I know, I know, I’m only a month and a half into this blog and already I’m behind. It’s not that I didn’t have a recipe. Or photographs. It’s just that things came up, or rather things went down. As in R. crashed down the ski slopes at Berkshire East last week. Then he was taken down the hill in a sled with the ski patrol (love you guys–thanks for the rescue!!) And after that he went down the road on his back in an ambulance to Baystate Hospital, which technically isn’t down it’s more east, but it sure as heck ain’t up. Then down on a table to have his leg x-rayed. Not fun as you can see. Continue reading
Category Archives: 50 Recipes
Orange Food
Sometime around the end of January I find myself eating a lot of orange food. Not on purpose–it just seems to happen when winter is whitest I eat orange. It usually starts with a case of honeybell oranges my parents send to us from Florida. Continue reading
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The Best Chocolate Cake Ever
After graduating from college one of my first jobs was as the baker at Leaf n’ Bean Cafe in Brooklyn Heights. I brought with me a rather slim batch of recipes. Prior cooking jobs had always handed me house recipes to use. No muss, no fuss just bake and serve. This was the first time I had been asked to supply my own recipes. The cafe was open for breakfast and lunch plus weekend brunches so the baked goods were pretty straight forward–muffins, cakes, pies, the occasional mousse, and bar cookies fit the bill. The glitch came around chocolate. The owners John and Allan wanted something chocolate on the menu every day, which makes sense since chocolate sells. The problem was that while I ate a lot of chocolate I didn’t have many chocolate recipes in my repertoire back then (my, how things have changed). My rescue came in the form of Continue reading
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First Recipe
I have to say I’m excited about this project. Really, really excited. What’s been keeping me up at night though is which recipe should I start with? Some of you emailed with suggestions of recipes you hope to see in this blog–I appreciated those emails because it reminded me of two recipes I’d forgotten about. Then there are the more or less fifty recipes that I’d jotted down on my iphone, but a list doesn’t tell me where to begin just what should be included. The extrovert in me voted for flashy and spectacular. Or I could start with something seminal and life changing (in a cooking sort of way). Major cooking influences in my life? Chronologically? Since this is the week of my actual birthday I thought about starting off with cake… When I finally stopped waffling about there was really is only one place to start and that is with Continue reading
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50 for my 50th
This project is the result of a small book I picked up while haunting the cookware section of Dean & Deluca some twenty-odd years ago. A Kipper With My Tea is full of quirky little essays, one of which I became somewhat obsessed with. It’s titled Funeral Cookbooks. In it Alan Davidson talks about a Thai custom “whereby a person composes a small cookbook before her death, so that it can be distributed as a keepsake to the mourners attending the funeral.” Now that I thought is something that I want my family to hand out when I die.
Of course there were a few problems with this plan. For starters the women in my family seem to be very long lived so I’m not likely to depart any time soon. Two is that I really had my heart set on Carol Blinn making this for me, which would be A) somewhat pricey and B) might run into timing issues as my and Carol’s expiration date is still unknown. And three is how does one narrow down a lifetime of recipes into a small cookbook?
About a year ago while I was knitting with my friend Jessica and talking about this idea for the umpteenth time she quipped, “What use is a cookbook of your recipes to me when you’re dead? I’ll probably be dead too! It would be so much better to have your recipes now.” She was right–why wait until I kicked the bucket before sharing my favorite recipes? Instead I would write a cookbook of my fifty favorite recipes and hand it out on my fiftieth birthday.
I came up with a list of recipes, talked to Carol about publishing the book (more on that later), but being the supreme procrastinator that I am I never quite got around to actually finalizing the list of recipes, testing them or getting them all snug between the covers of a small cookbook. So here we are in 2011. I turn 50 next week so I’ve had to tweak my plans to make this happen in my fiftieth year rather than on my fiftieth birthday. I’m hoping to blog fifty recipes in fifty weeks (I’d like to squeeze in a week or two of vacation) and before my fifty-first birthday put them all together into a little book. Enjoy!
Filed under 50 Recipes
50years50recipes 