferring thrillingly intact slices to plates of arugula and avocado. Eli would joke sometimes that I didn't even like that salad, but made it just for the chance to supreme.

Well. That was a lot to go on about citrus when all I’m offering today is juice of. But when I started thinking about grapefruit, this is what came out. Bear with me, if you would; there’s vodka on the way.

The grapefruit juice currently in my fridge is from a guy called Uncle Matt. And by “a guy,” I mean a company, I guess. The point is that this Uncle Matt, whoever (whatever) he is, makes a very nice juice. We’re only 25 days into the new year, and I’m already on my third jug which – considering that I am the only grapefruit juice drinker in my household and that for a few fevered days I consumed nothing but Gatorade and the entire first season of Downton Abbey – is healthy evidence that this juice and I are ON. The first jug arrived in the final hours of 2012 with my friend, Julia. She’d been mixing up Greyhounds – vodka, grapefruit juice, and lime – and came equipped on New Year’s Eve to spread the good word. I didn't have one that night, or for many nights, sticking instead to a tamer grapefruit juice and soda while my head cleared and stomach quieted. That's what I'm drinking right now, in fact, a – what shall we call it? A "Virgin Greyhound?" A “Grapefruit Fizz?” A “Fizzy Pup?” I knew I was in trouble when the words “Dog Soda” flashed through my brain. In any case, I’m sold.

On the alcoholic version now, too. The Greyhound is clean, simple, sleek, not too sweet, all things that make me suck it down more quickly than I should. I've mentioned before what a lightweight I am, but honestly, I barely even deserve that title, when a single swallow of champagne hits me right between the eyes and two sips of wine are enough. And yet. The Greyhound goes down easy. He’s a quiet, gentle pup. I drank nearly a whole one earlier this week after Mia went to sleep and still made it from sofa to bed on my own. Then last night I emptied my glass! January's looking up. And not a moment too soon.

Eli's Greyhound

Don't let me stop you from squeezing and straining your own grapefruit juice for this drink. Just know that best-quality store-bought 100% juice is also very good here. Replace the vodka with soda for a virgin option.

1 ounce vodka (We're into Cîroc right now.)
2½ ounces grapefruit juice
Wedge of lime

Fill a glass almost to the top with ice cubes. I think a Collins glass is the traditional one for this drink, but we don't have any, so we use a rock glass. Add the vodka (or soda), then the grapefruit juice, squeeze in the lime, and stir well.

Makes one drink.

How it feels

2013-01-07T23:59:00.000-05:00

It's January 7th. The new year is one week old. I'm probably supposed to be charging ahead, thinking new-new-new, and resolving the crap out of things. But you know, if 2013 were a human, it would still be in that sleepy, blobby stage, when the name of the game is take good care.

Here's a thing: At our table on New Year's Eve, someone asked about resolutions. I couldn't think of a single one. I want to do better and I want to be better, and I have some specific, personal ideas about what that means. Does it count as a resolution, though, if I felt this way every day of last year, too? Maybe yes. "Better" means lots of potential new.

This last year was very big and very fast, like one of those dogs, enormous and eager, that you sometimes see straining against its leash and wonder who's walking whom. It slobbers all over your chin and leaves paw prints on your sweater; it doesn't know its own strength. And though I could probably use a shower, and a nap, and maybe a hot fudge sundae, what I'd really like is to sit right here in it for just a little while longer.

2012 was hard in the way that the best things are hard. I'm grateful for that, and proud, and I want to remember how it feels. The breathless, jam-packed days. A proposal-in-the-making became a book deal; an idea became a business; a doughy, blinking babe became an honest to goodness person who walks, and talks, and wakes up singing, and will fight you for the last fish taco. (She does, I am happy to report, still smell like a warm pretzel. Thank goodness.) I've wondered sometimes if our pace is sustainable. Some days, I'm sure that it's not. But of all the shades of tired out there - sick tired, bored tired, sad tired - it's unspeakably lucky to get to fall into bed every night exhausted to the core by the people and things I love. I'm happy tired.

These are the party maps from the last month of the last year. Not pictured: the one from New Year's Eve. A bad head cold took me out of the game before I could finish it. Fortunately, there was a Molly in the house that night to take the reins and make sure no one starved. I repaid her by disappearing for 45 minutes to nurse a teething baby when I was supposed to be cooking and, upon my return, knocking a full glass of red wine to her feet as she rolled gnocchi for twelve. Then, because I am a very good friend, I burned a pear tart and moped about it.

I did get one thing right though, a spread of whipped feta with sweet and hot peppers that I think you're going to love. It was something of a December specialty - we made it and made it and ate it and ate it - and it's with us here in the new year, too. The fact is, whipping feta is a very smart thing to do. Feta is notoriously crumbly, but whipping it (or whirring it like crazy in a food processor, which this recipe counts as "whipping") makes it creamy and smooth. The sweet here is roasted red pepper (from a jar!) and the spicy is Aleppo pepper which adds a mild heat and, though this might just be me, a flavor like sun-dried tomatoes. I tasted this spread for the first time years ago at Oleana, a favorite Cambridge restaurant that I've mentioned here before. The chef, Ana Sortun, published the recipe in her first cookbook, Spice, which came out in 2006. Eli served it that year at my 26th birthday party, and we made it a handful of times after that, and then for some unfathomable and totally unjustifiable reason it fell off our radar for years. (Despite delighting over it time and again at the restaurant. We are sometimes not so bright.) Now that it's back, I'm not letting it out of my sight, and neither should you.

p.s. Halfway through writing this post I realized that today is the fourth anniversary of this blog. That's a nice chunk of years! Let's do some more. xo.

Whipped Feta with Sweet and Hot Peppers
Adapted from Spice by Ana Sortun

1 pound sheep's milk feta, drained and roughly crumbled
2 medium red bell peppers, roasted, peeled, seeded, and roughly chopped (I use jarred.)
2 teaspoons Aleppo chilies, plus a pinch for garnish
1 teaspoon Urfa chilies, plus a pinch for garnish
½ teaspoon smoked Spanish paprika
1 teaspoon lemon juice
¼ cup olive oil

Put everything in a mixing bowl and stir until the sweet and hot peppers coat the cheese. Transfer to a food processor fitted with a metal blade and purée for about 2 minutes, until very smooth and creamy. The mixture will be loose, but will firm up when chilled. Pour into a bowl or, as I do, a few ramekins, and refrigerate for about 30 minutes. Sprinkle with the extra Aleppo and Urfa chilies and the paprika before serving.

Off the charts

2012-12-31T14:54:00.001-05:00

My first first day of kindergarten was in Armonk, New York, a hamlet of Westchester County. I don't remember that day at all. My second first day of kindergarten, halfway through the school year, was in Moreland Hills, Ohio, and I do remember it, because I thought I was losing my mind.

That morning, we circled up on the rug, and our teacher handed out laminated disks of construction paper. A girl across from me held up her red circle and a kid to my left held up his, which was blue. Okay, a game about colors. Hers was red, and his was blue, and weren't we a little old for this? "PURPLE!" the class shouted, all at once. Purple? My cheeks burned hot. Where? But we were on to the next round, a yellow circle, a blue one: "GREEN!" they crowed. These Ohioans were advanced.We hadn't learned color mixing at my old school. I was five years old, and also, me, so on a scale of no big deal to really quite a very big and stressful deal, this situation was off the charts.

Another source of confusion - though, thankfully, of a less stressful variety - was the buckeye. Someone brought one in for show-and-tell that year, a glossy brown knob with a yellowish circle on top. He said it was good luck. We passed it around and our teacher explained that it was the nut from Ohio's state tree. I slid my thumb along its smooth skin. One day after school sometime after that, a friend's mother offered me a buckeye of my own. I held out my hand expecting one of those lucky nuts, and at first that's what I thought I'd gotten. But the dark part of this "buckeye" was chocolate, and the lighter round bit on top (and inside!) was peanut butter. My mind raced back and forth between buckeye number one - that wasn't candy... was it? - and buckeye number two. There was the twinge of discomfort at something not being what I'd expected, but after giving it some thought and figuring out what was what, I was delighted.

