This is my dad’s favorite summer side dish. My summer dinner memories are studded with it- my mom giving me the kitchen shears and asking me to run outside, my bare feet burning on the hot walkway to the cool grass, to pick chives. Barbecue chicken with corn and cucumber salad. Marinated flank steak with…
Zucchini Bread
With her tan gardening gloves on and trowel in hand, I follow my mom around our gardening boxes. We toss cherry tomatoes in our mouths, warm from the sun and popping with juice. She shows me which onions are ready to pick for dinner and we bend down together to smell her basil plant. And…
Blueberry Cobbler Ice Cream (No-Churn)
I bought a ticket on the no-churn ice cream train and let me tell you, I am here to stay. Not only is this method a huge bang for your buck but more importantly, you are in charge of the flavors. I know we all have our favorites (Chunky Monkey, Häagen-Dazs Coffee, Buckeye Fever from…
Easy Lemon Poppyseed Glaze
Okay so I feel like it is against the rules for me to be a baking blogger and hate frosting cakes. When I was younger I would make a cake for anyone’s and everyone’s birthday. I would day dream of what they would look like, the layers, the piping, the perfectly smooth icing. But it…
Blueberry Cobbler
A seasonal dessert is bittersweet. You crave it in December but know you have to wait till July. Kind of like when you want to wear that cute new sweater but it’s still early September and you know it deserves a better debut than sweating in it all day. Waiting all year for the month…
Blueberry Shortcake Bars
These bars are proving once again that the simplest bakes with the fewest ingredients are usually the tastiest bakes. Blueberry Shortcake Bars are the sibling to one of my favorites on my blog- Strawberry Rhubarb Shortcake– and they might give it a run for its money. This recipe is blueberry cobbler in bar form- no…
Lemon & Thyme Shortbread
The more I bake with lemon the more I am convinced that it might be better than chocolate. I almost erased that sentence as I wrote it but I think it’s true. Well for now. Wait until I am writing about a brownie. My herb garden-more like my herb corner- on my apartment balcony is…
Raspberry Ricotta Cake
If I had a signature bake, this would be it. It has been a staple for who knows how long now and it is a fit for any occasion or season. I wish I could take credit for it’s invention but it all goes to Bon Appétit. May I present, the Raspberry Ricotta Cake. This…
Mini Strawberry Rhubarb Galettes
Strawberry. Rhubarb. Flaky, flaky buttery crust. Oh and…they are personal sized. These will impress at a dinner party for four. Or at 10 a.m. with your coffee. Something about a pie you don’t have to slice…really makes my day. Galettes look gorgeous but they are so simple. They also have a more equal crust to…
Strawberry Rhubarb Shortcake
I am 99 percent sure this recipe has changed my life. I withhold the final one percent at the risk of being dramatic. I am, however, completely sure that I will be making this recipe, and flavor variations, very often for a very long time. Found in A Treasury of New Zealand Baking by Lauraine Jacobs, this Strawberry…
French Toast
Now that I am technically grown up- ya know, I do my own taxes, my knees pop and all I want to do is nap- I have realized what true love looks like. It looks like a mom cooking her two children french toast on a school day at 6:30 a.m. because they begged her…
Flour Tortillas
My love for Mexican food runs deep. If I am having a bad day, J’s go-to solution is to take me somewhere where homemade beans and tortillas are cooking in the back kitchen and server puts warm tortilla chips on the table before I have even ordered my drink. By the end of the meal…
Lemon Ricotta Spring Cake
I am rather obsessed with tea time cakes at the moment. Lately, I have been taking a deep dive into a Treasury of New Zealand Baking by Lauraine Jacobs. And it has really made me wonder why we, Americans, ever threw away tea time as an every day custom. What a glorious notion much of…
Fried Banana and Chocolate Egg Rolls
When I was little, and still had to ask permission to leave the dinner table, I would coyly ask my mom if it was okay to go next door to Aunt Laura’s until bed time. With an “okay” from my mom, my little brother quick on my heels, I would clear my dishes and race…
Cookie Crumble and Fruit Parfait
Sometimes you have leftovers and you imagine giving them a second life. And sometimes that second life is even better than their first! Food reincarnation, baby. I had kept leftover dough from my Ginger Sables frozen away and had made some blood orange curd earlier this week with varying ideas of what to do with…
Citrus Curd
