Dessert - Notes on Sugar

Dessert Tomato Tart

August 17, 2021 Jesi

It’s tomato season in Minneapolis- at long last. Even after living above the Mason-Dixon line for the last 12 years, I still can’t get used to the fact that you can’t get a good tomato up here until August. I start craving tomato sandwiches in June, and every June, I get miffed when I remember that I have to wait two whole months before I can have one. Once they’re ready, though, it is all tomatoes all the time for me. Tomato toast with a fried egg for breakfast! Open-faced tomato sandwiches for lunch! Cherry tomatoes by the handful for…

Dessert Avocado Ice Cream

June 8, 2021 Jesi 1Comment

A couple jobs ago, in a time when going to lunch with coworkers was a routine thing, I developed a bit of a reputation among my “ladies who lunch” group for always ordering the weirdest item on the menu. Granted, we mostly went to standard American cafés and gastropubs, so there was never anything truly crazy on offer– just, say, anchovy fillets on a salad, or mussels from the appetizer menu when everybody else was getting burgers– but my preferences were noticeable enough that they earned me some affectionate teasing. “Ooh, there’s squid on the menu– are you gonna order…

Cake Lemon Cake with Raspberries and Pistachios

May 12, 2021 Jesi

For the last several weeks, I’ve been on a Great British Bake-Off kick. To be fair, this is never exactly *not* the case; it’s one of my favorite shows, and I watch it pretty frequently. Bake-Off is everything I used to love about Top Chef, but with a fraction of the interpersonal drama and, I’d estimate, about 85% more cake. I especially like to play it as pleasant background accompaniment when I’m puttering around the apartment, working on this or that little project. (Hot tip: nothing will make you feel more delightfully elderly than cross-stitching to the soothing sound of…

Dessert Strawberry Cobbler

July 21, 2018 Jesi 1Comment

Listen, I know talking about the weather is boring. And I know I do it all the time anyway. But here I go, about to do it again, because temperature management has been a big old saga for us for the last couple of months. You Southerners might be inclined to laugh at me when I say we were struggling with a heatwave that put us in the upper-80s/lower-90s for a week or so (“oh, darlin’—the horror”), but what if I told you that, while this was happening, the heat was also running in our apartment, and we couldn’t turn…

Ice Cream Second-Easiest Ice Cream

July 27, 2017 Jesi

Alex and I are moving in a few weeks. If it feels like you’ve heard me say this before, it’s because we’ve moved every two years, like clockwork, since we arrived in Jamaica Plain for the first time eight years ago. Part of me wants to chalk this up to #BostonProblems– it’s not at all uncommon to get priced out of apartments, to have a changing roster of roommates, to switch neighborhoods, etc.– but we know plenty of people who have managed to stay put for longer stretches, so maybe we are just bad at adulting. (More likely: we just…

Cookies Browned Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies

March 6, 2017 Jesi

I’ve never been particularly skilled at handling disappointments, but one of my proudest achievements in my adult life has been learning to accept bad news with grace. By all accounts, I’ve had an exceptionally good life so far, so the bad news we’re talking about here is pretty minor, but lately it’s been well-concentrated in the career category. (You may remember that I’ve taken to the blog to lament job problems many times before.) I don’t want to get into all the unpleasant details, but I’ve had even more job setbacks in the last few weeks, capped off by a…

Cake Grapefruit Olive Oil Pound Cake

February 20, 2016 Jesi 1Comment

How even to begin a new blog post when it’s been nearly three months since your last one? Do you acknowledge the long absence with a rambling story about what happened in the interim (which sounds a lot like something I would do)? Do you skip the pleasantries and go straight into the recipe as if nothing ever happened (likely easier and certainly quicker)? As eager as I am to jump in and talk about this glorious cake, there is one major change that has occurred since November that at least deserves a brief mention: for the first time in…

Dessert Rice Pudding with Apples, Cinnamon, and Maple

November 13, 2015 Jesi

I am a bit of a cookbook hoarder. I know this, you know this, my poor husband definitely knows this, and so do all the saintly people who helped me move over the summer. I actually pared down a good bit of my collection before the move, parting ways with cookbooks I bought but never used, the ones I bought for cheap at Ross during college (and whose recipes never turned out quite right– probably why they were going for five bucks at a discount store in the first place), and the ones that just didn’t speak to me anymore….

