What the hell do I know about tropical fruit? As a boy, the closest I ever got to exotic was shaved coconut on an occasional doughnut or German chocolate cake, neither of which I ate with any relish (see here). Beyond that there were pears, apples (nothing too extreme, just red delicious and pippin), bananas […]
In Southern California, we never had White Christmases. Maybe up in the mountains we’d see a bit of snow, but down in the basin, it was typically not even all that cold. And that always sort of bother me. I remember how excited I got one Christmas when it rained. I had received a pair […]
In my day, Christmas never had anything to do with gingerbread. Gingerbread was the stuff of fairy tales and children’s poems. It was the raw material that witch’s houses were made of. It was the sugary drywall and roofing shingles that lured woebegone children away from their parents and into the stomach’s of crones. Ho, […]
Cheesecake has always been a pretty big thing in my life. When I was growing up, there was a picture of a slice of cheesecake floating in the clouds taped inside our pantry door. That was also as close to a discussion of heaven as ever took place in our house, which may have been […]
As an adult, I’ve come to associate pecan pie with Thanksgiving. When I was younger, it was only pumpkin. I don’t know when this gatecrasher made its way into my four-day weekend. But I’m not fighting it either. Pecan pie is a good thing. So much so that when the current generation of teen servers […]
I should have seen it coming. I should have known that my gum-hating wife would hate any ice cream that had chewing gum in it. For me, as ever, it wasn’t about the gum so much as nostalgia for pre-teen flavors. In this case it was an old Baskin-Robbins ice cream that brought together two […]
I’m reading a new memoir called “The Reading Promise.” The book recounts an agreement made between a father and his nine-year-old daughter to read together every night for 100 nights. I’m not very far into the book yet, so I don’t know how easy it was for them to reach that first goal but , after they […]
To be honest I don’t remember the first food I ever made. It might have been a batch of Charlie Brown’s brownies from the Peanuts cookbook. That recipe stands out because I made it wrong the first time. I failed to mix the dry ingredients thoroughly enough and wound up with tiny, hardened, white clum […]
Our freezer didn’t hold a lot of different flavors of ice cream when I was a kid. I remember a stretch when we went through a lot of Neapolitan—the Italian tricolor of vanilla, strawberry and chocolate—but most of the time it was just vanilla. Part of the reason for this was that my dad is […]
