Category Archives: cooking

St. Kate’s Day

Posted on March 18, 2010 | 1 Comment

I was sorely tempted last night to drive the two and half hours to Heath to eat corned beef. I knew it was a spring fever and tried to content myself with mixing together Kate Kearns’ family recipe for soda bread. I substituted cranberry sauce for most of the raisins. I’m moving and have become obsessed with using up every last item in my kitchen, including cranberries in the crisper from last fall. Somehow the spell of making the soda bread conjured a delicious boiled dinner – cabbage, parsnip and everything- with my neighbors the Donoghues.

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Baking and Bechamel Discoveries

Posted on March 11, 2010 | 3 Comments

Yesterday I made bechamel sauce for my pasta and peas lunch: truly you can make the sauce while the water boils on your lunch hour. My secret processed food allowance for years has included a few boxes of Annie’s mac and cheese for emergency comfort food. Obvious now that there was some gap in my thinking (damn you Don Draper) how could a powdered mystery substance really be easier than butter and milk and flour. Now Kraft seems as quaint and inexplicable as Bisquick, having lost all emotional control over me.

And then these wonderful molasses cookies that were baked between when I got home and when I went to the neighbors’ for dinner. Delicious modern ingredients that make these better than the old school cookies are 1 tsp. lemon zest and 1/2 cup wheat germ. Recipe comes from Moosewood Classics. I would mail you some, but I ate them all.

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Baked Green Lasagne with Meat Sauce

Posted on February 26, 2010 | 1 Comment

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Presidential Dinner, Heath MA

Posted on February 24, 2010 | Leave a comment


Thanks so very much to Kara and Bob for hosting us at their beautiful home- where I lived from age 5 to 15. The food was delicious and the friends old and new made it a real homecoming. I am so happy I was able to attend and that I have been blessed with so many good friends who although we don’t see each other every day, I can feel their love and support wherever I am.

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Gnocchi for Breakfast

Posted on February 16, 2010 | 1 Comment

A light, wholesome meal. No? I’m doing kitchen experiments again in preparation for some real food writing. I have three recipes- I have used Marcella Hazan’s in the past which calls for no eggs just potato and flour like an impoverished peasant. She’s stingy with the eggs in general. I have something called Urban Italian by Andrew Carmellini. And I have Lidia’s Italy by the dowager queen. Have you ever had memorable gnocchi? is it just a starch blob for meat juices? Or can it be something with a distinct identity? Thoughts.

Well, Carmellini’s tasted like pillows. Which is how Siena explained gnocchi should taste- it was so satisfying that I feel like I am now done with my gnocchi project. Next step: Peruvian rotisserie chicken? Pio Pio.

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Breakfast Pizza

Posted on January 26, 2010 | 2 Comments

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Freeland Farm

Posted on December 10, 2009 | 1 Comment

The house I grew up in as illustrated by my mother for the menu for her Gourmet Club, September 1984.

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Kombucha

Posted on December 8, 2009 | 3 Comments

Puffy lives in a tree house in Ditmas Park.
There was marmalade stewing in a heavy orange pot.
When she said goodbye, she handed me a thick layer of kombucha mold.
Known as the mother, it makes fizzy fermented tea.
I spilled some in my handbag.
Now a batch is brewing in the kitchen.
Yeast is everywhere. I remember the wild yeast I caught in Greenpoint and the bread it made that smelled so terrible and flopped on the pan, a sick animal.

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Cookies.

Posted on December 7, 2009 | 2 Comments

Well, my ploy to engage my lurking readers didn’t work. (Dad, this means you!) Commenters, dear friends, cookies are on your way this week. Watch the mails. Also, does anyone know why wordpress sometimes registers strange spikes in reader activity? It claims I had 350 views on Saturday, but my statcounter saw nothing. Why?

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December Cookie Contest #2

Posted on December 3, 2009 | 4 Comments

To encourage debate and conversation, I am offering a special care package of “Joe Froggers” Molasses cookies that “are as plump and dark as the little frogs that lived in the pond near Joe’s cottage” in Marblehead. According to the Betty Crocker Cooky Book of 1963. If you have already received cookies in the mail from me this month, you are ineligible. A comment on any post in the next 24 hours will add your name to the contest.

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