Starting today, the soup blog will move in a new and decidedly summery direction. Rather than ladling up bowls full of soup for the next hot few weeks (months?), I will be scooping out bowls of ice cream. Don’t worry. I won’t insult your intelligence with a demonstration of the equivalence of soup and ice […]
For me, the most rewarding tasks are the ones I do with my hands. I particularly enjoy working with wood but I enjoy fixing small electrical mishap and solving the odd mechanical trouble as well. For some reason the route to the most creative part of my brain goes right through my fingers. It’s why […]
I don’t really know what butterscotch is. I’ve eaten it for years in those old-timey hard candies wrapped in yellow cellophane. I put it on ice cream sundaes when I was a kid back in the days when I actually put syrups and sauces on my ice cream (potential future posting?). I’ve even had butterscotch […]
When it comes to citrus, I’m a proud Californian. I don’t have anything against Florida personally, but I’ll take one of my home state’s Washington navels or juicy Valencias any day over the stuff they peddle from the panhandle. Whenever we stayed over at my grandparents’ house (the same one with all the orchards, see […]
You might say that this week’s ice cream is very exotic or very French and you’d be right. But the best way to describe it is very Meryl Streep. I don’t know precisely how long I’ve been following Streep’s career, but I do remember watching her in a TV version of Wendy Wasserstein’s first play […]
I’m going to out my mother here. You may not know this, but my mom has a long and well-deserved reputation for scratch baking. Everything she makes, from pecan tarts and coffee cloud sponge cake to divinity fudge and Winnie the Pooh birthday cakes is made from a host of raw materials that she blends […]
I am totally embarrassed. I should have known better. I do know better. Yet there I was last week, making strawberry ice cream in the middle of winter. (We’ll ignore the foolishness of continuing to make any kind of ice cream long after the end of summer.) Call me stupid. Call me obsessive. Call me […]
My children are growing up. Not exactly breaking news, I know, but these developments surprise you sometimes. The other night as the girls were watching a video with their mother, a kissing scene came on. The younger daughter covered her eyes and groaned about how inappropriate it was, but the elder one did not complain. […]
In my office, I have a picture of the male side of my family, pre- next generation. It features my dad, my grandfather, my brothers and me. My brothers and I were in college at the time so we all look pretty goofy. My dad and grandfather, on the other hand, are both nicely dressed […]