Oh, my friends… garlic scape season has arrived!  I’ve alluded to garlic scapes at least once on this blog, but this is the first time I’ve had the actual specimen in my hand.  Wanna see it?  Oh, I’m totally going to show you. I think garlic scapes are some of the most gorgeous edibles on the planet.  Their curvature is simultaneously crazy and fluid–there’s a method in their madness.  When I get married someday in the future, I may have to schedule my wedding around garlic scape season so I can work them into my bouquet.  Or, so they can…

Alex and I are freshly back in Boston after several days in his hometown in Kentucky.  While we were there, we spent quality time with family, watched two good friends say their marriage vows, and of course, ate our collective weight in delicious, delicious food.  I had granola pancakes, which were larger than my face, mass quantities of amazing Indian food, and of course, a giant slab of wedding cake.  It was divine, but now my jeans are feeling considerably smaller than they were a week ago.  I may have to rename this blog “Notes on Celery” for a few…

Lunch is a strange meal, isn’t it?  For me, there’s next to no consistency in when I get hungry for lunch from day to day.  Some days my stomach starts rumbling around 10:30, and on other days, I have to make myself sit down and eat at 1:30 just so I don’t find myself famished during that awkward, too-late-for-lunch, too-early-for-dinner time around 3pm.  Lunch is also one of those meals that I usually just throw together without too much thought.  Leftovers one day; PBJ the next; hummus, day old bread, and a handful  of grape tomatoes after that. Allow me…

If there’s one thing I’ve made abundantly clear with this blog, it is that I have a very deep appreciation for foods with bad reputations.  Thus, it should be a given that hamburgers hold a very special place in my heart, but to tell the truth, I’ve never really equated burgers with junk food.  That’s probably because I was raised on handmade, from-scratch burgers that my parents prepared.  (Naturally, we ate at fast-food restaurants like most other families, but I was a diehard chicken nugget fan, so my non-homemade burger intake was remarkably low.)  There was just something inherently comforting…

It’s Friday!  Were you aware?  Until this week, Friday has been my one consistent day off.  Today is a day off, too, but I have a giant to-do list staring me in the face… wanna see it?  Well, I was going to show it to you, mainly to show off my pretty stationery and my impeccable handwriting, but it turns out the photo revealed less about those things and more about how badly I need to clean up my desk.  You don’t need to see that. For this busy Friday, I’m going to share a quick and easy recipe, and…

  At first glance, this post probably looks super healthy.  It’s full of colorful, fresh veggies and  green, leafy herbs.  I just had a farm-fresh, vitamin-packed party, didn’t I?  Well, yes… and no.  Fresh salsa is extremely good for you.  But what you can’t see in these pictures is the mass of fatty, fatty goodness that my friend Joe and I made to go along with the salsa. Joe and I have been cooking buddies for pretty much as long as we’ve been friends.  This started out in our kitchenless dorm back in Alabama; every once in a while, we’d…

                          I talk a lot on this blog about jobs– looking for jobs, losing jobs, maybe not being so crazy about jobs.  But let’s talk for a moment about quitting jobs. “Quit” is such a bad word; it still conjures up images of softball games from my nonathletic childhood.  But in terms of work, it seems so much worse.  I can just hear all these judgmental voices in my head saying, “Oh, so you’re just going to quit a job in the middle of a bum economy?  And for…

I’ve probably given the impression on this blog that I eat a lot of shrimp.  True, this is only the third time I’ve presented them, but given how small my blog is, and how much of it is focused on sweets, that’s still a lot of shrimp.  The truth is that shrimp are a treat—a “sometime food,” if you will—but I love them so much that on the occasions when I do make them, I just feel like I have to blog about them. [Sidenote: I’m not in any hurry at all to have kids, but I fully expect watching…

I’ve had plenty of practice lately with turning life’s lemons into lemonade.  Don’t worry, I’m not about to talk about jobs or money—I’m going to talk about freeze-dried bananas. As I might have mentioned before, I have a weak spot for less-than-healthy snacks.  Banana chips have been at the top of my favorite unhealthy food list for a while.  Granted, there are many worse things than banana chips, but they are fried and full of oil, and while that’s never stopped me before, there’s also nothing wrong with looking for a healthier alternative.  So when I spotted freeze-dried banana chips…

There are some kitchen projects that are completely easy and unintimidating, like quick pancakes or no-cook pesto.  There are some that can be a bit more labor-intensive, but still fun and calming, like yeasted bread.  And then there are some that scare the pants off me.  This is one of the scary kind. I’ve wanted to learn how to make cheese for years, since my kitchenless dorm days, at least.  But somehow, I’ve never gotten around to it until now.  And by “I’ve never gotten around to it,” I mean, “I’ve been dodging the task.”  For a while, my excuse…

I remember the very first time I made cookies by myself.  I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but it was during a break from school, and I was home alone, so I was obviously at that golden age where I no longer required child care but was still too young to get a job.  I had a hankering for cookies, but we didn’t keep a lot of store-bought sweets around the house, and I didn’t have a driver’s license, so I had no choice but to make my own.  I wasn’t about to use my mom’s electric mixer,…

This week is off to a refreshingly slow start, thanks to a day off for the Boston Marathon on Monday–apparently that’s kind of a big deal–and an inexplicably short shift at work today.  This has given me a rare chance to consider ways I’d like to spend my spare time, other than sleeping.  I’ve decided that I want to institute office hours, like professors have.  Never mind that none of my jobs at the moment require any kind of desk time whatsoever, except for blogging.  (It doesn’t have to be profitable to be my job, right?  I can put this…

I’ve been down in the dumps a bit lately.  Not sick, not lovelorn, not even depressed, exactly… but just a little blah.  This is for a number of very legitimate reasons, but none that I’m going to discuss here, because I insist on making this blog a place for uplifting things rather than downers and rants.  And furthermore, since I think we can all agree that using food as a means of solving our problems leans pretty strongly toward the bad end of the idea spectrum, I’m not even going to write about food today, if I can help it. …

If the saying “you are what you eat” is to be believed, I think I can safely say that, in addition to coffee, spinach pesto, and Chipotle burritos, my body is composed largely of popcorn.  I’m not even kidding– I eat popcorn on a near-daily basis, a habit which has its roots in my childhood, when my mom, brother and I shared a bowl of popcorn every single solitary day after school, usually while watching the Animaniacs (so. incredibly. hyper). Of course, all the popcorn I ate as a kid came out of a bag in the microwave, or on rare…

I made a pie several weeks ago, which I intended to blog about right away.  I thought to myself yesterday, “You know, it’s been a few days.  I really should work on that pie post.”  And then I realized that it was the 26th, and I had made that pie right around the 14th of March.  I remember this because my roommate pointed out that I had made a pie on Pi Day, a coincidence that hadn’t even occurred to me.  (I’m pretty sure I had overheard talk about “Pi” all day, and my brain translated it into “must bake…