This recipe doesn't take much which, as one year slides into the next, is the kind of recipe I like best. You don't even have to turn on the oven.

Wishing you all good things for these final hours of 2012 and better things still for the year to come. We're cooking at home tonight with friends. There will be bread, and bourbon balls, and the return of a salad. I'm looking forward, very much.

Buckeyes
Adapted from another Ohio transplant at Remedial Eating, who adapted the recipe from Saveur.

Please note that this recipe calls for 2 cups of sifted confectioners' sugar, which is not the same thing as 2 cups of confectioners' sugar, sifted. (2 cups unsifted is considerably more than 2 cups sifted; I checked.) So even though it's a little bit of a pain, you'll want to sift the sugar first, then measure it. For the peanut butter, I'd stay away from the natural stuff, here. I think even well-stirred, it could give you trouble. As for the vegetable shortening, I use Spectrum.

2 cups sifted confectioners' sugar (sift first, then measure; see note)
¾ cup smooth peanut butter
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
½ teaspoon vanilla
¼ teaspoon salt
8 ounces semisweet chocolate
½ teaspoon vegetable shortening

Put the sugar, peanut butter, melted butter, vanilla, and salt into a mixing bowl. Give it a few stirs with a wooden spoon to get things going, then knead with your hands until smooth. Roll into 1-inch balls, place them in a single layer on a plate, and freeze for 15-20 minutes.

Stirring often, melt the chocolate and shortening in a double boiler or heatproof bowl over a pot of barely simmering water. Remove from heat.

Line a cookie sheet with wax paper and set aside, next to the bowl of melted chocolate. Take a few peanut butter balls from the fridge. One by one, insert a toothpick into the center of each ball and dip into the melted chocolate, leaving a circle of peanut butter showing at the top. Twirl the toothpick to toss off the excess chocolate and place on the lined cookie sheet. Repeat with the remaining peanut butter balls.

Freeze the buckeyes until firm and smooth out the toothpick holes with your finger. Store in the refrigerator. They'll keep for a couple of weeks. Serve chilled or at room temperature.

Makes about 30.

How it works

2012-12-21T21:57:00.001-05:00

Hello and happy winter solstice from the rainiest afternoon I've seen in a while. The days only get longer and lighter from here. Thank goodness.

I have one more recipe for you before the year is out, but I have a feeling that the last thing you need this week is another something to do in the kitchen. Because of that, and also because it's long overdue, I thought I would tell you some more about Eli's company, Directr. When I announced the project back in July, I had to keep the details under wraps. It was fun sharing some of the big ideas behind it, but nowhere near as fun as telling you exactly how it works, which is what I finally get to do today.

Directr is an app, a free app, I should say, that helps you make beautiful short films with your phone. It takes just a few minutes, and there's no editing required. You choose a storyboard from the Directr library, shoot the frames however you'd like, add in your own titles, and hit print. The app stitches your shots into a clean film - backs it with music, too - and you're done. That's it! If you're looking for inspiration, there are suggestions and camera angle ideas included on each frame. Or you can go ahead and shoot what you please. There are holiday-specific storyboards (UPDATE: holiday cards!), storyboards for your walk to work, for your awesome baby, your awesome dog, your awesome morning coffee, and a few blank slates, too. And of course, there's plenty of food. The Directr team is hard at work creating hundreds of storyboards; a new one pops up on the site (and in the app) every day. You can see them all here.

Directr launched softly, quietly, as if on tiptoe, really, a couple of months ago. Now, after much ramping up and steadying of the ship, they're ready for all of us. I've said before that Directr reminds me a lot of what we do here in blogland, making something out of the stuff that surrounds us all the time, looking for the stories in our everyday, and doing our best to get them down somehow. It has been such a thrill to watch as people start doing just that with this thing that Eli and his team are building. Here's a film called Grateful: Finger Dancing that a user named He Ren made earlier this week.

I don't know who you are, He Ren, but I like your style.

And here are some of the other storyboards that I find especially lovely, stirring, and fun:

:: This is me.

:: A snowstorm.

:: Autumn.

:: Stripes in the wild.

:: Baby bathtime and baby eating. (Starring Mia, when she was just a pup!)

:: And finally, dessert.

(with a side of my friend Jonah, who loves to dance.)

Eli and I would be honored - and that really is the word - if you'd try out the app and make some films. We've heard from some of you who already have, and it means the world to us.

And hey, if you do make a film, would you share it here in the comments? Pretty please? Or shoot me an e-mail with the link? I do most of the sharing and the showing around here, but I treasure the conversations we've had in this space over the years. It would be such a treat to see a few corners of your world, and of you. Oh, and please don't be shy about speaking up if you run into any glitches or bugs, or if there's something you'd like to see. The Directr team is just getting started, working on new builds all the time, and would be grateful for your feedback.

Thank you, friends, for being here. Merry Christmas to all who are celebrating, and glad tidings to all.

A whole chicken to stay

2012-12-13T14:25:00.002-05:00

On Wednesday afternoons, when Mia wakes up from her nap, we go swimming. Last Wednesday was business as usual. I wrangled Mia into her bathing suit. (A tankini. A pink and green halter top. I die.) Mia grabbed a floating dumbbell and bobbed around the pool, as is her custom, smiling and waving at anything that moved. She drank pool water, also her custom, drifted along belly-up for a while, got sufficiently wrinkled and shivery, gave me the evil eye when it was time to get out, then cruised naked around the changing room shutting locker doors. Typical. We showered. I dressed myself. I dressed Mia. I stuffed her into her jacket, strapped a fuzzy hat (with ears, obviously) onto her head, and locked the whole squirming package onto my chest for the walk home. Nothing out of the ordinary.

What came next happened so quickly - it was a matter of seconds, really - I keep thinking that perhaps it didn't happen at all.

We pass through a hotel lobby on our way home, and as we neared the door last week, I saw a woman in a wheel chair. She was African-American, dressed all in black, with long silver dreadlocks. At once I had the feeling that I knew her. Mia started smiling and waving frantically, and I swear they locked eyes for a moment, and just as it's hitting me that whoa, WAIT A SECOND, I do know her, another woman rushes up, introduces herself as professor so-and-so and, breathless, looking like she is either about to faint, or cry, or sprint around the block, says, "Hello, Ms. Morrison. It is a pleasure to meet you. I'll be escorting you to your speaking engagement tonight." (I forgot to mention that I was in the middle of dialing Eli when this whole scene transpired, and at the precise moment when it all clicked, he'd picked up, and was now waiting patiently while I said slowly, shakily, over and over into the phone, "Hold on... Hold on... Hold on...") I am at this point blinking furiously, feeling that I might spontaneously faint, or cry, or sprint around the block, and Mia, still in that damn hat with those damn ears, is still waving, then clapping, then blowing kisses at Toni Morrison's back as she's wheeled across the lobby and out the door.

Well. You cannot wave and blow kisses at Toni Morrison, or have the miniature human strapped to your chest wave and blow kisses at Toni Morrison, and then just go home. So we went to the bakery instead for two slices of Boston brown bread, heavy with molasses and serious flours, lightly sweet, speckled with dried blueberries that steam and swell as the dough bakes. Mia loves it, and so do I. While we were waiting for our slices, the guy behind the counter told me about a man and a woman who come in once a week, order a whole chicken to stay, then sit down across from one another and eat the entire thing with their hands, tearing it apart as they go. He called it primal, mildly disgusting, and one of the most romantic things he's ever seen. The person by the register handed Mia a star-shaped cracker the size of her palm. It had anise and almond and citrus in it, and I'm sure a bit of sugar, too, though it wasn't terribly sweet. It's probably safe to say that it was more a cookie, but Mia doesn't eat cookies yet, officially speaking, so I'm going with cracker. It was a real treat.

That morning, I'd read that it was Joan Didion's and Calvin Trillin's birthday. Walt Disney's, too.

Also that morning: Mia walked.

Brown bread all around.

p.s. Emma Brockes on Toni Morrison here.

