Honey Almond Fig Cake

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My husband's great-grandfather Giovanni was an avid and skilled gardener. He often comes up in family conversations, especially how he had twenty bee hives, how he would check on his bees every ten days without fail, how huge his honey extractor was, and how he would ever have on hand a little bear jar of honey to gift. One legacy of him remains in the fig trees in our backyard. They were branches from his very own fig trees that my in-laws replanted and cultivated until they became full-grown trees of their own.

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Homemade Flour Tortillas

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Mexican meals are a staple in our household. I mean, when don't they satisfy? Give me a bowl of rice and beans any night, and I'm a happy camper. Having deliciously seasoned meat, cheddar cheese, sour cream, guacamole, and other toppings are all pluses, but honestly, I could do without most of them. 

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Brown butter chocolate chip oatmeal cookies

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I don't make cookies very often. These cookies reminded me why. I just can't keep my hands off the dough! I pick a little here and then a little there and I've probably eaten the equivalent of two or three by the time they're baked. These cookies get it right from every side: the perfect combo of sweet and salty with the deep, warm flavor of brown butter, not to mention a little substance from the oats, crunch from the nuts, and, well, chocolate. 

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Lime & Coconut Cake

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I've lived in Southwest Florida for eight years now, and not once have I made it down to the Keys. We had plans to make a family trip there over the summer, but things happened (like, I had a baby).

Much of Southwest Florida is filled with constructions built in the last few decades. So whenever I stumble upon anything in Florida that dates earlier than this century--anything that has the merest wisp of historicity about it--I am eager to soak it in. One of the places I have my heart set on visiting is Ernest Hemmingway's home. Sure, he may have been a less-than-admirable and deeply flawed character, but his prose defined a new style in American literature and his stories, though often troubling, are filled with an aching beauty, a longing for something beyond. Also, his home is worth visiting in itself,  having been built in 1851 by marine architect and wrecker Asa Tift out of limestone he excavated directly from the site. 

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Dried Flowers: Capturing Summer's Beauty

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My mother-in-law has grown flowers in the backyard for some time now. Throughout the spring and summer, the family grows accustomed to beautiful cut flower arrangements brightening the home. This year I wanted to see if I could prolong our enjoyment of flowers into the cooler months.

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Solution for Leftover Rice: Coconut Cardamom Pudding

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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. 

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Recent Read: The Grapes of Wrath

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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.   

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