These are the kinds of ideas that I really think twice about posting for all the world to see. Because pretty much nothing good can come of telling the world at large that I have home-baked an apple galette for my daughter’s doll. (Meet Esme, the luckiest Plan toy in the world!) I will say, however, that it is not as bad as it sounds — I was making a life-size galette as well and, as it happened, Abby hopped up on the counter to eat the sugar covered apples. (“Cooks privilege!” she is fond of saying, even when she is not the cook.) When I started rolling out the crust, there just so happened to be the perfect little bite-size scrap sticking out of the dough like Spain from Europe. What choice did we have but to lop that part off, mince a couple apples and make a mini pie? It was Abby who suggested serving it on Esme’s dining set — the latest acquisition in her diy dollhouse. Go ahead and call me crazy — my husband has already beaten you to it — all I can say is that for about 5 minutes (which is about how long the baby galette lasted before Abby gobbled it in one bite) I felt like mother of the year.

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I’m already over Andy’s goals for me and onto better things — namely, Bon Appetit‘s list of  25 Things to Eat, Drink, and Cook in 2012. In particular, please check out #24, a quinoa breakfast cookie I developed for them a few months back. I wouldn’t exactly call one of these lo-cal, but I can at least call it the healthiest possible cookie you can get away with still calling a cookie. I’m certain that if I added one more flax seed, the kids would sniff out something suspicious. (And btw: No need to tell anyone about the quinoa — you can’t see it once the cookies are baked.)

P.S. A cool little fact that I’m proud of: This is the 400th post on Dinner: A Love Story. Four hundred! Crazy right? OK, that’s it. I said it. In lieu of flowers and congratulations, you can just tell me what your favorite DALS recipe is — or even better, you can just follow me on Twitter! (Four hundred posts ago, I wouldn’t have ever believed those words would shoot so effortlessly out of my fingertips.)

Thanks to everyone out there for keeping this blog alive. I really mean that — we are so lucky to have such nice, thoughtful, well-read readers.

And now back to the cookies… (more…)

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Proposed Chocolate Pudding Pie (From Scratch)*

Preheat oven to 350°F. In a food processor fitted with a metal blade, process 2 packages honey graham crackers (total: 2 1/4 cups) until they resemble fine crumbs. Add 5 tablespoons sugar and 10 tablespoons melted butter (unsalted) and pulse to combine. Using your fingers, press the mixture into a 9-inch pie dish. Bake for 10 minutes. Cool. Make this chocolate pudding, then pour into prepared crust. Chill for at least 3 hours (and up to 24) and top with freshly whipped cream.

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Day Before the Eighth Birthday

Abby: Mom, I don’t want it to be my birthday.

Mom: What? Why not?

Abby: Because then it will be over and I’ll have to wait a whole ‘nother year for it to come again.

We have this same conversation every year — which is amazing to me, because between the classroom doughnuts, the annual restaurant-picking ritual, the party with friends, and the cousins-and-grandparents get-together, we seem to be celebrating Abby’s birthday all year long. All year long, it’s on her mind. “Where should my party be this year?” she’ll ask on New Year’s. “What restaurant are we going to on the night of my birthday?” she’ll ask in the middle of her sister’s February birthday dinner. “What should the theme of my party be?” She asked when I picked her up from camp one day in July.

I don’t want to pretend that this is hard work. All of us got into picking the theme this time, submitting our best proposals to the Birthday Boss.

How about an “almost-sleepover” party?
Too babyish.
An upside down party?
Naaah.
A British tea party?
Too girly.
A soccer party?
Not all my friends play soccer.
A secret agent party, like Phoebe’s 9th?
We did that already.
A Drive-by Truckers party?
Daaaad.

We wracked our brains. What did Abby love more than anything else in the world. More than her LaLaLoopsy dolls, more than Lemony Snicket, more than flying down a soccer sideline?

Once Andy threw out Japan as a theme we wondered what took us so long to get there. Abby’s idea of happiness has always been miso soup, shrimp shumai, and chicken teriyaki, followed by a private screening of Totoro.