Boston Brown Bread
Adapted from Hi-Rise Bakery and Artisan Baking, by Maggie Glezer

Traditionally, Boston brown bread is steamed in coffee cans for a crust as moist as its crumb. They do use cans at Hi-Rise, but leave them uncovered for a crisp crust. I folded dried cherries into the dough instead of blueberries because they're what I had on hand, and I really liked their deep, winy flavor with the rye flour, molasses, and cornmeal. You might also try dried currants. You'll need two 28-ounce cans or two 8 x 4-inch loaf pans for this recipe. I used a couple of 9 x 5-inch loaf pans (and shortened the baking time), so I ended up with shorter, flatter loaves. It wasn't ideal, but the bread still came out fine, with a damp crumb and extra crust. Please note: I baked this bread according to the weight measurements listed below. I have not tested the volume measurements and, as is always the case when converting from weight, they're approximate.

8 ounces (about 1½ cups) all-purpose flour
8 ounces (about 2 cups) rye flour
4½ ounces (about 1 cup) whole wheat flour
4 ounces (about 2/3 cup) medium- or coarse-grind cornmeal
1 tablespoon baking soda
1½ teaspoons baking powder
1¼ teaspoons salt
¼ cup molasses
¼ cup honey or maple syrup (I used honey)
2 cups whole milk, plus a bit more, if you end up needing it
1 cup dried cherries (or dried blueberries, or dried currants)
Butter for the pans

Heat the oven to 300 degrees and butter your cans or pans.

Whisk together the dry ingredients (flours, cornmeal, leaveners, and salt) in a large bowl. Add the molasses, honey, and milk, and mix with your hands until the dough just comes together. Do not overmix. If it's crumbly, add more milk, a tablespoonful at a time, until you have your dough. Gently fold in the dried cherries.

Divide the batter evenly between the prepared cans or pans, and bake for 60-90 minutes (my 9 x 5 inch loaves were done in 50) until deep brown with a hard, crisp crust. You can stick them with a toothpick, if you want to make sure their insides are cooked through. Remove from the cans or pans while still warm and transfer to a rack to cool.

Serve with cream cheese.

Mostly tomatoes

2012-12-04T01:27:00.000-05:00

Howdy.

My friend Molly turned 30 last week, and we – oh, hey, there she is now! Hi, M. Many happy returns to you! That's our friend Mary in the middle with the party eyes and backwards lips. Get your lips on straight, woman! Sheesh.

All right, who's that little mustachioed dudette, and who let her in here? Little bugger must've sneaked in through the back door while I was frosting the cake. Crasher.

Anyway, as I was saying, Molly turned 30 last week, and we had a dinner party to celebrate. Molly and I cooked up a storm – roasted squash with cardamom, lime, and a yogurt-tahini sauce; eggplant with buttermilk dressing and pomegranate seeds; soup; whipped feta with sweet and spicy peppers; anchovies; olives; bread – I baked a cake that I'm dying to tell you about, but I can't, not yet, because it's for the book; and my sister Kasey made (amazing! spicy! chocolate!) ice cream. Before the party, my friend Steph and I set up a makeshift photo booth (surprise, Molly!), and while Mia napped, Eli hot-glued 22 paper mustaches, glasses, bow ties, and hair pieces to 22 wooden sticks. Goooo team!

I love cooking with Molly. And that's saying something, because I very, very rarely enjoy cooking with anyone. There are people, I hear, who crowd into the kitchen, crack open a cookbook and a bottle of wine, divvy up the tasks at hand and get down to it. There's conversation and multiple knives in action, and music, maybe something like this. There are no lists or maps at all, just good food happening, and the mean heart rate in the room is andante, at most. It pains me to tell you that I am sooo not one of those people. But I often wish I were, and when I cook with Molly, I get to be. (Minus the wine. I'd never make it to the table.) Molly is unflappable in the kitchen. She's a scientist; her brain is packed with a boggling amount of information about how cooking works, thanks in large part to the book she put together for Cook's Illustrated. (Seven weeks and counting on the New York Times best sellers list! Yesssss!) But all that book learnin' (and writing) aside, Molly is an incredibly intuitive cook. She has fabulous taste, and I've learned so much from her. Molly said that for her 30th birthday, she wanted us to cook a meal together for her friends. I couldn't have been happier about that.

Molly started in on the squash when she arrived, and I got going on the soup.

It was a tomato soup, a recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi's new book, Jerusalem, but different from the tomato soup, also Ottolenghi's, that I shared here last week. This one's lighter, more devotedly tomato, with a flavor that's delicate yet deep. The ingredients are mostly tomatoes, plus sourdough, which I thought was kind of weird, and more cilantro than I thought was wise. But the sourdough breaks down completely, pulling together all those tomatoes, smoothing them out, and the cilantro is cooked, so it does something different, something quieter, than I expected.You purée the soup before serving, but only about three-quarters of the way, so that chunks of tomato remain and there are still plenty of seeds to burst between your teeth. It's a magnificent soup. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was eating the best tomato sauce I'd ever had, only from a bowl, straight. Fine with me. At the last minute, we decided to toast some pumpkin seeds to sprinkle on top. I suggest you do the same.

Happy December, friends.

p.s. - More photos here.

Tomato and Sourdough Soup
Adapted from Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

This is intended to be a summer soup, I think – the recipe calls for some fresh tomatoes, some canned – but I've winterized it by using only canned. It might seem strange to hand chop a can of tomatoes when you're also using another can of already-chopped tomatoes, but the variation in texture between the hand-chopped and ready-chopped is very nice. Use the best, most flavorful canned tomatoes you can find. We went with Muir Glen organic tomatoes and they were excellent. A note about the cilantro: The recipe calls for 2 tablespoons chopped cilantro, not 2 tablespoons of cilantro, chopped, which would be significantly less cilantro. That may feel like a lot, but it mellows considerably when cooked. I don't typically have sourdough on hand, but my new plan is to buy a loaf, slice it, and store the individual slices in the freezer so that I'll be able to make this soup on a whim.

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion, chopped (1 2/3 cups, or 250 grams)
½ teaspoon ground cumin
2 cloves garlic, crushed
3 cups vegetable stock
1 28-ounce can of whole peeled tomatoes, chopped, juice reserved
1 14-ounce can of chopped tomatoes
1 tablespoon sugar
1 slice sourdough bread, crust removed (40 grams), torn into 1- to 2-inch chunks
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro, plus extra to finish
1 teaspoon salt, plus more, to taste
Freshly ground black pepper
½ cup pumpkin seeds, toasted in a hot dry skillet, then salted (optional)

Heat the oil in a medium pot over a medium-high flame and add the onion. Sauté for about 5 minutes, stirring often, until the onion is translucent. Add the cumin and the garlic and fry for 2 minutes. Give it a stir every now and then to make sure nothing is sticking.

Stir in the stock, all of the tomatoes with their juices, 1 teaspoon of salt, and a couple of grinds of black pepper – everything but the sourdough – and bring to a gentle simmer. Cook for 10 minutes, stir in the sourdough, then cook for another 10 minutes. Add the cilantro, and purée with an immersion blender. You’re after a soup with varied texture; you want some tomato chunks and definitely some tomato seeds here and there. It’s a thick soup. If it’s too thick, add a little water.

Serve drizzled with olive oil and scattered with fresh cilantro.

Serves 4-6.

All I really want to do

2012-11-30T16:12:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking all week about how to bring this whole NaBloPoMo thing to a close, whether I should bang out one last reader request post, or reflect on just how lovely it was for me to be here every day this month. (It was very lovely.) But in the end, all I really want to do today is thank you. And feed you cake.

This is Alice Medrich's sherry and olive oil pound cake. I've never baked a boozy cake before, and for some reason I thought that most of the alcohol would burn right off, the way it does in cooking. I was mistaken about that. I discovered my error at approximately 1:25pm today when, after consuming two slices in rapid succession, my head felt suddenly swimmy. This cake is festive, shall we say, soaked and squidgy with a FULL CUP of sherry. (Though I am a terrible lightweight, so it's possible that you won't find it nearly as strong.) The dimpled crust has a crunch to it; the crumb is tight and rosy. It's scented with orange zest and as the cake baked, I could smell winter coming.

