Sharing stories of food stories we love.
What are your desert island foods? Let’s say you only get three—and let’s pretend, for the sake of this exercise, that we can abandon all ideals of nutrition and health (by which I mean, you don’t need to pick the three that would actually best keep you alive for the rest of your days).
My answer would have been different over the years, and each one serves as a barometer of various points of my life, the foods themselves being signals of a flood of memories and moments.
Read more
If you’ve read my writing much (you’re a gem if you just nodded), then you might remember that I love mail. Real mail. Handwritten letters and packages and the like. The farm where I grew up has a veeeery long driveway—about a third of a mile—and when you pull into the top of it, the entire farm is spread out in front of you like a beautifully draped blanket in greens and golds. The first bit slopes gently, then flattens out once you pass the edge of the woods; there used to be a huge, sprawling oak tree on one side and my dad kept a hive of honeybees on the other.
Read more
Is there something particular about sea air that makes baked goods taste better? It could be the salty scent of ocean water, or the appetite brought on by a day at the beach, or the specific pleasure of eating while watching boats bob gently at a marina. Or it could be something else entirely—some other secret phenomenon that brings excellent bakers in droves to beach towns.
Read more
In the hottest days of summer, we’d make ice cream. We had an old wooden ice cream machine—the sort that looks like it belongs in a scene out of The Music Man or Meet Me in St. Louis, with a silver hand crank and a spindly metal handle and a red medallion on the front that spelled out the words White Mountain. It held four quarts of ice cream: first you’d make the custard base, then pour it into a narrow metal canister which fit inside the wooden bucket. You’d pack the space between the canister and the bucket walls with ice and rock salt, then fit the crank on top and get to work.
Read more
In the pantheon of packaged snack food, I consider Nilla wafers woefully under-represented. Or, under-appreciated, more specifically. If you walk down the snack food aisle (ha! remember leisurely doing grocery shopping without anxiety?), Nilla wafers are usually tucked down on a bottom shelf, placed suspiciously close to the organic granola and rolled oats section. They are overlooked in favor of splashier boxes and bags: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos! Cool Ranch Doritos! Pringles! Oreos! Parmesan Goldfish (don’t make that face at me, this is the best flavor and it’s not up for discussion)!
Read more