Here’s what we ended up doing…

Candy Sushi! For twelve girls I made two sheets of Rice Krispie Treats, cutting them into round and square sushi-size pieces. Then I proceeded to load two trays (one for each side of the table) with some world-class junk: Swedish fish, gummy worms, jelly beans, Airhead Extremes (the rainbows), Dots, chewy Now-and-Laters, green Fruit-by-the-Foot (which stood in for the seaweed and is truly, hideously repulsive), and sour peach strips that were a dead ringer for ginger. (I think as I type this a week and a half later, the girls are just now coming off their sugar rush.) To make things a little easier for everyone — I chopped up a bunch of the candy into bite size pieces so they’d fit nicely on or around the rice patties. (more…)

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I really do believe that there are two kinds of people in this world: the bakers and the cooks (or “cookers” as Abby once called them.) Me — with my absolute inability to pay attention to amounts and rules and, you know, crucial details (last week I applied Athlete’s Foot cream on Phoebe’s rash instead of hydrocortisone — I fall squarely into the cooker category. I love nothing more than coming across an instruction like “mix until you reach desired consistency” in a recipe. In other words, there’s no wrong answer! This is why, in my hours of need (aka Halloween), I turn to my friend and ICE graduate, Sara of Sara Bakes Cakes, who, now that I think of it, is actually neither a baker nor a cook, but a true artist. I asked her to give me one easy, creepy treat that would see me through Halloween bake sales and fairs and parties along with one instruction: No fondant, which may scare me more than the bloodshot eyeball cupcakes themselves. They are made with bloody red velvet cake and a foolproof vanilla buttercream frosting, both of which I’m thinking will be nice to have on hand throughout the year. And as soon as I get the guts up to try making them, I’ll let you know how they are.

Sara’s Red Velvet Cupcakes (more…)

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…where my grand plan to make Deb’s Best Birthday Cake, devolves into this instead.

But Abby will forgive me when she opens these and this. (We’ve already exhausted Season 1.)

I’m thinking of having a third child, if only so I can dress him or her in this for Halloween.

Why can’t it be October 25 right exactly now?

I always knew Reese was a smart one. (Please note her choice of reading material.)

A good reminder: Who’s David and who’s Goliath in the battle between book publishers and Amazon?

I’ve accepted the fact that I will never have handwriting like Marion Deuchars, but now I can at least have her book. (Be sure to play the “How to Draw a Simple Bird” video for your kids.)

How fun is this menu planning? And I’m totally making the lemon-garlic-anchovy potatoes this weekend.

And now a few things from Andy:

One upside to the kids growing up: Abby is one year closer to appreciate this kind of writing.

Can’t stop listening to this, and the rest of the family can’t stop listening to me listen to it, either.

This could be my Halloween costume this year.

An amazing piece of old-school reporting.

Want to get the kids excited to go play some soccer/take a spelling test/go to a piano/just go out and kick some butt in general? Try this. How fun does that look?

Thank you, New York Times, for showing me that I am doing everything wrong in the kitchen.

Of all the things I love about All Things Must Pass, the album cover is right up there at the top. Here’s the obituary of the man who shot it, along with a bunch of other iconic covers.

If The New Yorker would only post their articles for free, I could link here to the  latest David Sedaris essay, Memory Laps. But they don’t, so I can’t. If you get the magazine, though, it’s a good one. We read aloud it to the kids, in our best public radio voices – for real — and they loved it.

Happy weekend!

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If you present one of these baked caramel apples as an afterschool snack, don’t you think you are off the hook for just about everything else…all month long?

Baked Apples with Caramel

Heat oven to 425°F. Remove stems from your apples. (I used Empire here; you want an apple that can hold its shape under heat — Granny Smiths, Romes, Winesaps, Golden Delicious) Using a paring knife, cut about a half inch into the apple around where the stem was and remove the fruit. Using an apple corer, remove the core, without poking all the way through to the bottom. Using the same knife, cut a little belt, about 1/8 inch deep, all the way around the middle of the apple. Sprinkle the cores of your apples with cinnamon and brush the top with melted butter. Bake for 45 minutes. (Keep an eye on them as they bake — they may take less or more time depending on variety and size.) Drizzle with caramel sauce.

