baking

another serving of hawaiian sweet bread pudding

~ jama ~ 50 Comments

When is a recipe more than just a recipe?

Back when I first started blogging in 2007, one of the first recipes I shared was for Hawaiian Sweet Bread Pudding. It’s so sinfully delicious, people are often surprised at how easy it is to make.

This longstanding Island favorite is perfect for neighborhood potlucks, bake sales, and school and church gatherings. It’s my go-to recipe for last minute guests, always fits the bill for relaxing Sunday brunches, and is just about as comforting as comfort food can get.

I’ve fed sweet bread pudding to painters, carpenters, and landscapers. To dinner guests I wanted to impress. To new neighbors and physical therapists. I even converted a fourth grade class of die-hard brownie and chocolate chip cookie lovers. One taste, and their stories magically brimmed with sensory detail.

But of all the happy eaters I’ve encountered, Roberta is my favorite.

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[cookbook review] the secret lives of baked goods by jessie oleson moore

~ jama ~ 21 Comments

“Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.” ~ Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel

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Call my name, brand new cookbook! I’ve dallied between your covers and I’m under your spell. You speak my language: Animal Crackers, German Chocolate Cake, Alice B. Toklas Brownies, New York Cheesecake, Lemon Meringue Pie.

Yes, I’ll marry you. 🙂

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Recipe for Old Fashioned Doughnuts included.

I’ve just had the best time devouring Jessie Oleson Moore’s, The Secret Lives of Baked Goods: Sweet Stories & Recipes for America’s Favorite Desserts (Sasquatch Books, 2013).

Like she says: “everything tastes better with a backstory.”

Think about the hundreds (okay, thousands) of doughnuts you’ve eaten in your lifetime. Who invented the holes? And did you know “the hole is so the calories can fall out”? (I feel so much better now.)

You probably already know that Ruth Wakefield invented the chocolate chip cookie at Massachusetts’ Toll House Inn, even that Nestlé gave her free chocolate for life in exchange for permission to print her recipe on the back of their semi-sweet chocolate bars. But did you know it wasn’t until after the cookie became a national superstar (featured on a Betty Crocker radio show), that Nestlé invented chocolate chips?

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good friday feast: a mary oliver good morning with baked french toast

~ jama ~ 46 Comments

“It is Spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.” ~ Rilke

 

Good morning, Poetry Friends, and Happy Spring!

More than a few rabbits have invaded the Alphabet Soup kitchen but we don’t mind in the least. Thought we’d ease into Easter Weekend by serving up an iconic Mary Oliver poem and some delicious baked french toast.

In this season of renewal, growth, and fresh starts, it’s good to remind ourselves that something wonderful may be waiting for us just over the horizon. As someone once said, “you can’t turn back the clock, but you can wind it up again.”

So let’s toast this new morning, this new day, with all the positive energy we can muster up and nourish ourselves with food for the mind, heart, body, and spirit.

Remember: we can be the light.

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mrs. tiggy-winkle comes to tea

~ jama ~ 48 Comments

 

Just in case you were wondering, the reason we usually look so spiffy around here is because we have the best washerwoman.

Her name is Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and she hails from the Lake District. Do you know her too? A tidier, more conscientious “clear-starcher” you’d be hard pressed to find. The other day, when untimely Spring (?) snowflakes were drifting down from the sky, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle chanced by to deliver a freshly laundered stack of tea towels and table linens.

We couldn’t very well turn her out in a snowstorm, so we invited her in for tea. Coincidentally, Cornelius and I had just baked a fresh batch of Littletown-Farm Carrot Cookies. Every Easter we get into a “Peter Rabbit mood” and crave carrots. We found the cookie recipe in Peter Rabbit’s Natural Foods Cookbook, and since we’d made Fierce Bad Rabbit’s Carrot-Raisin Salad from that book many times before, we thought the cookies would also be a good bet.

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“Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s hand, holding the tea-cup, was very very brown, and very very wrinkly with the soap-suds; and all through her gown and her cap, there were hair-pins sticking wrong end out; so that Lucie didn’t like to sit too near her.”

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author chat: kelly starling lyons on tea cakes for tosh

~ jama ~ 20 Comments

tea cakes cover

They’re light and buttery, a little chewy, just a touch of brown around the edges. The fragrance of vanilla and cinnamon wafts through the kitchen as they gently puff up in the oven.

Some describe it as a soft, old-fashioned sugar cookie; some say they are neither cookie nor cake, but most agree that Southern tea cakes are all about childhood, family, and a big ole batch of feel-good memories. If a bite of Southern cuisine could hug you, the tea cake would be it.

I would be lying if I didn’t confess that Tea Cakes for Tosh (Putnam, 2012) had me at the title along with the picture of the grandmother and grandson on the cover. Certainly their special bond is the heartbeat of this tender, multi-layered intergenerational tale so lovingly told by Kelly Starling Lyons and masterfully illustrated by Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Award winner E.B. Lewis.

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