icon caret-left icon caret-right instagram pinterest linkedin facebook twitter goodreads question-circle facebook circle twitter circle linkedin circle instagram circle goodreads circle pinterest circle

Recipes and Stories

16 November 2024: More Comfort by the Bowl

Comfort in a Bowl: My Minestrone, in my mother's brown bowls with one of my grandmother's spoons

Tomorrow is my birthday, and ushers in the last year of my sixties.

 

It's a milestone I suspect none of us is ever ready to face, and is coming at an especially difficult time for my family and for our country. Consequently, that need for comforting soup in my household hasn't lessened; if anything, it's only gotten more pronounced.

 

Whenever that need becomes acute, the soup that provides it best isn't, oddly enough, one I grew up on, but a classic Italian minestrone. True, it's a kissing cousin of my grandmother's vegetable soup, but its comfort isn't rooted in childhood memories as are most other "comfort foods." When I was traveling to teach a lot, Read More 

Post a comment

7 November 2024: Comfort in a Bowl

Butternut Squash and Leek Puree

 

Usually Autumn is a season that fills me with hope, a time of golden light, of doors opening on new beginnings, and of joyful anticipation as we look forward to the winter holidays. But this one has been dark, a season of endings, sadness, and anxiety, of doors not just closed but slammed in our faces. We've needed comfort in large, hefty doses, and while it's been tempting, not all those doses could take the form of ice cream and bourbon.

 

Yesterday's comfort came in the form of a velvety butternut squash and leek puree. Of all the winter squash, butternuts produce Read More 

Be the first to comment

4 November 2024: Mama's Cornbread

Mama's Cornbread Muffins

 

My mother's cornbread, while I was growing up, was like so many other Southerners' bread back then, a round cake baked in a preheated iron skillet, just as her mother's and grandmother's and probably her great- and great-great-grandmother's had been before her. Cut into wedges and passed around while it was almost blistering hot, we eagerly risked a burn to split our steaming wedge and stuff it with as much butter as we could get away with.

 

It was the quintessential accompaniment for Mama's pots of greens, beans, field peas, and vegetable soup.

 

And yet, oddly enough, when I'm missing her and craving her cornbread, it's not a round skillet cake that I make, Read More 

Be the first to comment