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I wasn’t sure I heard her right.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“What’s up with the flat bags?”

I heard her right. The question came from the photographer’s assistant during the DALS Book photo shoot a few weeks ago. She was in her twenties, hailed from Williamsburg. I didn’t get a peek at her iPod, but I feel certain it would be loaded with songs by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the New Pornographers. In other words, bands I’d never heard before. She was referring to the bags of chilis and soups in my freezer — I always freeze dinners in flattened Ziplocs. When you do it that way, you save time (by thawing whatever is frozen under running water for 60 seconds) and you save space. (After your soup or stew is frozen, you can file the bag in your freezer like a book in a bookshelf.) How did she not know this?

Most likely because she hadn’t spent six years of her life at Real Simple or four years editing the food pages of Cookie. I need to remember that not everyone is a former magazine editor walking around with a mental catalog of time-saving, money-saving, energy-saving, sanity-saving, life-saving, surefire, guilt-free, guaranteed fool-proof, plan-ahead, stress-free, problem-solving shortcuts, tips and tricks. (And yes, in case you are wondering, all those words consistently scored the highest with the focus groups.) I need to remember that not everyone out there feels comfortable with recipe-writing language that calls for a “handful of beans” or a “pinch of cayenne.” (Don’t literally pinch cayenne, especially if you are using those same pinchers to remove contact lenses an hour later.) I need to remember that calling for lemongrass in a recipe is a potential deal-breaker and that calling for a  ”large” can of whole tomatoes is going to elicit this comment from my book editor, Lee: “Ounces please! Lord, define large!” This is why she is so awesome. Not only because I can hear her southern drawl through the most miniscule of notes, but because she yells at me now so you won’t have to later.

Anyway, in honor of all of you out there who don’t know to store your folded garbage bags inside the garbage can (so you can conveniently grab a replacement as soon as you discard the full one –classic Real Simple tip ) or that adding skim milk to boiling liquid is going to result in curdling (classic Jenny screw-up), here are a list of things I wish someone told me fifteen years ago, when I was the one with the loaded iPod (Sony Walkman?) who did not understand the kind of happiness that a quick-thaw might someday bring me.

1. Don’t ever make recipes (or trust cookbooks) that have overly cutesy recipe titles like “Struttin’ Chicken.” These kinds of dishes rarely have the kind of staying power that a good simple Roast Chicken will. (Grilled Chicken for People Who Hate Grilled Chicken is the obvious exception.)

2. Buy  yourself a pair of kitchen scissors. You will use them to snip herbs. You will use them to chop canned whole peeled tomatoes that have been dumped and contained in a 4-cup Pyrex. You will use them to snip spinach right in the skillet as the spinach wilts. Spinach! As long as we’re on the subject: always make more of it than you think you need. This way you will not find yourself in the position of having one cupcake-sized mound of sesame spinach for your whole family of four to share.

3. Some Type-A behaviors worth stealing: Do everything you can in advance when you are having people over for dinner. No matter how easy and tossed-off the task  may be. No matter how many times your partner-in-crime says, Why don’t we just do that later? Filling a sippy cup takes 30 seconds! If you forgo this advice and do nothing in advance, at least make sure you start off the evening with an empty dishwasher. You will thank yourself a few hours and a few cocktails later when staring at the mountain of greasy plates in the sink. Lastly, if at all possible, go to sleep with a fresh trash bag in the kitchen garbage can. I find it somewhat soul-crushing to see last night’s dinner scraps piled up before I’ve had my morning coffee. And I sleep better when I know it’s empty. (See: Type A.)

4. Brushing dough with a quick egg-wash is the secret to getting that shiny, lacquered, I’m-worth-something-after-all glow to your pies, breads, and cherry galettes (pictured above). This comes in especially handy when trying to pass off storebought crust as homemade. Whisk one egg with a fork, then use a pastry brush to cover every inch of the exposed crust before baking.

