Well, friends, this is a momentous occasion, indeed: Notes on Sugar’s very first cocktail post.  I haven’t exactly beaten around the bush about my affection for bourbon-based drinks; if you’ll recall, my very first post involved a big, fat bottle of Woodford Reserve and a Manhattan that had very little to do with the actual recipe.  But a whole post about a drink?  This feels odd.  Odd in a good way. And, it should be noted, this is also probably the first post that has the potential to inspire a healthy dose of sophomoric giggling.  I wouldn’t even bring this…

One of the electives that I took in grad school was a food history class, which functioned not so much like a class, but rather like a really intense book club.  When the professor handed out the syllabus on the first day, the reading list included not only a new book for each weekly meeting, but another long list of books that we were instructed to divvy up among ourselves and read independently.  The longest book we were all required to read was Vestal Fire, by Stephen Pyne, which weighed in at an astounding 680 pages (I’ll let you take…

For the past few weeks, I have been obsessed with Project Runway.  And I mean obsessed with a capital O.  We’re only on episode four of the current season, but so far, those few episodes have done nothing but whet my appetite for more.  Fortunately, in addition to its many other charms, the Boston Public Library has multiple copies of almost all the previous seasons on DVD, so when I found myself home alone one evening last week, I was able to sit down with a glass of wine and hours and hours of runway footage.  Just perfect. In general,…

Clearly I’ve been feeling all kinds of nostalgic lately, especially in the dessert department.  The only sweets I’ve made in the last month are old favorites from my pre-Boston days, and here I am with yet another.  It’s not like I have any shortage of dessert cookbooks lying around, but what can I say?  I’ve just been hankering for the old faithfuls lately.  Temperatures are high, energy is low, and I’m more than happy to fall back on recipes I could probably bake with my eyes closed. These blondies are nothing if not faithful.  The recipe is so simple, you…

Mayonnaise and I have a complicated relationship.  Over the years, it’s gone from love to tolerance to hatred, then back to tolerance, and now it has grown into what I think can only be described as “wuuuv… twoooo wuuuuv.” The first stage of love is easy enough to explain: I was about four years old.  I specifically remember sitting at a blue and yellow plastic kiddie table in my family’s living room, dipping cut-up pieces of hot dog in mayonnaise.  But there’s no accounting for what we like when we’re that young, and my feelings for mayo cooled sometime during…