When I mention that we eat a dinner salad almost every night, M-F, I get furrowed brows and lots of hows? No one asks why, because most of us know, because most of us are looking for simple ways to get more vegetables into our day and into the bellies of our tiny humans. But how? I once heard a simple vegetable wisdom. It goes like this: If you want to get more vegetables into mealtimes, especially with kids, start with them. Fill up on them first. Read more
I miss the good ole days, the days where I’d test a recipe over weeks, if not months, and post it when it was ready, when it was just right. I’d test it on Saturday mornings, when we’d eat it for breakfast, not 6 times in a row over the course of a Monday and Tuesday, a speed I learned when recipe testing for a cookbook. I started testing these Blueberry Spelt Pancakes with crushed walnuts on the underneath side sometime last year, like the good ole days, over slow Saturday and Sunday mornings. Read more
I fell in love with a little prepackaged turmeric oatmeal cup on a trip to Seattle. Kev and I ate it in our hotel room every morning to save money. He’d bring up filtered water from the workout room, 3 floors down, where I swear I heard weights dropping to the ground at 5am. Bump, bump. Bump, bump. Bump, bump. We were still on central time, awake before the hotel and the city, before the sun and the birds. Read more
Every time I make a quiche, every time, my mind goes to the restored kitchen of a bed and breakfast, like this one. The one we dream about running when we’re old and grey, when our kids are young but grown, when a 10-inch quiche is too much for our table of two. I’ll stockpile handmade pie dough in the freezer and blind bake the crust each night. We’ll fill it with the freshest eggs and whatever else is in season. Read more
Like religion and politics and tradition, there comes a point in adulthood when you decide what to keep from childhood and what to revise and what to frame for a shelf. These questions go through rounds of editing when two become one and then three and almost four. The Coleman family Christmas traditions are a slurry of his, mine, and what is starting to become ours. But the overnight orange cardamom rolls and cutting down a tree and going on a carriage ride and decorating a gingerbread house and cookies, the new things, they all felt a little fraudulent at first, like trying on a romper when you’ve always worn jeans. Do they fit us right? Only time will tell. Read more
We can do big, hard things. This is sort of becoming a mantra at our house. Though most of our big things are small things and our hard things are not-so-hard things, but they are for us. You know, things like saying good-bye to mom before getting on the bus to school, or planning ahead and using a calendar, or saying no instead of overcommitting. And then there are other big-hard things like making a cheese board for a party. Ask me to design a whole house, and I’ll leap with glee. But ask me to create a winter cheese board, and I’ll sweat faster than a cold block of cheese in a warm room. Read more
If you’ve been around since the beginning, you’ll remember when this blog was exclusively a baking blog. Eventually, my pants got tight from all the testing, because baking takes a lot of testing. And I got grumpy that my pants were tight. So, I cooled it on all the baking and turned my attention to dinnertime, which was a gaping hole at our house, that and designing our home, which made me really happy. But now that all my pants are all fitted with a stretchy elastic band and the doctor says to eat 300 extra calories a day, I’m bringing back vintage Faux Martha for a second, turning this place into a bakeshop. On the menu this week: Grand Cru Apple Beer Bread. Read more
How realistic are your expectations of yourself? Hmmm. Do you over plan and underdeliver? Uh-huh. Are you met with the feeling of failure when you don’t live up to your expectations? Uh-huh, yes. How many hours are allotted in your day to complete these expected tasks? Hmmm. Do your expectations exceed or fit within that given timeframe? Ugh, you got me there.
These Swig Pumpkin Cookies were on my list to-make last year. You know, October 2018. Here we are on the last day of October 2019, after a whole lotta cookie testing, and the cookie in my head finally slid out of the oven and onto the blog. Just in time. Expectation barely met after completely underdelivering last year. Hmmmph. Read more