5. Meat will never brown properly if you add it to the pan when it’s freezing cold and wet. (And browning properly is where you’re going to get most of your flavor.) It should be patted dry and room temperature. Unless you have just walked in the door, it’s 7:30, the kids are screaming and the instruction to “bring it to room temperature” is the instruction that will make you swear off family dinner forever.

6. Add acid. A drizzle of vinegar, a spoonful of tangy buttermilk, a simple squeeze of lemon or lime will always add brightness to an otherwise boring and flat dish. I’ll never forget an interview I read with Mario Batali that reconfirmed this: He said the easiest way to pretend you know what you’re doing in the kitchen is to talk about the “acidity” level of a dish.

7. Never use the phrase “pun intended” or “no pun intended.” Oh sorry! That’s from my “Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I Started Writing” list.

8. Learn the correct way to slice and dice an avocado. You will not only save time, energy, sanity [insert up to 4 more Real Simple focus group words here] by doing this, but you will find yourself giving tutorials to awed, in-the-dark observers every time you make guacamole in front of them.

9. Ice in the cocktails, people. Don’t be stingy. Nothing worse than a lukewarm Gin and Tonic.

10. You won’t get arrested if you leave out an ingredient or replace it with something that’s not called for. That doesn’t mean leave the shrimp out of the shrimp and grits, but if you don’t have scallions for the chopped salad, or if you don’t have red wine called for in the braised pork, take a look around and see what else might stand in for what’s missing. Every time you do this and it works, you’ll be a little more confident in the kitchen. And every time you do this and it doesn’t work, you have one more good story to tell.

Flattened freezer bag photo by Jennifer Causey for DALS.

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And by that question I mean, is it easier for families to get everyone around the table at the same time eating the same thing first thing in the morning — before the playdates and the meetings and the deadlines conspire to pull everyone in different directions?

In case you can’t tell by now, we’re big fans of a shared meal at the end of the day. But that’s most likely because, after a few harrowing years with apron-hangers and witching-hours babies, we’ve found our dinner rhythm. We know the meals we can make blindfolded. We know what kind of surgery — rice removal surgery — has to be performed on the porcupine meatballs in order for Phoebe to eat them. But if morning is the best time for your family to unplug and connect — what’s stopping you from declaring breakfast the new family dinner? Actuallly….What’s stopping you from declaring the all-parties-present road trip or bike ride or the weekend hike the new family dinner?

For all of our inspired steaks and salads, we here at DALS haven’t yet cracked the breakfast code. Every week at Trader Joe’s we beg the girls to keep breakfast in mind as they shop — we will buy them anything if it doesn’t fall into the starch-fest category, aka pancakes, bagels, waffles, french toast, aka their morning-time default mode. (Our morningtime default mode: Smoothies, which the girls go back and forth craving and rejecting.) But no matter how many cartons of strawberry yogurt and granola we lug home, we’re usually back to our pancake routine by Wednesday. If I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll have Nigella’s homemade mix in the countertop canister, but it’s usually Trader’s buttermilk batter we’re shaping into silver dollars and the girls’ initials. If we’re going to have the same thing every day, might as well make it interesting.

Initial Pancakes (shown above) I find they turn out better when you drizzle the letter into the pan in its mirror image and then flip to its correct positioning.

Fakey Crepey Remember when we handed the girls ten bucks and challenged them to find something new at the farmer’s market? The first time they came back with lavendar honey and two sourdough rolls. The second time, they wisened up and found the newest vendor at the market: they found the crepe guy. With his French accent, twirly wand, and charming little cones,  I am no match for him, but I make what Abby now calls my “Fakey Crepey,” achieved by thinning out my pancake batter with milk, then smearing Nutella across the middle. It ain’t Paris, but it’ll do for now.

Silver Dollar Stack A perennial favorite in my house. (How could it not be?) The trick is to pile the tiny cakes as dramatically high as possible.