Thank you for a great November, everyone. I've loved spending this month with you.

xo.

Sherry and Olive Oil Pound Cake
Adapted from Pure Desserts by Alice Medrich

You have your choice of pans for this cake. The recipe makes enough for one 10- to 12-inch tube or Bundt pan, or for two 5- to 6-cup loaf pans. In her recipe notes, Alice Medrich says something about toasted slices for breakfast, so I went with the loaves, naturally. She also says that the cake improves over a day or two. It's very good today just a few hours out of the oven, so I'm looking forward to that.

The recommended sherry for this recipe is a medium sherry called Amontillado. I had only Pedro Ximénex on hand (thanks to this recipe), which is sweeter, but I went ahead and used it and reduced the sugar by ¼ cup. No problem.

3 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1¾ cups sugar
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
Zest from 1 medium orange
5 cold eggs
1 cup sweet sherry (Amontillado or Pedro Ximénex; see headnote)

Position a rack in the lower third of the oven and heat to 350 degrees. Oil and flour the pan(s), or line the loaf pans with parchment.

Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt into a medium bowl.

Put the sugar and the zest into the bowl of a stand mixer and mix with your fingertips, breaking up any clumps of zest as you go. Fit the mixer with the whisk attachment, add the oil, and beat on medium-high speed until well-blended. Beat in the eggs one at a time, waiting until each one is fully incorporated before adding the next. Continue to beat for 3-5 minutes, until the mixture is thick and pale.

Add a third of the flour, beat on low until just blended, half of the sherry, beat again on low until just blended, then repeat until all of the flour and sherry are incorporated. (Flour, sherry, flour, sherry, flour.)

Scrape the batter into the pan(s). Bake until a tester comes out clean, about 60 minutes, and the top is nicely browned. Cool the cake in the pan(s) on a rack for 15 minutes. Then, slide a knife around the sides of the pan(s) to release the cake(s), and turn out on the rack to cool completely.

November 29

2012-11-29T23:10:00.002-05:00

A few more photos from that early November walk. I made these with a chubby little camera that I borrowed from my friend Steph.

:: :: ::

:: This week's food issue of The New Yorker is a treat. I was hoping that Calvin Trillin would have a piece in there and I was not disappointed. I love the way that man writes about, well, everything, but especially food and the people he loves. Also in this issue is a profile of Yotam Ottolenghi (chef, author, all-around smartypants) by Jane Kramer. It looks like you need a subscription for the link to that story to work; if you don't have one, I think these two pieces alone are worth the price of the issue.

:: I've got my eye on these.

:: And these.

See you tomorrow.

They hunt me down

2012-11-28T23:58:00.002-05:00

Come now. You didn't really think we'd make it all the way through November without a single corn bread recipe, did you? You did? That's okay. To be perfectly honest, I did, too. Enough is enough is enough is enough. I thought. But it's no use. These corn breads, they hunt me down. They sneak up out of nowhere and tap me on the shoulder like Eli sometimes does when I'm hunched over my computer writing, only instead of screaming and banging my knee on the desk, I pull out a skillet.

I hope you know that I wouldn't dare crowd our plates with another cornbread if it weren't something special. I may say that about all my corn breads, but that doesn't make it any less true. This one sprang from the pages of Melissa Clark's most recent book, Cook This Now, an endorsement in itself when you consider that Clark is also the source of a certain very special snacking cake that makes me want to applaud every time I bake it. I gave the book to my mother sometime last year, and when I went home to Ohio for the holiday I found it, appropriately stuffed with page markers, on a shelf right by the kitchen. This recipe is one she hadn't gotten to, not yet, but I had a good feeling about it - something having to do with the words "corn" and "bread" and "Melissa" and "Clark" - so I copied it down before I left. Then, at my father's house on our last morning in Ohio, I got down to business.

This honey whole wheat corn bread is a smooth-faced beauty, as you can see. Nothing fancy. It looks like corn bread. But there are some noteworthy things that happen in and around its making and I shall now commence to note them. The name of this bread does some of my work for me, spelling out as it does some of what makes this cornbread this cornbread: the honey and the whole wheat flour. It's up to me, though, to tell you that the whole wheat flour is so sparingly used here that you can think of it almost as a seasoning, adding flavor more than texture to a light and tender crumb. It's the kind of bread that's very easy to chew and swallow, and I appreciate that. Still, I suspect that this recipe would stand up nicely to more whole wheat, and maybe even be the better for it. Melissa Clark herself suggests swapping in whole wheat flour for the white as a variation, and I’m going to do that next time. I'm excited now to tell you about the butter and the way it makes its way into this bread. It's unlike anything I've ever seen. First, you prepare the batter. The dry ingredients, the wet ingredients, everything but the butter. Next, you place your skillet over a high flame and let it get very hot. Here's where things get interesting. Instead of melting your butter the usual way which, for me, means starting it in a cold pan or zapping it in the microwave, you toss it into the already-hot skillet. So in addition to melting, it also browns. Faintly, but enough to taste it later on and feel glad that it's there. If your skillet is hot enough and you've cut your butter into pieces, the browning happens almost at once. Swirl it around, pour it into the batter, and you get a fully-greased skillet for your trouble, too. Not bad, I say. Welcome, newest corn bread. You can stay.

Honey Whole Wheat Corn Bread
Adapted from Cook This Now, by Melissa Clark

This recipe calls for a 9-inch skillet but all we had was a 10-inch, so I used that and really liked the thinner bread with more crust. In fact, the day before I made this cornbread, we made this one in the same 10-inch pan (yes, you read that correctly; two corn breads in two days) and from now on I’m going to choose the larger skillet for that one, too.

1 cup cornmeal
1/3 cup whole wheat flour
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup sour cream
½ cup whole milk
1/3 cup honey
2 eggs
¼ teaspoon baking soda
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, sliced into ½ inch pieces

Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Whisk together the cornmeal, flours, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. In a separate bowl whisk together the sour cream, milk, honey, eggs, and baking soda. Pour the wet ingredients into the flour mixture and gently fold until just combined.

Heat a 9- or 10-inch cast iron skillet over a high flame until very hot. Toss in the butter and swirl to coat the bottom and sides of the skillet. Once the butter is well on its way to fully melted – it will be a matter of seconds, not minutes – remove the skillet from the heat and continue swirling until the butter is completely liquid. Fold the melted butter into the batter, then scrape the batter into the skillet.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, until the top is golden, the edges are crisp and pull away a bit from the sides of the skillet, and a toothpick inserted into the center of the bread comes out clean.

Serves 8-10.

A conversation with Jodi Kantor

2012-11-27T15:19:00.000-05:00

Hi, all.

I have a little something different for us today. I've mentioned before that I see this space as a kind of workshop or studio, a place where I come to write stuff and make stuff, and also to think about how that writing and making gets done. I've always loved talking to writers and artists about their creative process. Since starting in on my manuscript I've found these conversations to be particularly helpful and inspiring. So, I thought it might be fun to invite someone to join us right here for a chat. (And some soup.)

Our guest today is New York Times reporter and best-selling author Jodi Kantor, whose book, The Obamas, came out in January of this year. As I read it, I wondered, as I often do, about the author's writing life. I was thrilled when Jodi graciously agreed to discuss just that with us, here.

I hope you'll enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

:: :: ::

JF: Can you tell me a little about your daily writing routine? Do you have one?

JK: Not in the slightest. You know, I think of myself as a reporter before I think of myself as a writer. My friends who are novelists, they’re the ones locking themselves in a room with a cup of tea, a blank screen, and the characters in their brains. But my job for the past six years has been to answer questions like, "Who are Barack and Michelle Obama? What’s happening to them in the White House? How are they changing?" So the part of my job I spend the most time on, the part I ruminate on and stress about and frankly enjoy the most, is reporting. Watching the president and first lady. Speaking with the people close to them. A lot of breakfast and drink dates, a lot of trips to D.C. and Chicago. I love writing, but writing is not where the drama is in my job, book-wise or newspaper-wise. Some stories are a struggle to write, some practically write themselves. Some are fast, some are slow. But I don’t worry a lot about writing because I just revise my way into it. I’ll write a terrible draft and then figure out how to improve it. Also, I have the best editor in the history of... Actually, she hates superlatives, so I will merely state that she is rather good at her job.

