Treats for appetites of every size
I’m pretty sure my roommate buys bananas exclusively so that I’ll turn them into banana bread. They sit in our fruit bowl, largely untouched, until there are only three left and they’re all brown. At which point I don’t really have a choice in the matter, since my banana bread recipe just happens to call for exactly three overripe bananas.
It is scarily close to the end of my first semester of law school. This coming week is the last full week of class. After that, two half weeks are all that separate me from reading period and final exams. And then that’s it – one sixth of the way through.
Full disclosure: this is the earliest I’ve started celebrating Christmas in recent memory. Most years, I have a strict no-Christmas-until-after-Thanksgiving rule, but desperate times and whatnot.
This is kind of embarrassing. I made it all the way to October 25 (only 6 days until Halloween!) without posting a single pumpkin recipe. I’m not sure how I can call myself a true seasonal baker.
Strawberries are a happy fruit. I’m not sure what exactly makes them happy, though. Maybe because they are red. Maybe because they are the June’s fruit, and June is my birthday month. Maybe because they are the only fruit that I would consider eating as a dessert unadorned. Maybe because I just finished reading The Happiness Project and am looking for happiness everywhere. For whatever reason, they are happy.
I love breakfast. It combines everything I like in a single meal. Eggs. Cheese. Bacon. Carbs. Sweets. It can be warm and savory. It can be refreshing and simple. Many things that normally would not necessarily qualify as a meal find their way into breakfast. Smoothies, which are really just glorified frappes, become nutritious at breakfast. French toast, which we should all just admit is a vehicle for syrup and sugar, is a mainstay at any self-respecting breakfast establishment. It really is a surprisingly versatile meal.
This weekend marks the first weekend of Lent for 2015, and, as I do every year, I gave up any and all sweets. A lot of people do this. But I don’t think that a lot of people have the level of dependency on sweets that I do. I legitimately had withdrawal headaches for two full days Wednesday and Thursday. So this is a big deal for me.
Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day! So, naturally, I had to bake something for the occasion. I looked through the recipes that I had stolen from my mom’s recipe box and found one for Irish bread, and the decision was made. Funny enough, after I had already made the Irish bread, I got a call from Sandy (her recipes include Trout Farm Apple Pie and Oh Henry Bars) asking if I wanted an Irish recipe for my blog this week. I told her I had already baked some Irish bread, only to find out it had actually been her recipe, and …
I spent the weekend in NYC with my mom, who was an amazing sport and took the train down from Massachusetts (that’s a very long train ride). We went and saw Lion King on Broadway, exactly 20 years after I first saw Lion King in theaters, which is pretty cool. I’m actually listening to the soundtrack now as I write this. Anyways, despite a weekend in the city with lots of inspiration in the form of baked goods around us, we couldn’t come up with what I should bake this weekend. Additionally, whatever I baked had to be doable while …