Nine Years. Nine Blueberries When I was six, I made my mother insert six blueberries into my pancake. When I turned seven, I made her insert seven. The ritual continued for an embarrassingly long time. When I told Phoebe about it, she responded “Grandma better get ready to make you a big pancake next time!” And then: “Make me one with nine!”

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Psssst. Don’t tell my bosses, but I was doing a little pleasure reading at my desk today. More specifically, I was reading an old piece from GQ* by the food writer Alan Richman. Here is a sentence from that story, which I was going to try to build a whole dessert post around, but then gave up when I realized there was nothing I could add that could possibly make it better, or more true:

Show me a man who believes his favorite desserts are those he has eaten as an adult, and I’ll show you a man who has had an unhappy childhood.

Mine is either the snickerdoodle or the s’more, too close to call. Jenny’s is Jell-O chocolate pudding pie, with real whipped cream and a graham cracker crust. Discuss.

*And, okay, I was reading this, too. How good?

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1 It’s summer. 2 It’s summer. 3 It’s summer. 4 It’s summer. 5 It’s summer.

Enjoy the weekend.

Summer Blueberry Galette
If you have extra crust and extra berries, add them to a ramekin to make a mini pie. Warning: If you have more than one child, this may result in an epic eye-scratching battle. Best to avoid altogether or make enough minis to go around.

Preheat oven to 425°F. If you have the time or the inclination to make a pate brisee, by all means go for it. If not, place one piece of a 9-inch storebought frozen pie crust (such as Trader Joe’s or Pilsbury) on a cookie sheet and allow to thaw. In a mixing bowl, gently toss about 2 cups of fresh blueberries with 1/4 cup sugar, a light dusting of corn starch (about 2 teaspoons), a pinch of cinnamon, and the juice of half a lemon. Scoop into the center of your dough, leaving a 1-inch border. Working in a circle, fold the crust in overlapping pieces over the berries as shown. (Once you get going the overlapping of the dough should feel natural but if not, no worries, there is no real art to this — in fact, sometimes, the more artless the better.) Using a pastry brush (or one of your kid’s clean paintbrushes) brush the crust with a beaten egg. (This is an excellent task for kids.) Bake for 20-25 minutes until the crust is golden and the blueberries are bubbling. If the crust is looking too brown before the blueberries bubble, cover the galette with foil and continue baking. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or freshly whipped cream.

PS: I’m so making this berry dessert next.

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Last week, when my Mom and I were dreaming up red-white-and-blue treats for our Fourth of July celebration, I talked a big game. There would be a flag cake, of course. But not just your garden-variety flag sheet cake. I was imagining cross-sectioned flag cakes, maybe even horizontally slicing a pound cake and re-assembling using red frosting or jam. Maybe I’d bake different sections in different colors and then re-assemble? But would the yellow cake be white enough for a flag cake? Was that unpatriotic? I know! I would bake a white, fluffy angel food cake. And maybe I would use a fresh strawberry sauce to paint stripes on each serving and then top with blueberries? The kids would love that. (more…)

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Besides the fact that it’s Friday and that we have a grilled leg of lamb on the menu tonight, what else is making me happy today?

1. Finding a ridiculously easy way to frost the ridiculously easy mud cake I make for every birthday. The one above was for my dad’s 75th — don’t worry, I eventually added the “birthday,” part. (Scroll to bottom for recipe.)

2. Holding a first draft of Dinner: A Love Story, the book in my hands. A very positively extremely roughly rough first draft, but a draft nonetheless.

3. Conjuring up image from last weekend of daughter flying down sideline with soccer ball.

4. Holes, by Louis Sachar. Note: it makes me happy to read such a well-written book. The book itself, which I’m reading to both girls (ages 9 and 7), is actually creepy and cool and not happy at all. At least not yet.

5. The large batch of granola that is baking as I type, and that will be ladled into cellophane bags for school teachers, piano teachers, soccer coaches, and Father’s Day honorees.

6. Getting real in the Whole Foods parking lot. So freaking genius. (Thanks, Grid!)

7. This promising development out of Palo Alto.

And now a few from Andy:

8. This story on Disney World, where we have never been, which is totally my fault, but something about it just kind of scares me.