JF: But still, your book is, what, about 400 pages long? And you've constructed a narrative that carries us all the way through it. At some point, at many points, you have to be sitting alone with your notes and a blank page and figuring out how you’re going to say what you want to say, no?

JK: Yes. My book takes place chronologically, as the presidency unfolds. But the presidency is a flood, a torrent of issues and problems and events and characters and incidents, and I wanted to follow one particular story in that flood: the Obamas’ arrival in this strange new world and their reaction to it. Some of the trick was figuring out which scenes were going to stand for which ideas.

JF: So, when you’re doing that figuring out, when and how do you do it? Do you set aside time after a period of reporting where you sit down with everything you've got and start mapping things out? Or is it more like you do all your reporting, then you’re in the shower one morning and suddenly it hits you exactly how to get a chapter down, so you run in a towel to your desk and drip all over your notebook trying to write out your idea before it leaves you? (Or, uh, is that just me?)

JK: More like the second. Then I sit down and I write the bad, sloppy, fast version, just to get it down on paper. I might polish it a little. But I’ll always discover the same thing next: I need more reporting. So it’s back to sources. More breakfasts, more phone calls, or sometimes even texts.

JF: Are you always right about that? That you need more reporting? Do you ever find that you think you need more reporting, but maybe it’s actually just that you haven’t figured out how to write it the way you want to? I guess what I’m asking is if you ever find yourself procrastinating on the writing by doing more reporting. I know I do that all the time when writing papers for graduate school. "If I just look at one more source..."

JK: Reporting is always the answer.

JF: Of course, "procrastinating" is putting too sharp a point on it. The trouble is, I find, that sometimes that instinct is exactly right, that more information is necessary. And sometimes it’s just some weird subconscious coping mechanism. And I find it really hard to distinguish the two.

JK: Yes, you have to cut the reporting short at some point. As my old editor David Plotz used to say, "the deadline is the muse." And you can get too deep into the weeds, for sure. One reportorial disease is a deep fascination with information no one else cares about.

JF: I think that’s a disease shared by academics. And lots of writers, too. I want to ask you now about your relationship with deadlines. I have always said that while I love writing, I could never ever be a reporter because I am such a painfully, painfully slow writer. But I’m doing this thing on my blog right now for National Blog Posting Month where I've committed to posting every day by midnight. The other day I found myself cutting it extremely close. Midnight was approaching and I was nowhere near done with the post I was writing. But then this adrenaline kicked in, and the piece just took on a life of its own, and instead of it being what I thought it was going to be, it became something else, and suddenly, bam, there was the last sentence. I posted at 11:58pm. I have to say, it was quite a rush! And I thought – just for a second – hey, maybe it would be fun to write in that state more often. Because of that (self-imposed) deadline, words showed up, and what those words turned out to be surprised me. Do you get that rush all the time when you’re writing shorter pieces for the New York Times? I imagine that you have to love it, or you wouldn't be able to do what you do.

JK: Yes, I love that rush. I recently wrote this story in a couple of hours, and it was so satisfying. Pitched the idea at 6:00am, boom. Reported and wrote in a few hours, boom. On the front page the following day, huge reaction, boom.

JF: I am in awe of the "boom." I experience it so infrequently.

JK: Even that story required revision, though. The first lede was, in the words of one editor, "actually going to repel New York Times readers away from this story."

JF: So, after writing in that tight-deadline mode for years, what was it like to switch gears for the book?

JK: The deadline for the book was far more intimidating than any newspaper deadline, because the action was unfolding in real time as I was writing about it. I wanted to answer questions I thought would be on many readers’ minds around now. How has the Barack Obama of 2008 changed? What does Michelle Obama really make of this whole thing? What happens to you – really happens to you – when you become president or first lady?

JF: Did you find the day-to-day energy of sitting down to write was different without the close deadlines looming? Did you detect a change in your voice, the way the words came together on the page? To get the writing out, did you set yourself mini-deadlines along the way?

JK: Yes to all. The biggest change for me was temporarily leaving the nest of the New York Times. The Times is a place of rules, of forms. Writing a story here means following a recipe, one refined over the years by the best writers and editors in the business. Ideally you’re not just following the recipe. You’re adding new thoughts, flourishes, and so on. But a New York Times story is a New York Times story. There are certain things you have to do with it, and certain things you can never do with it. A book is different. A book can be anything, which means limitless possibility and terrifying freedom.

JF: At the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned "not really worrying" about the writing, and "revising your way" into your work. I imagine that these two things are related, that the fact that you’re "not really worrying" allows you to let yourself go, write your heart out in a messy, messy way, and then deal with it later. Do you think that’s right?

JK: Exactly. The reason I don’t worry about writing is that I have a reliable process, a set of steps I follow. I outline, which is slow and hard. I write the first draft, which is slow and hard. But then it takes off from there. I get a lot of pleasure from making each draft better. That’s one reason I knew I wanted to be a journalist. I was always editing and polishing. Relatives’ toasts, friends’ grad school applications…

JF: When the writing is coming more slowly than you’d like, what do you do?

JK: One thing I find is that taking the right breaks helps. I recently wrote a big story about Obama’s personal approach to the role of first black president. The lede came to me after a yoga class. When I just can’t seem to write well, I stop and read the work of someone whose prose style I love, a non-fiction writer who is really expressive, who knows how to break the rules. Stacy Schiff, Marjorie Williams, and Frank Bruni all work well.

JF: Finally, let’s talk about food. I find that the things I like to cook and eat move in periods, so, for example, I associate the summer of 2009 with a certain lentil salad. Is there a certain food or meal that you ate a lot when you were working on The Obamas?

JK: Food memories from The Obamas… Good restaurants in Chicago and D.C. Glasses of red wine. You learn which sources like what. Warm bowls of CSA vegetables in Brooklyn, mixed with grains or cheese or whatever was in the house. Vegetarian stuff. My daughter, who is six, became a vegetarian while I was writing the book so that is our obsession. Do you have any vegetarian entrees a six-year-old kid might like?

JF: I do. [Coming right up!] Thank you so much for this, Jodi.

JK: My pleasure.

Tomato and Chickpea Soup
Adapted from Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi

When I asked Jodi about her daughter's food preferences and aversions, she said, "A six-year-old's aversions? Do you have a year? And by the time I list them all, she'll have changed them." Jodi was, however, able to tell me that her daughter is reliably interested in soups - at least for now - and loves chickpeas and tomatoes. As it happens, our go-to soup from last winter, one that I made over, and over, and over again, but somehow never got down here, perfectly fits the bill. It's Yotam Ottolenghi's take on a Tuscan ribollita. His version is thickened with toasted sourdough bread, which is wonderful, but somewhere along the way I started substituting pearl barley, just enough to add some chew. (I got the idea here.) There's still plenty of bread involved when we eat this soup; it's just alongside rather than inside the bowl.

This recipe is forgiving. If you're down one or two of the herbs, you can still confidently make do with what you have. It freezes well, so I usually make a double batch and store the leftovers. Speaking of the freezer, if you happen to have some basil pesto stashed in there, this soup is an excellent occasion to trot it out. Plop a spoonful in the center of each bowl before serving.

