Outpost 505

We spent last weekend in Rockford, celebrating a very special boy’s very special first birthday. Jenn and Bill really outdid themselves with the treats, and I’ll be honest when I say that I was tempted to dig in with the same sort of abandon demonstrated by the birthday boy. It got messier from here, but [...]

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As I understand it, the holiday of Purim celebrates the Jews’ narrow avoidance of extermination at the hands of an evil man named Hamen. How the holiday came to involve also eating Hamen’s hat, I’m not sure, but it’s delicious and I’ll take it. I’ll also take any excuse to bake delicious pastries: After a [...]

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In the last month, I’ve baked 8 loaves from the basic Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day recipe. Five boules, which were more or less successful. The first couple were great, including the two I baked while extremely hung over the weekend of my birthday. That’s the beautiful thing about this recipe – even if [...]

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I’ve been cooking up a storm since we got home from Cleveland last Wednesday – I just haven’t been blogging about it. I made hummus and fresh pita bread for our friends’ New Year’s party – the latter was perfect, unlike earlier pita efforts. We were both somewhat worse for wear on Saturday, and the [...]

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Photo by sass_face We’ve been craving – no, fiending for – Rice Krispies treats for the better part of the week. We stopped by the bodega* at the end of our street for ingredients one night, but couldn’t justify paying $5 for a box of cereal and $2.50 for a bag of marshmallows when buying [...]

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I go through bread baking phases. When I first learned how to bake bread – back in 2003, in the apartment with a horrifically carpeted kitchen and tile on every surface – it was a revelation. We were broke, and the bread we bought was generally of the extremely inexpensive store-brand variety. Occasionally we’d get [...]

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I went to my first A2 crafty meet-up the other night at Pot and Box, a sweet shop focused on “beautiful, ethically-sourced and responsibly-serviced flowers and plants.” I’d heard a lot about the space and its owner, but hadn’t been until a new crafty vegan friend invited me to the night of craftiness. Her invite [...]

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Olivia has already done a great job of documenting what we baked, so I’ll focus on the rest of this morning’s bakefest: brunch.  Also the Leland Palmer, featured in this month’s Bon Appetit. I can’t fairly say that I was a Twin Peaks fan ‘back in the day’, as I didn’t discover the show until [...]

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I had good intentions for tonight.  They involved sitting on the couch with my knitting and watching The Straight Story or maybe The Jerk and a leetle bit of prep for the Saturday bakefest.  Instead I spent literally the entire evening in the kitchen, save the 15 minutes when I ran cookies over to SELMA.  [...]

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In lieu of a local wedding reception, and also in celebration of the birthday of our favorite Talking Head, we threw a party tonight and called it David Byrne Day (Observed).  We’d been anxiously watching the weather given the omg constant rain, so were delighted to have a beautiful day and clear night for grilling [...]

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