9. The latest, crazy good, crazy funny piece of fiction from George Saunders, in this week’s New Yorker.

10. The fact that Louis CK’s show is about to start again — which we liked okay the first time around, but which showed glimmers of greatness and we love him so much, we’re betting it’ll work out.

11. This song, because… just because. I mean, please.

12. More good kid books — 12 a year — coming down the pike from McSweeney’s. Soon to be reviewed on DALS!

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It was late Saturday morning, Memorial Day weekend, and we were at all home, puttering. The kids were upstairs doing their thing, and Jenny was at the kitchen table, her face buried in her MacBook. I opened the refrigerator, and then the freezer.

“We have any butter?” I asked.

Jenny looked up. “Why?”

“I think I’m gonna make some snickerdoodles with the girls,” I said.

“No, you’re not,” she said.

“Why?”

“You can’t make snickerdoodles,” she said. She actually looked serious about this. ”And you definitely can’t write about it.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Snickerdoodles?” God, just the way she pronounced the word: chilling. “I just can’t let you do that. Too emasculating.”

I’m not going to get too deep into the subtext here, or any latent impressions Jenny may or may not have about men who bake — let alone bake snickerdoodles – but let’s just say it felt a little like the person I love very much and with whom I have had two children, was calling my sh#t out. Like, seriously? A guy wants to do something fun with the kids on a sleepy Saturday morning, and he gets hazed by his wife? The thing is, there’s a lot you do as a parent — or, okay, as a father of two daughters — that carries an unmistakable whiff of the surrender-monkey to it. Printing out and memorizing the lyrics to Lady Gaga’s new single: that would definitely be one of those things. Enduring Ryan Seacrest in silence: yup. Nursing a lifelong grudge against musical theater and yet pretending, without complaint, to be Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music when it is called for*. Getting a (small, cute) dog and naming it Iris. Applying toenail polish (no smudges!) in rainbow colors on one tiny foot, and then doing the other tiny foot in the opposite color progression. Over the past several years, I’ve done all those things and so, so much worse and — apologies in advance to all the bros out there who may be reading this — the truth is, I never really gave any of it a second thought. Don’t you kind of check your manly bona fides at the door when you have kids? I mean, isn’t that part of the point?

Given all this, was making a batch of cookies so bad?

“Yeah, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think I can be married to a guy who makes snickerdoodles.”

She is now married to a guy who makes snickerdoodles. (more…)

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In the very early days of DALS, I wrote a short post about my Aunt Patty, who introduced us to the life-altering pleasures of (a) Marcella Hazan, and (b) Marcella Hazan’s milk-braised pork loin. Patty did a lot of things well in the kitchen, that rare person whose talents matched her ambitions. Porchettas; marinated, butterflied, grilled legs of lamb; real tiramisu with real, espresso-soaked lady fingers and hand-whipped cream; lemon-zested ricotta cheesecakes in spring-form pans: the woman could flat-out bring it in the food department. But like any artist, no matter how inspired, she had things she was good at, and things she was great at.

She was great at breakfast. (more…)

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Just about a year ago, my neighbor Helene walked into her midtown office at Bloomberg LP, where she was employed as in-house counsel, and told her boss she was quitting. She had two teen-agers at home and was tired of the grind, tired of her son’s friends asking him “So where does your mom live?” She wanted to be around more. To slow down. I’m sure her boss was shocked, but he couldn’t have been more shocked than I was. Because as long as I’ve known Helene, she’s been on the move. Seven years ago, during those magical moments nursing Abby at 5:30 in the freaking morning, I’d look out the window across the street and see Helene’s bedroom light on. What could she be doing at this hour…voluntarily??? A few months later, during our first winter on the block, there was a huge snowstorm that kept us all holed up in our houses —  but instead of bunkering up and breaking out the boxed mac & cheese like I had planned, she and her husband Seth invited half the neighbors to a multi-course dinner featuring a spicy Thai-style squid salad. (Did I mention they are also world-class cooks?) I got used to seeing Helene zipping around town in her pumpkin-colored mini-Cooper convertible, which, during the week, was always parked in the first spot at the train station. She got in early and worked hard and was always home for dinner. Long before DALS existed, I asked her what the secret was to raising such smart kids and — I’m not making this up! — her answer was: “We eat together every night.”