1 large yellow onion, sliced
1 medium fennel bulb, sliced
1 large carrot, peeled, cut lengthways in half, and sliced
3 celery stalks, cut and sliced the same way
Olive oil for sautéing and finishing
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 cup white wine
1 14-oz. can Italian plum tomatoes
1 tablespoon chopped oregano
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1 tablespoon thyme
2 bay leaves
2 teaspoons sugar
4½ cups vegetable stock (In a pinch, I once used water and adjusted the seasoning accordingly. I think I also added a small onion. Still good.)
1/3 cup pearl barley
2½ cups cooked chickpeas (Canned are fine here.)
Salt and black pepper

Put the onion and fennel into a large saucepan (I use a 3½ quart enameled cast-iron pot), add 3 tablespoons of olive oil, and sauté on medium heat for about 4 minutes. Add the carrot and celery and cook, stirring occasionally, for another 4 minutes, just until the vegetables have slightly softened. Stir in the tomato paste, and keep on stirring for one minute while it cooks. Add the wine and let it bubble away for a couple of minutes, then add the canned tomatoes with their juices, the herbs, sugar, and vegetable stock. Taste, and add some salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook, partially covered, for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, put the chickpeas in a bowl and lightly mash them with a fork. You want a varied texture, a little mush, some whole chickpeas, and a lot that are in between. When the soup has simmered for 10 minutes, add the chickpeas and the pearl barley, return to a simmer, and cook for another 20-25 minutes. Taste again and adjust the seasoning. Drizzle each bowlful with olive oil and serve with plenty of warm, crusty bread. I've served it a handful of times, at least, with this.

Serves 4-6.

Earlier this month

2012-11-26T08:00:00.000-05:00

Welcome to to the fourth and final week of NaBloPoMo! To kick things off, here are some photographs from a walk with my sister from earlier this month. My spoils of the day included an air plant and a large canister of maple cream from Hollis Hills Farm. The plant lives on a window sill in our living room now, and the maple cream is halfway gone. (Toast!) I haven't tried making maple cream on my own, but this is the recipe I'll start with if I ever do.

Happy Monday.

For all of us

2012-11-23T17:37:00.001-05:00

Well.

Thanksgiving's completely swallowed me up this year and if it's okay with you, I think I'll stay down here for a while. There's lots of pie, and a vat of mashed potatoes, and gravy so smooth and rich with pan drippings, I'd like to wade right in. All of my people are here, too, first my mother and aunt in Cleveland, and now the rest of the clan about 150 miles south of there. Oh, and we've got leaves! Piles of them and a baby who knows what they're for.

Last night, around 8:30pm, Eli lifted a sleeping Mia off a sleeping Jess and climbed into bed himself. We all stayed that way until 5:30am, when Mia woke up for some milk. She normally flops around in our bed for a while after that, pulling my ears and patting Eli's cheeks, but this morning, she wedged herself into my armpit and conked right out again, and snoozed unmoving until eight o' clock. It was a Thanksgiving miracle. I can't remember the last time I slept that long or that late. When we all did finally peel ourselves from the bed, the grandparents and aunties whisked Mia away and I got a long hot shower. I swear, someone must have popped out my eyeballs during the night and given them a good scrubbing. Things look different today, brighter and crisper and mellower somehow than they did before so much food, and family, and consecutive hours of unconsciousness.

So, yes, if you don't mind, I think I'll stay right here. For a couple more days, at least. Then I promise, up and at 'em. There's work to be done. On our dining room table right now are five pies in various shades of almost-gone. I assume that you may also be facing a similar scene today, so I'll just go ahead and say it for all of us: We'd better start in on some cookies.

It's never too soon, I tell you, to consider the cookie tin, not with Christmas tunes already spilling from my car radio and trees already aglow. Best to start with something simple, something with a hint of virtue, even, though you'd never know it. Best to start with a recipe I've had on deck since Sara and Hugh's cookbook arrived on my doorstep months ago for shortbread spiked with oats. With oats! Not nuts, or zests, or spices, or cheese, or anything else I've ever tried to give shortbread a kick in the pants (not that it needs it; I'll take a plain, pure-butter shortbread any day) but OATS. I love a recipe like this, one that gets me excited about an ingredient I eat practically every day and cook and bake with all the time, but never in exactly this way. They're spiced with nutmeg, rich with butter, sweetened only with turbinado sugar, which adds an unexpected warmth. I like that they have the faintest chew to them within their crisp edges, unlike a more traditional shortbread that's all snap. The oats are a perfect fit. I baked a batch right before I left for Ohio and packed a couple with me for the road. I managed to eat only one of them on the plane while Mia napped on my lap, and I found the other one a few days later, still in tip-top shape. Sara says that these will last in an airtight container for up to one week, and I believe her. That means these cookies are shippable, and I'm thrilled about that. I bet some other people I know will be, too.

Oaty Shortbread with Chocolate Drizzle
Adapted from The Sprouted Kitchen by Sara Forte

1½ cups rolled oats, plus more for garnish
½ cup unsalted butter, room temperature
½ cup turbinado sugar, plus more for garnish
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 egg
¼ cup all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon nutmeg
2½ ounces dark chocolate (60-72% cacao), chopped
Flaked sea salt (I use Maldon)

Pulse the oats in a food processor to make a coarse flour. You’re looking for a varied texture, some finer meal, some flecks of oat. Pour the oats into a bowl and set aside, and cream the butter and sugar together in the food processor. Add the vanilla and egg and mix well, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Add the oat flour, all-purpose flour, salt, and nutmeg, and pulse a few times until just combined, scrape the sides, and give it a few more quick pulses.

Line a surface with a sheet of parchment or wax paper and sprinkle with rolled oats and turbinado sugar. Dump the dough onto the lined surface and roll into a log 2 inches in diameter. The dough will be sticky, so you’ll have to work quickly. (If you have any trouble making a uniform log, do the best you can, and once the dough has chilled for 20-30 minutes, you can remove it from the fridge and give it a quick roll to correct any lumps or bumps.) Wrap the log in plastic and chill for 1-2 hours, or overnight. (Save the parchment paper for lining your baking sheet.)

Heat the oven to 350 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Remove the log from the fridge and slice the log it into coins 3/8 of an inch thick. Place them on the baking sheets 1½ inches apart and bake until the edges and bottoms are golden, 16-18 minutes. Cool completely on a wire rack.

When the cookies have fully cooled, melt the chocolate in a double boiler or glass bowl over a pot of simmering water. Drizzle the chocolate over the cookies using a fork; dip the fork into the chocolate and give the fork a few good hard taps over each cookie. For more control, you can do as Sara suggests: Scoop the slightly cooled chocolate into a plastic bag, snip off a corner, and pipe it onto the cookies. Sprinkle a few flakes of salt on top of each cookie. At a cool room temperature the chocolate will set in 30-45 minutes. Store in an airtight container between layers of waxed paper. The cookies will keep for a week.

Makes about 20 cookies.

To you and yours

2012-11-22T15:17:00.001-05:00

Sunday supper, September 2012.

:: :: ::

Some Thanksgiving traditions from me and mine to you and yours:

:: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (I and II)

:: Poultry Slam! (I like this one a lot.)

:: This cranberry relish

And some words from last year that are on my mind again today.

Thank you so much for being here.

xo.

Clear Flour

2012-11-21T18:41:00.001-05:00

Hello, hello.

Anyone out there on this Thanksgiving eve?

With so much going on in your own kitchens, I thought we'd leave the baking to the pros tonight around here.

This is Abe Faber. He's standing just inside his bakery, Clear Flour Bread, which he owns with his wife, Christy Timon.

There's a skylight in the middle of their kitchen. The light and shadows are all over the place in there.

Clear Flour is across the river from where we live, but on Friday mornings, Mia and I go to a playgroup just a few blocks away. When it's time to walk home, I tuck Mia into her stroller for a nap and stop by the bakery for a morning bun with walnuts. I always plan to eat it at home with a cup of tea, and a few times I've made it.

But it's a three mile walk, and that bun is very good.

Safe travels to all who are between places tonight, and happy landings. See you tomorrow for a quick hello.

For no other reason

2012-11-20T23:20:00.002-05:00

It’s November 20th! Thanksgiving’s on Thursday! Let’s talk about Valentine’s Day.

