Bittersweettoast

I love to bake. For the past five months I have stared at a card that my sister sent me for Valentine's Day to remind me of the benefits of being a good baker. Six words send a powerful message: I am hot & I can bake. Yes, indeed. But good bakers can get into ruts, baking the same old stand-bys, the tried and true they know will delight. And this is the unfortunate state I have been in for way too long. I'm a sucker for cookbooks, and the more stunning the pictures, the more likely it is to lure me in. Next to my sister's card is a cookbook she sent me for Christmas with recipes from the Miette Bakery in San Francisco. The cover is stunningly beautiful as you will see in a moment. Upon opening this gift, I instantly began imagining the spectacular cakes I would bake. Difficult recipes, unusual ingredients and supplies be damned. I knew that someday I would re-create that beautiful cover picture and write all about it in my blog, wowing my readers with my baking know-...

The solstice nears. I know this mostly due to my sleepless state, which is caused by our 16-hour long days. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, but it would be nice to sleep in past 5:15 each morning. Unfortunately, our local flock of birds makes that extremely difficult, and so I persist through my mind's foggy state. Nevertheless, I love summer. As a teacher, my battery is drained and in need of recharging. As a Northwesterner, my body seeks to replenish its store of vitamin D. And as a working parent whose life is just a little too busy, I relish the slower pace of life that summer brings. It's difficult for me to welcome summer and not think about Aloha Hive, the camp in Vermont where I spent two summers as a young girl. This was a camp that my mom went to for eight summers and my sister for two. I knew I was destined to follow in their footsteps, but the timing came a little sooner than expected. When I was just 7 years old, my mom needed to have a triple b...

Sometimes when I finish a post I start wondering if I'll ever come up with another idea again. Fortunately, inspiration keeps coming, sometimes in the strangest ways. We were up in Victoria, B.C. this past weekend, a last-minute getaway to join up with Eric after he finished sailing in the Swiftsure race. If you've never been, Victoria is one of those places that beckons you to become English. We had perfect, drizzly, tea-drinking weather, and my son quickly proclaimed the weekend to be his favorite "eating" holiday ever. He divides our vacations into two categories: "active" trips in which we burn off more calories that we take in and "eating" trips, which speak for themselves. Imagine that -- a 16-year-old boy who actually enjoyed touring the Butchart Gardens, perhaps because the afternoon tea there involved some really delicious eating. The gardens were indeed beautiful and captured well by my sous-photographer, Johanna. So my mind was o...

Sixteen years ago today I had one of the most fearful moments of my life. Well, that may be a little dramatic, but I was very pregnant with our second child. We had  moved two weeks earlier to the Eastside, one bridge away from Seattle where I was set to deliver. For those of you who do not live in this area, there's a really big lake that separates Seattle and the Eastside communities and  two bridges that connect them. Every morning and every afternoon many cars travel very slowly over those bridges as Seattleites and Eastsiders drive to work and back home. So my fear of going into labor during rush-hour, complete with visions of a bridge delivery dancing through my brain, was not a crazy one. Lucky me, my first contraction on May 14th arrived at 5:30am, just as all those little worker bees were leaving their garages and heading to the office. I was doomed to deliver in the backseat of our car; not exactly what I was hoping for. By 6:30 we were on the road. It was...

Cinco de Mayo. Even if you never studied Spanish, you know this means that day in May when we eat Mexican food and drink Margaritas. What you may not know is why. Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Mexican army's  victory over France at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. You see, the year before this victory, Mexico was in financial ruin and needed to default on some loans from Europe. Britain and Spain were able to negotiate with Mexico, but those pesky French saw this as the perfect opportunity to finally grab a chunk of land on the other side of the Atlantic. Late in 1861 a large French fleet arrived and stormed the Mexican shores at Veracruz, forcing President Juarez to retreat. But in a great David and Goliath turn of events, Juarez put together a rag tag army of 2000 who, on May 5, 1862, fought a French army three times its size and won. Although the war went on for six more years before Napoleon III gave up and returned home to his cafes and croissants, this impre...

I went skiing this past weekend, and although I should have been exalting over the ten inches of new April snow that unexpectedly fell, I couldn't help but think of all the recent Facebook posts I had seen over the past week from friends vacationing in Hawaii. My heart was not in the snow, as nice as it was. Instead it was seeking a warm, sunny beach, blue skies, and the scent of beautiful plumeria blossoms. Perhaps this is why, as I pondered the subject of an overdue blog post, my mind veered towards the Mai Tai. Call it a lame attempt to summon tropical breezes in 50-degree weather, but I've been thinking about Mai Tais for a couple of months now. I had one last summer, umbrella and all, on the island of Maui, but to be totally honest I was not enamored by the drink. Despite my love for fresh pineapple, I don't actually like the fruit in any other form, so my pineapple-laden drink just wasn't hitting the spot. Rum is also not my favorite spirit....

My dad and I used to have this tradition of trying to beat one another at finding the 6 differences as quickly as possible in Hocus Focus, that two-paneled picture you see in the Comics & Puzzles section of the newspaper. As simple as the drawings were, it was amazing how challenged we each could be, especially when the other quickly got to 5. I still play Hocus Focus when free time allows. On days when the differences just don't appear, I imagine my dad quickly claiming victory; when my own vision works wonders, I gloat at my prowess and make my victory "V". Here's a little version of Hocus Focus for you: Okay, I admit, I stretched the rules of the game because there are more than 6 changes between these two pictures. The one on the left shows my liquor collection pre-blog days when I had the ingredients to make a gin and tonic, kir, and margarita, along with an assortment of little airplane bottles that were used for cooking and baking. Now, ju...