Remember small talk with strangers? Cocktail parties and the attendant chit-chat you’d make as you sipped a glass of Chardonnay in someone’s living room, or nursed a too-strong gin and tonic amidst a group of friends at a bar? Dinner parties where you politely conversed with the people on either side, finding out that the man to your left is an accountant who builds wooden canoes in his spare time and that the woman to your right only likes to humble brag about her three children?
Read moreSESAME PRALINE GRAHAM CRACKERS
I tap open the weather app and see a bold red “flood warning” above the day’s hourly forecast. It’s not yet 7 AM—an hour at which the day usually hasn’t declared itself, weather-wise. I step outside into a cloudy, opaque world: fog and mist obscure the street, making the houses and trees and cars appear pale and shadowy.
(I realize I talk a lot about the weather here. Either I should consider a career as an amateur meteorologist, or it’s a reflection of the fact that when you live at the beach (and anywhere really), a sunny day versus a rainy one greatly colors your daily experience. Anyway. Roll with it, okay?)
Read moreCOCONUT SWEET ROLLS
Let’s talk about birthdays. Are you the gung-ho sort when it comes to celebrating your own? The kind of person who proclaims an entire birthday week? When you were little, did you demand to be treated royally for the entire day, loudly stating “it’s my birthday!” to anyone within earshot? Or do you shy away from the whole ordeal, feeling sheepish about being feted for the mere fact of being born?
You might fall somewhere in between—increasingly indifferent to the showiness of it all, but fully willing to blow out some candles and request a special dessert.
Which brings us to the question at hand: what would your ideal birthday dessert be? Are you a classic traditionalist, preferring a golden yellow cake with a sturdy crumb swathed in rich chocolate buttercream? Maybe you like cake, but you’d indulge your inner 5-year-old and opt for funfetti with a fluffy vanilla frosting coated in sprinkles. Maybe you’d go with red velvet with cream cheese frosting or lemon layers with lemon curd and piles of seven-minute meringue frosting.
Read moreS'MORES CAKE
There’s an intangible but precise shift just before Labor Day—the air takes on a crystalline quality. Overnight, the hazy humidity of August disappears, as if it was absorbed by the ocean or as if a storm swept in and washed it away, like rinsing water on a glass then wiping it away, leaving it perfectly clear.
I love this time of year. It can carry a tinge of melancholy as summer wanes and slips away from you, but it’s such an achingly beautiful few weeks that you can’t help but be glad. The beaches are empty, showcasing their wild rambling loveliness. Waves tip up onto the rock-strewn sand, spilling white foam over the smooth surface of the boulders. Tangles of greenery cover the gently sloping dunes that hug the scalloped curves of the shore for miles. I learn the names slowly: northern bayberry and beach plum and winged sumac and creeping juniper and coastal sweet pepper bush.
Read moreTWO-BANANA BROWN BUTTER BANANA BREAD
Wait a second, you’re thinking. She just posted a rye banana bread recipe. This girl is either floundering under the waves of early parenthood and actually losing her mind OR she is strangely fixated on banana bread.
And I’d ask you: can’t it be both? Just kidding! Not floundering! I promise. But to be honest, some days I do arrive at 5 PM and look back with wonder at the morning, thinking it must have been weeks ago that I woke up, not mere hours. There is a lot more occupying my mind—and my hands—these days, in the nicest way possible, and it is not inconceivable that I would forget about having just posted a similar recipe. Just as I might forget to switch the wet laundry to the dryer, or be unable to remember where I put the stamps, or completely lose track of my phone for the one millionth time.
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