Eating in Singapore

It was an episode of The Layover that finally convinced us to start our Asia travels with a few days in Singapore.  Friends of mine from grad school lived there and though I’d spent years drooling over their food photos, it was watching Anthony Bourdain stuff himself with hawker food that really sealed the deal. We planned most of our time there around food, visiting…

Welcome summer!

My current ambition for the summer is to spend as much time as possible enjoying the warm weather with a glass of rose and a little cheese.  I’m just as happy to pick out something simple for us to share, as I am throwing together an assorted cheese platter to enjoy with friends.  What are your favorite summer treats?

Naked cake

A naked cake with raspberries and mint to celebrate someone special’s birthday.  

Urban pig roast

A glorious night of food in the Petworth neighborhood of DC.  This porker roasted in a wooden box for the better part of a day, and by the end of the night, our friends reported that the hungry masses had only left about 3lbs of meat to go into the freezer.  Can all our friends just do this every weekend?  Pretty please?

Peppermint bark time!

I’ve never had much of a sweet tooth, but over the last few years I fallen in love with peppermint bark as a holiday treat.  The simplicity of the ingredients let’s me focus on using really good quality chocolate which is great for flavor and keeps the sweetness factor in check.  However, I’ve found that the real magic is adding rice krispies to the…

Another lovely Thanksgiving

Another lovely Thanksgiving spent in New Jersey, this time with 100% more cute baby nieces.  All the cuteness plus a lot of desserts and visiting with friends and family made for a wonderful holiday weekend!  Hope yours was great, too!.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!  I’m taking today and tomorrow to relax and spend time with family and friends in New Jersey and New York.  Hope you have a wonderful day filled with food, loved ones, and lots of pie! A couple of fun memories from this time last year: The importance of Friendsgiving when you live far from family. Practice, practice, practice makes perfect pie crusts….

Beaujolais Nouveau Day Celebration

There’s probably no holiday I look forward to more than Beaujolais Nouveau Day.  It’s my favorite excuse to gather all my friends for a night of cheap wine and expensive cheese, and this year’s celebration was one of the best.  All told, I think we managed to cram fourteen cheeses, eighteen wine bottles, and more than twenty friends into our tiny apartment.  It was…

Monday cheese

Creamy blues and earthy burrata on a chilly afternoon in the Big Meadows at Shenandoah National Park.

I pick my friends like I pick my fruit

  Maryland, October 2014.

Cider and donuts

What is your favorite part of fall?  As much as I love red leaves, crisp temperatures, and beautiful pumpkins, there’s nothing I look forward to quite as much as hot apple cider and fresh apple cider donuts.

Caramel apple

Homestead Farm, Poolesville, MD. October 2014.

Stop and smell the cheeses

Can we all just pause for a moment to remember how great cheese is?  Especially when it is ripe and oozy, and ready to expire.  Mmmmm.  Okay, back to work.

A jar of summer

Over the years we’ve had fun teaching ourselves to preserve our favorite summer foods with a little help from Youtube and my grandmother’s Ball Blue Book.  We’ve canned peaches, jammed and jellied strawberries and cherries, and had fun pickling cucumbers and red onions.  However much fun, canning can also be a lot of work, and over the last couple of summer seasons, we decided…

The Clam Box

Traveling to Massachusetts in the summer means fried clams and onion rings, and for the Mister, no place place sings their siren song sweeter than the Clam Box in Ipswich, Massachusetts.  As a teenagers, he and his brother had jobs as onion boys (onion ring makers), and even now, whenever we visit someone working in the kitchen recognizes him.