Develop a Taste for Strong, Sharp Flavors

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Image by Negative-Space from Pixabay

When we were in Kansas City recently we visited the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, a truly splendiferous place that we had missed out on the last time we came through town because we got delayed at Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue. (Also because we got going rather late that morning.) Anyway, if you’re ever in the area you really should go. It’s free, and one of its major draws is that it has one of only two castings of Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise.” There’s even a video that shows how they installed the thing. (We knew nothing about this ahead of time, of course, in our time-honored tradition of bumbling and stumbling upon things of wonder. We walked in and got to the bottom of the ramp that leads up to it, and I said, “Those are Ghiberti’s doors!” So I guess I get full props for recognizing them.)

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What’s the Difference between a Habit and a Streak–and Which One Is Better?

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

We just got into the month of June, and I was thinking about ideas I could implement to get some results I’d like to see over the summer. Laura Vanderkam, one of only a couple of lifestyle bloggers I follow (the other one’s being Gretchen Rubin—of course) has been on a running streak for well over a year now (800+ days). She committed to running at least a mile every single day, and she has done so even if she’s been on a trip and had to run around the

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A Quick, Fresh, Healthy Dinner

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Image by kitkatty007 from Pixabay

No picture of this one, as it was thrown together at the last minute and rushed to the dinner table. But the stock photo gives you an idea of some ingredients, and you can use whatever you have on hand. It was my turn to make dinner last night (my mother-in-law and I trade off, very informally–how I suffer!), and I wanted to use up some stuff I had on hand–cucumbers, spinach and peanut salad dressing–and I’d taken some chicken out of the freezer. We’d had a lovely Memorial Day dinner Monday that featured the Korean marinated grilled steak from Half Baked Harvest (one of only four cooking blogs to which I

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A Lovely Payoff

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Not a food-related post today, but just a nice reminder from our trip that sometimes you get to see the fruits of your labors in a surprising and gratifying way. These two trees are in the front of our old house in Northern Virginia where we lived from 1994-2009. We planted them when Gideon was a baby/toddler–I think he may have been a year and a half old. I remember that we did some gardening in the front yard with him sitting out there in his playpen with us. Jim and I pondered and pondered about what trees to choose and decided on the contrast of the Japanese red maple with the Kousa dogwood. The photograph doesn’t do the dogwood justice; it was covered with blooms. Kousas are so much nicer than the regular dogwoods as they bloom quite a bit later and their blossoms are longer-lasting than the regular ones. I keep saying  that I want to plant one here, as they are hardy to zone 4. Since they bloom later in the season they are less likely than the earlier-flowering ones to have their buds killed by a freeze. Seeing the spectacular results of our efforts over two decades ago is a nice spur for me to get going on planting one now. They take awhile to get going, and we aren’t necessarily going to be at this house for 20 more years! Maybe I’d better go over to the garden center today and see if they have any in stock.

Is there a project you need to start so that you can see the results down the road?

Eating on Vacation with Enjoyment and Control

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Image by Quinn Kampschroer from Pixabay

I haven’t written much while we’ve been on our trip, although I hope you got the recipe in the previous post for the white chocolate-cream cheese frosting, a true winner. At some point I’ll do a calculation of the sugar content of it and the buttercream, but that’s a subject for another day. In this post I want to give some random ideas on vacation eating, a topic I’ve discussed rather thoroughly before. But hey! There’s always room for more info about eating mindfully and well.

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Two Recent Gatherings, Plus a Great Frosting Recipe

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Here I sit in Kansas City, Missouri, well after the events I described in my last post: the post-concert reception and the dinner for the annual business meeting. So I’ll give you a quick update and then a great, simple frosting recipe that you can use in the place of that horrible powdered-sugar stuff. I’ll be doing an exhaustive (and exhausting) recipe and variations for my streamlined Swiss buttercream, but that will have to wait.

In the meantime, here’s what I did, with some helpful hints along the way:

I nixed the black pepper-Parmesan biscotti and just stuck with the spicy Cheddar cookies.

I nixed the banana cupcakes and just stuck with the pistachio ones, part of them with strawberry buttercream (recipe to come) and part with white chocolate-cream cheese frosting (recipe below).

Sorry about the rather distorted photograph; it was taken in haste via smartphone at the reception itself.

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Reception Recipes–Mini Cupcakes and Savory Cookies

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silver platter mounded with cheddar cookies
Not a great shot; I’ll hope to replace it after this week’s reception.

What’m I making for this Friday, the last post-concert reception for the year? I’m so glad you asked! We have a very spring-y theme: “April Showers Bring May Flowers,” and I’m so excited about making adorable little cupcakes plus some savory cookies. The sweet items will be very small, made in my mini-cupcake tins (of which I have six). I’m not going to worry too much about the sugar content of anything, and I do plan to sample some. They are going to be so cute! And people love my Cheddar cookies. I will have a visual and textural contrast to those with some pepper-Parmesan biscotti, an item I’ve made before that went over well.

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How Do I Balance the Day?

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Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

Since I’ve been writing so much about various fad diets that you should just blithely ignore (with more to come), I thought it might be a good idea to write something about how a person should eat, and how well my own diet stacks up.

So first, for breakfast, Jim and I typically alternate between an egg-and-meat meal and a grain-based meal. If we had an omelet with veggies, cheese and perhaps some meat one morning then I might make whole-grain muffins the next day. Or we might have bagels bought

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How Do You Evaluate Health Claims?

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Image by Manfred Steger from Pixabay

I thought that I had covered the major fad diets out there but realized that there are a few more to aim at. Before I plunge into more of these scams, I figured it would be a good idea to write more generally about how to make informed decisions about your health or anything else. Ridiculous new ideas are coming down the pike every day. Here are some guidelines you can use:

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No More Massive Desserts!

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Image by GLady from Pixabay

Just a quick post today as I go back to a principle I’ve been on the verge of forsaking, that making/serving a big, massive dessert is almost always a mistake. Much, much better to make small, individual portions that are easy to serve and that don’t overload people. I let myself get sucked into making that huge three-layer carrot cake for the Easter dinner, and, while I enjoyed the challenge, in the end I decided it just wasn’t worth it. People were very appreciative of my wonderful dinner and ate a lot, so then that massive (I know I keep using that word) cake was

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