Valentine’s Day is Monday, and love is most certainly in the air. My good friends welcomed their new baby last night (love, love, love!) and Ella has met a new puppy friend that she seems quite smitten with. There’s all sorts of happy going on these days, and nothing says “I love life,” or “Love…
Delicious distractions
Wednesday afternoon was a first for me. As I sat at my desk and typed away on work-related odds and ends, I clicked on my Twitter feed just as @food52 tweeted about this week’s wildcard winner on their site. Normally I don’t have any trouble clicking back and forth between Twitter updates and the task…
Feeling cold, tasting spring: Lemon olive oil cake
Yesterday felt like the coldest day of the year. I think the high hovered somewhere near 16, and the wind chill prompted atypical alerts about dangerously cold winds and frostbite possibilities on my trusty Weather Channel app. Normally, this sort of bone-chilling weather would lead me toward the soup section of a cookbook, or at…
Project NYT: Parmesan crackers, no boxes allowed
In the short while since I started this blog, the words made from scratch have taken on such new meaning to me. It’s no longer just about following a recipe or venturing beyond the boxed cake mix. Rather, it’s about taking even the simplest of foods and reducing them to their bare bones ingredients: the…
Good things take time: Butternut squash risotto
Few acts in the kitchen can make an amateur cook feel quite as accomplished as the successful preparation of homemade risotto. For a single dish, you get to chop, grate, season and sauté before spending 30-plus minutes standing over the stove while tending to your impending masterpiece. Yes, it’s more labor intensive than spaghetti or…
Winterizing summer favorites: Spanish roasted potato salad
My Grandpa Smith is a jack-of-all-trades sort of guy. A general contractor by profession, he’s been building houses for years and years and knows his way around pretty much any tool or project that Bob Vila could throw at him. When I was 10 years old, he built an amazing set of furniture for my…
Ina knows her chicken. My chicken. All chicken.
Last night, as I stood over our kitchen sink clutching a whole uncooked chicken and whimpering, “Ew, ew, Jared, what’s that inside there? Can you pleeease get it out?” I realized something. This little blog has taken me all sorts of places I never thought I’d go. Jared aptly described the event as my first…
Project NYT: Baking from honey-dipped memories
Food is a funny thing. On the one hand, it comes equipped with so many quantifiable qualities: vitamins, nutrients, calories and ingredients. On the other hand, so much of what we eat and how we eat is tied to much less tangible traits: what we know, whom we know and what we remember. Food has…
Project NYT: Rollin’ in dough
For the past few years, my heart for pizza has been divided between two great loves: Shakespeare’s Pizza, the No. 1 college hangout here in Columbia (seriously, just ask Good Morning America) and Monetti’s Pizzeria Ristorante, a little Italian restaurant in my hometown of Warrensburg. One’s classic American fare, done right with fresh ingredients, and…
Secrets don’t make salads
Have you heard the story about the lady who, while shopping at Neiman Marcus in Dallas with her daughter, stopped into the café for a few chocolate chip cookies? According to the story, she loved the cookies so much, she asked for the recipe, to which the waitress replied, “Only two-fifty.” The woman agreed and…