As of a couple of weeks ago, I'm officially back at work. Unlike his mama, B3 thought the transition was a total breeze -- he sees me off to work every morning with such blasé cheerfulness that I'm wondering whether I shouldn't be at least a teensy offended. (He is, however, in a war of attrition with his Public Enemy No. 1, The Bottle, so there is ...
vegetarian
buttered eggs on toast with radish & parsley
Ever since I found their story a few years ago, I've been awed by Sonja and Alex's journey to parenthood. Sonja's poignant, thoughtful words and their constant light throughout their experience have been humbling and inspiring; it gives a whole new perspective to this stage of life that B2 and I have been figuring out our way around lately, and ...
roasted mushroom, avocado & ricotta toasts
I had it built up in my head that taking B3 out to an actual, sit-down, non-Jack-in-the-Box-drive-through meal was going to be an endeavor that involved at least one meltdown and/or leaving before the food actually came. But while our friends were here we ended up going out to eat not one, not two, but three nice, awesome, meltdown-free times. ...
kimchi potato skins
I spent the summer between high school and college working two jobs, one as a hostess at a Chinese restaurant and the other as a waitress at a T.G.I.Friday's. Most of my time at T.G.I.Friday's was spent (1) trying to raise my voice enough in the kitchen that they could hear me when I asked for more ranch, (2) forgetting to enter orders, or (3) ...
macau-style almond cookies
The day we visited Macau was a rainy one. We splashed around from Senado Square to the Ruins of St. Paul, hunted down Margaret's Cafe e Nata for caramelized, blistered Portuguese egg tarts only to discover to my utter dismay that it was closed on Wednesdays, and eventually ended up, soggy-toed, in the Venetian Macau, which I suspected meant we ...
pear, parmesan, & balsamic salad
Our Christmas tree is up! It's the first real, live, non-plastic tree to make an appearance in our household. We chose it in about five seconds flat last Saturday with babe in tow, in the signature haste of panicky new parents who are still not very good at this "taking the baby out into the world" thing. (Luke, meanwhile, was just passed out ...
thanksgiving leftover stuffing waffles
A few years ago I came across an Alton Brown diatribe against one-use kitchen gadgets (or "unitaskers," I think he calls them) and thought it would be a good rule not to buy them for our New York kitchen. This more or less worked (mostly thanks to B2 putting his foot down on random Amazon purchases and the fact that we just had no room, lest we ...
garlicky spaghetti with lemon, capers & almonds
So, our freezer is officially ready to burst. I wish I could say that it's packed to the brim with healthy, ready-to-heat casseroles and nourishing breakfasts that I tucked away for the zombie days ahead, but that's only about 30% true -- maybe more like 0% true depending on how you interpret "healthy" or "nourishing" -- and the remainder is more ...
molly’s all of the alliums fried rice
I think fried rice may have been one of the first things I learned from my mother and grandmother in the kitchen. I imagine it must be like Sunday gravy in that every family has their own little way of doing things, though I don't know that ours was so much a heirloom recipe as just an easy, quick, and comforting way to get food on the table: for ...
tomato-braised eggs and creamy baked polenta
Earlier this summer, I spent a few glorious hours in Venice at The Tasting Kitchen in what felt like an endless parade of dream brunch fare. Before this I'd never had any kind of chef's menu or omakase-type meal, but a group of us opted for their tasting menu (because that seemed like what you should choose at a restaurant similarly named) and it ...