Stribling goodies

Nothing beats harvesting your own food! These apples are from Stribling Orchard, where apple pie/cinnamon/mulled cider smells waft out of its creaky-floored gift shop.

Homemade pecan pie (an ode to my Momma).

Cinnamon-sugar donuts (also from Stribling Orchard). Still warm and perfect with cider.

Green tomatoes frying in generous spoonfuls of butter. Also an ode to my Momma and my Gamma.

The makings of velvety mashed sweet potatoes. Simmered in their own juices for 45 mins.

Farmer's market tomato rainbow!

I love the purple-y rouge color of these onions.

Lovely Sarajevo

Took this pic from my yellow-curtained window in Bascarsija, Sarajevo's lovely old town.

A true amour

I ran into her in front of the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris after walking alone for hours, frozen-fingered under a broken umbrella in the hail. She was so majestic and calm. Amour at first sight!

Aabee y azul

This is the Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif, the fourth largest city in Afghanistan. Particularly appropriate today because the lovely and cosmopolitan Miss Zoe So is in town from Kabul on a whirlwind five-day tour of the eastern seaboard! She will return to compound living in Kabul before re-adjusting to our time zone.

I took this photo on a key of Los Roques (a Venezuelan archipelago). Giulio and I visited in May 2009 for our first dating anniversary. Coming from the city, Los Roques felt like another planet. The water is warm--you can walk half a mile out and it only reaches your knees.

Barbary figs

I want to eat this fruit I found while googling recipes for Morrocan Lamb Tagine. It's called a Barbary fig and is native to Morocco. So many colors!
I'd like to eat one on a breezy Marrakech evening, surrounded by similarly colorful lanterns. And then I would head into the market my sissy so beautifully captured below:

Sick day

I'm the worst at staying still when I am supposed to rest on a sick day. Today I only made two new things, but both were deliciosos!

Hot Lemonade: a cinnamon stick plus honey, juice from 2 lemons, 1/2 lemon sliced thin, and hot water. The hot lemon is the perfect response to a cold/sick day. And cinnamon is known for increasing both heat and hunger within the body. So that feature and plus the name Hot Lemonade makes it amazing.

Choux de bruxelles aux lardons

(Brussel sprouts with lardons and golden raisins)

.

Everytime I make a dish with foreign origins, I'm going to refer to it in its native tongue. The goal of the inexperienced, insecure cook is to impress people, and when you say things in another language, people really think they're being treated, even if the translation of your creation is celery. For example, "I'm making you boeuf bourguignon" sounds slightly more enticing than, "I'm making you beef burgundy." Also, I think it shows respect for the identity of the dish. Highlighting its uniqueness in this way helps me savor a feast.

A New Lurve

I never really understood friends who stayed in and cooked all the time. I also felt condescending sympathy (the kind only a 22-year-old can feel) for women who traveled abroad, fell in love and then eventually moved back home. I couldn’t imagine when boarding a plane and waking up in an unfamiliar place could possibly trump staying in one place.

I found that exact moment: it’s when the smell of recycled plane air becomes so nauseatingly familiar that the last thing you want to do with vacation time is hand your ticket to a stewardess and bid adieu to fresh air for 14 hours to arrive hallucinating, but just awake enough to realize that your only bag with clean underwear actually boarded the connecting flight to Cote d’Ivoire.

Four years later, with half-destroyed suitcases tucked quietly under my bed, I would much rather stay in on most nights to squint at flour-dusted cookbooks, admire the fleshy redness of a tomato, and clumsily drop eggplant slices into crackling oil, all to the sound of Jacques Pépin on YouTube telling me how his fresh pesto is just Heaven.

It’s probably a mix of cold weather plus the nesting bug, a term Mom uses with restrained delight since I left a travel-heavy job that culminated with voicemails like, “I’m flying home tomorrow and can’t tell you the flight number because this phone is tapped, and I don’t want to get arrested at immigration.” But I just spent an entire Saturday reading about why lean meat would be a mistake for slow-cooked stews and why chocolate, in spite of its heaviness, rises just as effortlessly as other ingredients in a properly-orchestrated soufflé. And I lurrrrved every minute.