'Tis the season
I’m in full-on holiday mode these days. If it’s not writing about cookies for the Food Network and Cooking Channel blogs (today it’s macaroons–yay, Hannukah!–and pecan bourbon balls), it’s pondering upcoming festive dinners–Christmas, New Year’s, random dinner parties. You name it, I’m obsessing over the menu for it. It’s cold and rainy outside, but in [...]
Friday Food Writers: Elizabeth Bishop
I had a different Bishop poem in mind for today, one about coffee and bread and a little bit of magic on a balcony at breakfast time (a fine combination if ever there was one), but leafing through my Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, 1927-1979 I rediscovered this little masterpiece, which I’d forgotten about. It [...]
A happy new year
Happy 2010! My year got off to an exciting start when my editor emailed me yesterday to say that Eating for Beginners was just put on Publisher’s Weekly’s list of “10 Most Exciting Food Books of 2010″. Considering the fact that no one (aside from me, my agent, above-mentioned editor and a few select friends [...]
Before Thanksgiving
We’re very excited about Thanksgiving around here and will be contributing pecan pie, a staple of my childhood Thanksgivings, to the dinner we’re going to at my sister-in-law’s house. The Cheese-Hater, I suspect, has already determined that it will be a happy, chaotic event with no cheese on the menu and various children in attendance—precisely [...]
Chesnuts, Food, Memory
I know, I know–I owe you a Friday Food Writers. Actually, I owe you many Friday Food Writers, and several hundred other posts, too. What can I say? Any excuse I could offer, though it would of course (of course!) be true, would probably just annoy you. So instead, I’ll just tell you what’s on [...]
Home Sweet Home
I am alive! And back in Brooklyn! It’s been weeks since I posted, and in that time we left Berlin, made a pit stop in England, and then crossed the ocean on the Queen Mary 2, which was quite an adventure. Among other things, I wondered over a five-course dinner every night whether it’s even [...]
Friday Food Writers: Shirley Jackson
This past week I re-read (for about the 8 millionth time–the pleasure of re-reading never dies for me) Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages, possibly the most wickedly funny book ever written about raising children and family life. It’s quite a famous book, though Jackson is most famous for her short story “The Lottery” and [...]
Comfort Food: May 18
Today is my father’s birthday, the third one since he died in the summer of 2006 just a few months after The Cheese-Hater arrived. He was born and lived in what is now Slovakia until his early twenties, and though he lived in the US for almost triple that time, he never gave up most [...]
Cooking writer at work (and a recipe)
I’m trying to finish the last round of edits on Eating for Beginners this week, which is my only defense for posting so infrequently (though I’m sure my editor thinks it’s the best defense…). What this means is that in addition to working on the writing, I’m testing out all the recipes included in the [...]
Friday Food Writers: Julian Barnes (with a dash of Joseph Conrad)
Julian Barnes is the author of numerous novels (Flaubert’s Parrot is the best known), but my favorite book of his is The Pedant in the Kitchen a very sympathetic and very funny book of essays about his trials and tribulations as a home cook and his—he feels—nerdy, profoundly human reliance on recipes (“Non-pedants frequently misunderstand [...]