Did you accidentally buy too many lemons? Too many limes? Or in my case it too many blood oranges? We have strict no food-waste policy in our apartment that is enforced rather easily by the fact that we are wildly too good at eating. So too many blood oranges in my fruit bowl became too…
Pineapple Upside Down Johnnycake
What is a johnnycake, you ask? Your new best friend, that’s what. A johnnycake is a mix of cake, cornbread and pancake. That means you can eat this for breakfast- not that you need my permission to eat cake for breakfast. In fact you never need permission to eat cake for breakfast, remember that! This…
Banana Bread
Can’t you just smell it? I can. As it sneaks out of the oven, it wraps me in a blurry, fuzzy blanket of memories of home, family and warm, melting butter. Banana bread. I have never met someone who doesn’t mmmmmm or oooohhhh when I bring banana bread over. I think it is one of…
Cornmeal Biscuits
Let me paint you a scenario. You are out to breakfast, you sit down among the bustling morning crowd, coffee wafts around you and the morning feels light. You sit down at your table and read the menu. Classics. From the Griddle. Benedicts. On the Lighter Side. Eggs look good. But so does the french…
Ginger Sables with Blood Orange Glaze
Bonjour! Je m’applle Anna et je parle très mal Française. Mais! Je pense que je cuit très bien les biscuits français. Non ? These cookies are, at their base, quintessentially French. Butter, butter, butter. Simple, versatile, and perfect next to an espresso while you sit at a little spindly table on cobblestones surrounded by beds…
Cream Scones with Dried Fruit
Scones smell like when you used to be excited to wake up on Saturday morning at 7 a.m. They smell like “Poached or scrambled?”. They smell like tiptoeing next door to my Aunt’s house, peeking in, my feet cold on her frosty door stoop- hoping she was awake with her coffee brewing and the oven…
Asparagus Galette with Whole Wheat Crust
Crust. My true love. It is a chicken or the egg thing for me. Do I love crust because I’m rather good at making it? Or am I rather good at making it because I love it? Also, can someone be a natural a crust maker? The butter, the elusive flakiness. It has to be…
The Lemon Bundt Cake
I’m in Ohio now, right? So I might as well start putting ‘the’ before any phrase I feel is worthy of being distinguished to the utmost. I can’t think of any other recipe than this Lemon Bundt Cake. Or should I say The Lemon Bundt Cake. As I was on the phone with my mom…
Ode to Winter
I can not tell a lie- snow makes me giddy. The tepid winters in central Ohio have left me disappointed and wishing for crisp polar vortex air, frosted apartment windows and ice crystals on my eyelashes. I was so, and excuse what may sound very hyperbolic, fulfilled this week when my phone said it was…
Blueberry Muffins
When I head to the store and have a craving for something sweet I usually linger over the muffins, perfectly lined up in their plastic tins. But then I think, “Not worth the calories.” When you go to the coffee shop and eat a muffin that has been baked hours ahead there is such a…
Peanut Butter Blondie Sundae
Do you ever eat peanut butter right from the jar? Do you love it? Of course you do. And I think the state of Ohio does too. If you are ever driving through the geographical center of Ohio, Centerburg, keep your eye out for a tiny drive through off the highway. The Twist n’ Shake…
World Peace Cookies
….or as I think of them, Air-Conditioning-Peace Cookies. We were sitting on our couch with as little clothing on as possible but still appropriate with all the windows open, the one fan we had just bought at Walmart on high, when my boyfriends boss knocked on our door. Slightly embarrassed but way too hot to…
Sour Cherry Galette
The color! The tartness! The excitement! I have now lived in six different states and two countries. And for the first time my crazy life has led me somewhere that has sour cherries sold by the bucketful at roadside farm stands. Growing up in Colorado, it is nearly impossible to find fresh sour cherries for…
Everyday Pesto
I grew up in a very divided household. My dad loves tomatoes and thus tomato sauce- saucy, chunky, bubbling on the stove for hours sauce. On the other hand, my mom tends to go lighter for her pasta dishes- barely there, just a hint of flavor, takes five minutes to make sauce. I was never…
Cream Cheese Frosting
My favorite frosting. Sweet, tangy and can go on basically anything. If I am choosing between two desserts on the day and one has cream cheese frosting and the other doesn’t, it can truly be the deciding factor. So here is a basic to add to your recipe box. Cream cheese frosting is impossible to…
flour dusted 