Solution for Leftover Rice: Coconut Cardamom Pudding

October 03, 2017 by Sarah Blanchard in sarah, baking

We've all been there before: rice was on the menu for dinner and you simply made too much.

I don't know why, but rice is one of those things I find nearly impossible to estimate right. Sometimes it forms a main component of a meal (think rice & beans) and we find ourselves scraping the pot clean. Other times, it's the flavorless and forgotten side. It ends up packed in a container and stowed away in the fridge, waiting for the day it's discovered again and promptly tossed in the bin. Because, let's face it, microwaved rice really stinks.

Recent Read: The Grapes of Wrath

October 01, 2017 by Sarah Blanchard in life, sarah

I just finished reading John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath for the first time. Talk about depressing! It ranks among the most wretched books I've ever read (right up there with Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage). It's one of those books that just hits you in the face with its unrelenting misery, one of those books which continually drops not-so-subtle hints that things are only going to get worse--and they do. Pushing on, I would alternately cry, shake the book, yell at the characters NOT to go do that very thing they were inevitably going to do because doom was the forecast from the start. I found myself five pages from the end, wondering how on earth the misery was going to wrap up, when suddenly, on the second to last page, a glimmer of hope, an ending so strange, so appalling, yet so transcending that it flirts with the sublime.

Basic Sourdough Bread

September 30, 2017 by Maria Almeida in food, maria, baking

Going sourdough turns baking into a lifestyle. I baked a lot of bread even before I started using natural leavening, but the entire process was a lot more spontaneous and less of a commitment. A sourdough starter requires care and attention. Not constant attention and not time-consuming commitment, but it does need to be worked in and worked around. Diligence and care often are their own rewards, but the actual loaves of sourdough, those are what makes it all worth it. Bread person or not, a slice of sourdough bread, with its depth of flavor and creamy, open crumb, toasted with butter or cut for a deli sandwich, cannot fail to please. It is simplicity, it is perfection. It's the daily bread, the bread of life, the bread worth breaking with friends.

Vintage Recipes

September 29, 2017 by Maria Almeida in food, maria

I came across this little gem in an antique store in Tomball - an old recipe box stuffed (literally stuffed, I mean, look at it) with old recipes. Some are handwritten, some are typed out (on a type-writer OF COURSE) , some are clipped from ancient magazines ... some are literally scrawled out on scraps of paper as if whoever wrote it just couldn't leave the party without it.