No, I couldn’t imagine her slowing down. I couldn’t even imagine her sitting down.

But we sat down for morning coffee soon after she left her job. “What do I do all day?” she asked, still sweating from the 8AM spin class she had come from. “I’m so confused!”

“Helene, it’s Tuesday, ” I told her. “You’ve only been home since Friday.”

I should’ve known better than to think that she was going to “take a breather” or devote her summer to, say, working out the kinks in her backhand. Before June was over she had signed up for a vegan baking class at ICE and started talking about opening up a gluten-free, dairy-free bakery. By July she had transformed her oven into her home office, churning out lemony pound cakes, sugar-topped raspberry muffins, fudgey brownies, gooey chocolate chip cookies, orange-almond cakes, coconut macaroons, vanilla and chocolate cupcakes (the girls’ favorite) then dropping them at our house for a taste-test with the command: “Be brutal! I can take it!” By September, I could barely walk the dog without seeing one of my other neighbors shuffling up the block cradling some delicious cellophane-wrapped, raffia-tied baked good. (“Good morning Eileen! Coconut Layer Cake today?”) By February, Helene had perfected her recipes, designed an awesome logo, signed a lease on her storefront, and by May, i.e. last weekend, she opened the doors to  By The Way Bakery.  As in, “This is delicious! Oh, and by the way, it’s also gluten-free and dairy-free.” You’d really never know the difference.

On opening day, she was working harder and moving faster than ever, but this time she was flanked by her two sons, who were manning the register and taking orders. A lot of orders. If you’re local, please stop by and see what the fuss is about. If for some criminal reason you do not walk out of there with a bag of chocolate-dipped macaroons (my favorite), I guarantee you’ll walk out of there with some inspiration. (more…)

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How great is vacation? How great is the idea of having an entire afternoon dedicated to tracking down shrimp in a 200-year-old Spanish-moss draped Lowcountry town on the Edisto River? Only to discover that the dock is closed for business on Mondays so could you come back tomorrow? The thing is, we can! (What else is there to do?) And Monday’s pursuit of shrimp ended up detouring left, down a dirt road, around the rickety fence, following hand-written U-Pick signs to 10 acres and seemingly millions of strawberry bushes begging to be harvested. So what was going to be shrimp and grits or easy shrimp tacos with some lime and jalapeno ended up here, at strawberry pie. And I can’t say that anyone complained.

Jackpot! Would you look at this place. An entire farm to ourselves.

Now that’s a strawberry. (more…)

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I didn’t make this cake for my nine-year-old’s Secret Agent Party. I had the local bakery write the birthday message in “code” (see if you can crack it!) but that’s where my confectionary contribution ended. I opted to buy the cake instead of bake one from scratch because by the time I was thinking about this last piece of the party puzzle, Reasonable Mom (Secret Code Name: Make-it-Easy-on-Yourself Mom) was losing to Unreasonable Mom (Secret Code Name: Who-Exactly-Are-You-Trying-To-Impress Mom). In fact, for this particular party  – with its three-floor, ten-clue scavenger hunt, hand-stenciled tablecloth, and late-night phone consultations with my friend Marcie, who threw her own spy party a few years ago — Unreasonable Mom was crushing Reasonable Mom. For this party, Unreasonable Mom was leaving it all on the field.

It was Unreasonable Mom who, two weeks earlier, forced me spend an hour designing the invitation for the party on my computer, even though the 9-year-old honoree herself was downstairs playing Angry Birds on the iPad. (A major violation in our house! Reasonable Mom always makes sure the birthday girls are as involved in the process whenever possible. Reasonable Mom does everything in her power to protect me from being on the other end of the silent accusation: Who’s this party for anyway? The mom or the kid? ) (more…)

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