Every year about this time I start thinking about Christmas. It must be a psychological cooling device, because I stop thinking about it the moment the heat breaks. When I was at school and had summers off, this preoccupation took the form of various projects: one summer I latch-hooked a rug with Santa Claus heads on it (yikes!), another I spent festooning a foot-high Christmas tree with tiny ornaments (one of my better efforts), and another I devoted to the production of worry-doll ornaments vaguely resembling characters from history and fiction (only I could identify them).
Continue reading …

There was a story in one of my primary school readers about three English siblings, suffering from collective insomnia very late one stormy night, who converged in their kitchen and conspired to make potato cakes from a bowl of mashed potatoes that their mother had been saving in the fridge. So carefully did the children erase all evidence of their nocturnal cookery that on the following morning, their mother was convinced that there had never been a bowl of potatoes in the fridge to begin with.
Continue reading …

On the 4th of July, while I was lounging around munching on cold lamb kibbeh for breakfast and samosas for lunch, our native son Joey Chestnut set a new world record at the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island, polishing off 66 dogs in twelve minutes and defeating six-time champion Takeru Kobayashi of Japan. Chestnut brings the champion’s coveted mustard-yellow belt back to the United States. Kobayashi, who set a new personal record on the 4th despite a jaw injury, gets an admiring salute as well.
Continue reading …

I’m obsessed with ice cream; I can’t stop making it. It’s because I’ve had ice-cream-maker envy my whole life, and now I’ve finally got one (thanks, Dad and Teryl).

This rosemary olive oil ice cream is my favorite recent concoction, and my contribution to Meeta’s July Monthly Mingle over at What’s For Lunch, Honey?. It’s inspired by an olive oil gelato on the menu at Babbo in New York City. There is a recipe for this in the Babbo cookbook but, cynic that I am, I can’t imagine that Mr. Batali has handed over his own precise formula. (This is a cynicism born of recently reading Bill Buford’s “Heat”.)
Continue reading …