being not doing

December is always busy for us, and this year is no exception. If anything, our choice to celebrate the season by attending performances of various kinds has heightened the schedule-juggling. Our first event of the month was The Trumpet of the Swan, a reading of the book set to music that debuted at the Kennedy [...]

Wild persimmons. Last year we foraged wild (American) persimmons from an undisclosed location in our county. All the hippies we know seemed to be wild about the fruit, and having stumbled across a few trees we decided to give them a try. Persimmons being extremely astringent when not quite ripe, it was hard to gain [...]

This week we made blondies (p. 218), a cookie bar that I’d never made and rarely eat. For the 5 ounces of bittersweet chocolate, we used Icelandic chocolate, sold as part of the ‘sustainable Iceland’ project (I’m guessing that means ‘helping Iceland have an economy so it can sustain its existence as a nation’ and [...]

Tonight we had our fourth cookie date, barely squeezing it into the end of the week. We made Neil’s scalloped sugar cookies (p. 162). This is a variation on the standard sugar cookie recipe, that involves using confectioner’s sugar instead of granulated sugar, and using only the egg yolks instead of the whole egg. As [...]

Our cookie making schedule was a little thrown off by my trip out of town, but we recovered, and last night was our third attempt. This week we made crackly cinnamon wafers (p. 71), and they were quite tasty. My skill with the electric mixer is improving, although I must admit that I find myself [...]