These photos are from this past one. As you can see, we went out. That was a first for us, which makes it sound as though we’re about as much fun as the Valentine’s Day equivalent of a lump of coal (whatever that is). I assure you, that is not the case. At least I hope it’s not. The thing is, I’ve always thought of Valentine’s Day as more of a kids’ holiday. With the hearts everywhere, and chalky candies bearing messages, and that chubby little naked fellow with the wings and bow and arrows, it’s easy to understand why. It’s just not a day I've ever been able to take seriously, and that’s okay, because I don’t think you’re supposed to. I think Valentine’s Day, much like Halloween, comes with an implied warning label: for entertainment purposes only. It’s not about grown-up, romantic love any more than Halloween is about true horrors. It has nothing to do with popsicles on the sofa and the latest 30 Rock, or a custom built desk (with cubbies!), or awesome t-shirts, or a hand on my back while I chop onions, or a quick hello by phone in the middle of the day, all of which are more romantic in my book than any box of chocolates or bouquet of flowers could ever be. (Though Eli, if you’re reading this, chocolates and flowers are also nice. Especially flowers.) Valentine’s Day is about other stuff, the giant chocolate heart with my name in white icing that my grandmother mailed each year, cutting valentines from paper doilies with my mother, the sweet and silly cards my father always sends. Valentine’s Day is for fun. As for the two of us, we eat the heart-shaped cinnamon red hots (Eli) and chocolate-covered cherries (Me). Then we stay home and do what we normally do.

But this year, a restaurant across town called Tres Gatos was doing something for Valentine’s Day that it doesn't normally do, namely, taking reservations for parties of two. We love Tres Gatos. We hadn't been there since before Mia was born and, even with a babysitter, getting there anytime soon was going to be tricky, we figured, since we’d have to factor in unpredictable but generally lengthy (though totally worth it) wait times for a table. Mia was five months old at the time, and now that I think about it, at that point, I’m not even sure we’d been out to dinner anywhere. We booked our sitter. I had a Valentine’s Day date.

After the marinated anchovies and tortilla espanola with pimentón aioli, after mopping our plates with salty grilled bread, our server appeared with the small white mug and pitcher you see here. Inside the mug were two scoops of vanilla ice cream. Inside the pitcher was sherry. It was a sweet sherry, a Pedro Ximénex, and it poured down over the ice cream like a thin syrup. I went with a scrape and dunk approach at first, gliding my spoon along the ice cream then dipping it into the moat of sherry that surrounded it. I ate slowly, and by the time I neared the end, the half-melted ice cream and sherry had pooled together into a creamy, boozy soup, part cocktail, part dessert. It was the most perfect, delightful combination, and when we went back to Tres Gatos last month for our (seventh!!) anniversary, I ordered it again. After that, I asked Eli, please, to pick up a bottle of Pedro Ximénex the next time he was at the store, and last weekend, for no other reason than the fact that that bottle was now in my apartment, I made a batch of vanilla ice cream, just to have around. I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about a dessert. I can’t wait for you to try it. I know the timing’s somewhat off with Thanksgiving creeping up and so many pies on your plate. But soon enough, say, Sunday evening, with the leftovers all packed away and relative quiet restored, it might be just the thing.

p.s. - Tres Gatos takes reservations for two now year round. If you're ever in town, I highly recommend it.

p.p.s. - The Mia requests keep rolling in, so here you go: a short film from Valentine's Day this year. (Hannah, this one's for you.)

Vanilla Ice Cream and Sherry
Inspired by dinner at Tres Gatos. Ice cream recipe adapted from Sunday Suppers at Lucques by Suzanne Goin.

I’m a sucker for a good homemade vanilla ice cream, and I like making it myself, but you don’t have to. Just get the best vanilla ice cream you can get your hands on, add sherry, and there you go.

1 vanilla bean
2 cups whole milk
2 cups heavy cream
4 extra-large egg yolks
½ cup sugar

A shot (or so) of a Pedro Ximénex sherry, like Hidalgo or Barbadillo.

Split the vanilla bean in half lengthwise and scrape out the seeds with a paring knife. Put the seeds and the pod into a medium saucepan, cover with the milk and cream, and bring to a boil over medium heat. Turn off the heat, cover, and let the flavors infuse for 30 minutes.

Return the mixture to the stove and bring it back to a boil over medium heat, stirring occasionally. When it boils, turn off the heat.

Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together in a medium bowl. Whisk a few tablespoons of the warm cream mixture into the yolks to temper them. Whisking constantly, add another ¼ cup or so of the warm cream. Still whisking, slowly add the rest of the cream mixture into the bowl, then pour everything back into the pot and return it to the stove.

Cook the custard over medium heat for 6-8 minutes while constantly stirring and scraping the bottom and sides of the pan. Soon, it will start to thicken. Do not let it boil. (That’s important.) A great tip from David Lebovitz: Coat the spatula with custard and run your finger across it. If your finger leaves a line that doesn’t run back together, the custard is done.

Strain the mixture through a fine-mesh sieve and chill at least 2 hours, or overnight. Process in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

Scoop the ice cream into bowls and pour the sherry over top. For a tableful of guests, I’d probably serve the ice cream and pass a pitcher of sherry at the table.

We're settling in

2012-11-19T12:58:00.001-05:00

The tally, since we last spoke:

One (1) pot of soup
Twenty-one (21) cookies
Twenty-six (26) meatballs
One (1) batch of ice cream
One (1) roll of film
One (1) recipe index, updated and improved
More (and more) of this salad

Also, I flew to Ohio. With Mia. That happened yesterday. The two of us are at my mother's house now outside of Cleveland, where traffic circles abound and, in more exciting news, so do Honey Maid cinnamon grahams and bowls of chicken soup. We're settling in. I'm typing this from under a fringed wooly blanket on a purple chaise opposite the kitchen. Mia is snoozing, and while she is, I'm going to pick an item from that tally up there and drum up some words. And while I do that, some photos for you. It's another reader request day today, with a post on "fall in Boston" for Mel. Mel, I've taken some liberty here and I'm giving you fall in Cambridge, instead. I hope you won't mind.

These photos are from the archives, from a walk along the river in 2009 about this time of year.

Get out the map

2012-11-16T16:05:00.003-05:00

Hi, friends.

A few things today before I sign off for the weekend:

:: I've shared some thoughts about yesterday's photo journaling project in the comments section here. Thank you, Gemma, for the prompting. Thanks also to Steph and Pia for their thoughtful comments here.

:: I've (finally!) been updating and overhauling my recipe index this week, and I'm almost done. The new design is much more user friendly, I think. There will be a section specially devoted to Thanksgiving, which I hope will be helpful. I'm aiming to get it up by tomorrow night or first thing Sunday morning, so stay tuned.

:: These party maps! I've shared my party maps a couple of times on this site, here and here, and a reader e-mailed to ask if I might share more. I'm sure I have a zillion of these things tucked into various cookbooks and buried in stacks somewhere, but these are the three I could get my hands on this morning.

There are a few ideas behind the maps. First, they allow me to visualize the meal or spread in a way that helps me better judge if all of the parts and pieces are working together and if the quantity of food makes sense. When I think not only about the menu, but about the mechanics of how I will serve the food - which platters and plates and bowls I'll use and, in the case of bigger parties, where in my home I'll put each dish - I start to get a feel for the energy of the meal I'm creating, and I like that. That sounds kind of new age-y and weird, but I'm not sure how else to put it. The maps' most functional purpose, the reason I started drawing them in the first place years ago, is that they make it very easy for people who know my kitchen to lend a hand. I'm sure you've experienced the feeling that it's just faster to do something yourself than to explain to even the most eager and competent helper how you'd like it done. What's nice here is that all I need to say to Eli or a friend is, "Please plate the eggplant." They can do it without asking which plate to use, and they even get a reminder from the map to sprinkle the za'ater over top before serving. I'm not hosting Thanksgiving this year, but if I were, there'd be a party map, for sure.

Thanks for another great week of NaBloPoMo. Enjoy the weekend, and meet you back here on Monday.

(p.s. If you click on the party maps, you can see them larger.)

November 15

2012-11-15T23:14:00.000-05:00

Hi, friends. As promised, here is a selection of today's photos. You can view the full set here.

See you tomorrow.