Dessert Jelly Doughnut Muffins

July 16, 2015 Jesi 2Comment

You may not believe me when I say this, but I have never been much of a doughnut person. It’s not that I don’t like doughnuts– who doesn’t, really?– it’s just that I can take or leave them. While I am totally incapable of turning down, say, a slice of cake with buttercream, I can walk past a box of doughnuts and not think twice about it. Or, at least, this was all true until I discovered jelly-filled doughnuts. I should stress that the jelly-filled doughnut in question was not your standard, mass-produced Dunkin’ variety. (Say what you will, but…

Ice Cream Banana Nutella Ice Cream

July 7, 2015 Jesi

For a long, long time, fall has been my favorite season. The reasons for this are both obvious and well-documented: crunchy leaves, vibrant colors, chilly nights… I’m sure I’ve listed all the reasons publicly, at least twice. But this year, after the winter we just had, I am completely ecstatic to welcome summer. I don’t even care that it’s a little too hot to sleep comfortably through the night, and I don’t care that Moose still wants to drape her warm, furry little body across my lap at every possible opportunity. I’m just glad that it isn’t snowing, and that…

Cookies Chocolate Chip Pistachio Cookies with Smoked Salt

February 18, 2015 Jesi 2Comment

Greetings from the frozen wasteland that is the city of Boston! We are currently digging out from under our fourth blizzard in as many weeks. My positive-thinking initiative is still going, but this winter is really trying my patience. I’d complain about the terrible (i.e. non-existent) public transit conditions and the subzero temperatures, but frankly, I’m just tired of it. It’s all anyone’s talking about, and I’d just rather talk about cookies. I made these on a Sunday afternoon, the day before Alex left town for a week. I was stuck inside, I felt like baking, and I figured that a big batch of cookies would be ideal for…

Cake Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Coffee Cake

February 2, 2015 Jesi

Sometime around September of last year, I realized that winter was coming– just like last year, and the year before that, and pretty much every year, come to think of it. Knowing that there was no way to stop it, and knowing that we had no plans to migrate South (at least not long-term), I turned to the only thing I thought might help me cope: positive thinking. Or, as I like to call it, lying to myself. Every time I felt a chill in the air or thought about snow piles and wool socks, I forced myself to say, either…

Cookies Pumpkin Cranberry White Chocolate Cookies

November 3, 2014 Jesi

I’ve noticed a trend in social media over the last few weeks: a total backlash against fall in general and pumpkin-flavored foodstuffs in particular. I love pumpkin, but I can understand this. I remember that during my freshman year of college (2005, holy cow), the Starbucks pumpkin spice latte was basically the only pumpkin-flavored product on the market, and I wolfed those lattes down with reckless abandon. However, over the course of a decade or so, other food producers have taken note of the success of the PSL (as Starbucks now abbreviates the pumpkin spice latte, annoyingly enough) and churned…

Dessert Bread Pudding with Knob Creek Pecan Ice Cream

September 11, 2014 Jesi

Is it too soon to come back to the blog bearing yet another recipe for ice cream? I’ve had my ice cream maker for a little less than three months, and I’ve been using it on a near-weekly basis. There’s something so satisfying about combining a few simple ingredients, putting them in a machine, and coming back later to find a rich, silky frozen treat. I can totally understand why there are so many small-scale ice cream producers cropping up all over the country; every time I pull a fresh batch out of the freezer, I have visions of starting…

Dessert Multigrain Buttermilk Biscuits

August 19, 2014 Jesi

I am a bit of a magazine junkie (read: hoarder). Although I strongly prefer to keep my living areas neat and tidy, I am somehow not bothered by stacks and stacks of magazines. In my living room, there are two file boxes stuffed full of back issues of culture and Cooking Light (mostly from my college days) and at least two stacks of magazines that I’m “currently reading” (Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, and Cook’s Illustrated ranging back for at least two months), not to mention several file folders full of magazine clippings. It comes pretty close to being a…