Mom’s Christmas Cookies

If Dad produced odd German spicy treats every year (as my recent post talked about), my mother could be depended on for the kinds of cookies you could give to the postman without imagining his puzzled look. Mostly sweet, best eaten fresh, and decorative. Some were super-sweet, like her “Matrimonials.” She produced decorated butter cookies, of…

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Dad the Baker

It’s no accident that the cold, dark time of year finds us thinking of warmth and family—either enjoying it, or missing it. And nothing represents family quite so much as holiday foods. Which generally means cooking. Growing up, my mother was the cook, but certain things my father claimed as his. Preparing Sunday brunch gave…

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Small Business Yumminess

Small Business Saturday! Everyone’s favorite shopping day, it’s a welcome antidote to the mad competition of Black Friday.  And for those of you in the neighborhood of Santa Cruz, when I’m finished sauntering through the Sock Shop and Bookshop Santa Cruz, I’ll probably pop by my favorite eating place, Oswald–who are open tomorrow just from 7-11 and…

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The fun side of the job

Not a lot of people can count play as part of the job. I’m very lucky this way, since doing fun things goes under the header of “building community” and that’s what authors do, right? So when I buy some sparkly flapper dresses and drag the family into climbing into them for photos, that’s the…

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Flavors of spring

I meant to share with you pictures of my new favorite spring fare, that I got just before I set off for New York and wish I’d had more days to gorge on them: ramps and purple asparagus. Ramps are a kind of wild onion with an extremely limited season. And the purple variety of…

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Caramel(ized) corn

I love the foods of summer. Bye-bye squash and cauliflower, hello strawberries and tomatoes with actual flavor rather than vague redness, a panoply of peppers, Romano beans, white peaches, and… corn. Ah, corn. When sweet corn first begins to appear—ears that haven’t travelled a thousand miles, with kernels as chewy as the husk—just giving it…

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Laurie amidst the coffee plants

I got married during a time when I had been deeply immersed in setting up a coffee store called Kaldi’s (see Monday’s post.) Our honeymoon was an academic journey into the South Pacific, eight months through Papua New Guinea, the Australian outback, and island-hopping across the ocean from Tonga to Easter Island. And in many of…

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Coffee: rocket ships or old socks?

So, you have some freshly roasted, gorgeously brown beans, from Ethiopia or Costa Rica. What to do next? Mahmoud Hazr has one approach: Mahmoud set the mortar and pestle to one side and reached for the incongruously homely English saucepan of steaming water that Ali had set to boil, filled from a skin hanging off…

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Coffee, nectar of the underslept

Over the years, I’ve introduced any number of people to the contagion of excellent coffee: a pound of some excellent beans and a decent grinder, I’ve created an addict for life. Beans: what kind? Any beans you get in a coffee store is going to be Coffea arabica (the big, low-altitude robusta are only used…

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Coffee week: 2, the Coffee Cantata

In the 1730s, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a sort of miniature comic opera about a young woman devoutly addicted to coffee, and her despairing father who would do anything to break her of her habit. Because coffee is certainly not a habit suited to a lady. I met this cantata in the seventies, when I…

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