Every bite

2012-11-15T07:16:00.000-05:00

When I announced that I'd be blogging daily this month in honor of NaBloPoMo, a reader named Lena requested a post about what I eat on a given day. Lena, this one's for you.

Today over on Instagram I'll be posting photos of what I eat. All of it, in real time. Then, tonight, I'll collect some (or all?) (the best of?) (we'll see.) the images and put them up here as a kind of photo journal of the day. I'm @sweetamandine on Instagram, and you can follow along there or, if you don't have an account, right here.

This exercise is out of my comfort zone because I don't typically make photos of food to "document" it. (Aside from some of the shots on this site that I make to illustrate recipes, of course.) We seem to have much more trouble understanding photography as a representational medium than we do, say, painting or sculpture. But when we pick up our cameras and snap away, we don't capture life as it is. What we get is an approximation, a representation. What we make is art. As Gary Winogrand famously said, "I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed." We're not collecting moments when we go out into the world with our cameras. We're making something of them.

When I photograph my food, it's because something's grabbed me. Often, it's that I've seen something that somehow matches what I'm feeling, and thereby draws my attention to that feeling. Sometimes I just think something's pretty. There's so much visual appeal in the moments of everyday life. A lunch on the table amidst papers and notes, a pizza place at closing time, a messy countertop, the people I love. I am not so moved by every bite I eat, so today will be interesting for me and, I suspect, a challenge.

There have been all kinds of critical and funny things written about people snapping photos of their food, and with their cell phones, no less. There are some fairly terrifying food photographs to be found on Instagram, for sure - some of those filters, ouch! - but there's also a lot of beauty. All judgement aside, I think it's fascinating that so many of us feel compelled to photograph what we eat and share it with the world.

I'm curious: If you photograph your food, why do you do it? What does it mean to you? I'd truly love to know.

See you over on Instagram today, I hope, and back here tonight.

:: :: ::

[With thanks to Tom Roma, for so much inspiration]

We do things with food

2012-11-14T23:46:00.004-05:00

I put cottage cheese on baked potatoes. I put milk in tea. I put mustard on grilled cheese. I put honey and sesame paste on toast. (I put everything on toast.) I put eggs in potato salad and potatoes in egg salad and pickles in both. I put peanut butter on a spoon.

We do things with food.

Eli comes from a family that puts ketchup on pasta. (Or used to, anyway.) I come from a family that does other things. My grandmother put cream in her ginger ale. My sister puts fries in her chocolate Frosty™. My other sister does, too. A recipe from my brother: "Mustard. Bread. Mustard sandwich."

I know a guy who puts hot honey on pizza. I hear others prefer Ranch dressing. I had a high-school English teacher who put condiments on everything. I have a friend who puts them on nothing. I sometimes put quinoa in granola. I often put granola in oatmeal.

Someone, I can't remember who, once told me that's like putting ketchup on tomatoes. I say, stranger things have happened. (Ketchup on pasta, anyone?)

There are people, I hear, who slice soft pretzels in half horizontally and put the mustard inside. I call these people geniuses, and if you count yourself among them, and we happen to meet one day, I hope you'll let me shake your hand.

Lately, I've been putting avocado on kasha. Pomegranate seeds, too. Olive oil. Salt. Lunch.

p.s. Meet me back here first thing tomorrow. I'm up to something.

Kasha with Avocado and Pomegranate Seeds

½ cup cooked kasha (buckwheat groats)

A few slices of avocado

A handful of pomegranate seeds

A drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil

A generous pinch of salt flakes; I use Maldon

Here's how I cook the kasha:

Bring 2 cups of water to a boil. Add ½ cup of dried kasha and return to a gentle boil. Cook for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. If you get the heat under the pot just right, all of the water will have either absorbed into the kasha or evaporated by that time. If the kasha is fully cooked and you have extra water still in the pot, it's better to drain off the remaining water (use a fine-mesh sieve) than to keep cooking it, lest you end up with mush. You'll have enough for a few lunches here. Store leftovers, covered, in the fridge.

November 13

2012-11-13T15:03:00.001-05:00

September, 2012.

:: :: ::

I have a short film for you today by Starlee Kine and Arthur Jones on writing, the creative process, and working in confined spaces. See especially from 1:48 on.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to mop the ceiling.

A moment, then

2012-11-12T23:58:00.000-05:00

These days, these last fleeting days before fifteen-pound birds and pumpkin pies start falling from the sky, it is important to remember the scone.

A moment, then, for this one, rippling with apricots and toasted almonds, sweet in its way, though less so than you’d expect, craggy, crumbly, cratered, and cracked, a tender crumb, delicious. I want to remember this scone. And yet. It happens every year when the holidays descend, this reshuffling of priorities that sets suppers and soirees and sweets on the throne. It’s natural, I’d say, with only so much room in our bellies and mashed potatoes laying their claim. The low season for breakfast is upon us.

I don’t mean pancakes, or omelets, or festive soufflés. Those guys are safe this and every time of year. It’s the grab-and-gos that fall away, the elevenses and armchair treats, the kinds of thing you bake first thing to sustain you through a morning of recipe testing and story scribbling, and then shuttle down to your neighbors who, early in November, are still happy to receive them. I must get this all down before amnesia sets in.

These scones are from the bakery I mentioned twice last week, another recipe from their cookbook, Standard Baking Co. Pastries. I’m not sure what possessed me. I generally prefer more of a blank slate scone, uncluttered by fruit and nuts. These are thick with both. But apparently at least one corner of my brain doesn’t care what I “generally prefer.” I value that corner dearly.

I mentioned this above but I’ll say it again, since I want you to know what you’re in for: This scone is not sweet. Or it is, but in a sparse and varied way. There’s the mild, prodding sweetness of brown sugar, just a bit, the crusty-sweet crunch of the turbinado sugar, the edgy sweet-tart that the apricot brings, and the almond in full bloom – a kind of sweet we sometimes forget to think of as a kind of sweet at all. We forget a lot of things, it seems. We won’t forget these scones.

Apricot Almond Scones
Adapted from Standard Baking Co. Pastries by Alison Pray and Tara Smith

I have a feeling that some of you might wonder about the yogurt, if it's really necessary to use non-fat. I generally only have full-fat yogurt around, so I called the bakery to see if I might use it. I spoke with a very helpful woman named Sara who explained that the fat in the yogurt would cause the scones to spread and would change their texture; they'd be softer on the outside, cakier on the inside, more of a biscuit than a scone. I ran out and bought some fat-free.

1 cup dried apricots
1 heaped cup plus ¼ cup almonds
4 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon packed dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1½ teaspoons salt
2/3 cup (1¼ stick) unsalted butter, chilled, cut into ½-inch cubes
1½ cups non-fat plain yogurt (not Greek), chilled
¼ cup turbinado sugar

Heat the oven to 350 and toast the almonds in a single layer on baking sheet. It will take about 8-10 minutes. Meanwhile, cover the apricots with hot water and soak for 5 minutes, then drain and set aside. Let the apricots and almonds cool to room temperature, then coarsely chop.

Turn the oven up to 425 and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Put the flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl and whisk to combine. Break up any remaining lumps with your fingertips. Add the cubed butter and rub it into the flour mixture, but don't be terribly thorough. You want some pea-sized lumps of butter in the end to insure a light and flaky texture.

Stir in the almonds and apricots, add the yogurt, and mix with your hands until the dough just comes together. If it's still surprisingly crumbly looking, that's okay, as long as it more or less holds together.

Dump the dough onto a lightly floured surface and form it into an 8 x 7-inch rectangle, about 1¼ inches thick. Sprinkle the turbinado sugar over top and press it lightly into the dough with your hands. Cut the dough into six squares with a sharp knife, then cut each square in half on the diagonal. Transfer to the lined baking sheet with about an inch or so of space between each scone.

Bake for 15-18 minutes, rotating the baking sheet about halfway through the baking time. The scones are finished when they've browned lightly around the edges and are firm to the touch in the center. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Serve slightly warm or at room temperature. These scones are best on the day they are made.

Yield: 12 scones.