I baked all of the time! I love baking and have lost that passion over the years.

This just sounds like fun! :) 4 weeks ago

I know I shouldn’t really care, but guys, I want to be the cool teacher. Not cool as in pals with the students, but the kind of teacher students think of as changing their mind about school. As I wrote in a letter to myself at the end of my licensure program, “Be the kind of teacher they make those stupid movies about.”

And so, I baked this weekend. My seventh-grade social studies class is learning about the Civil War, a good topic for 12 year old boys, especially because this particular curriculum is rife with pictures of surgical instruments and guns and whatnot. And in my attempt to be the cool teacher, I made hardtack, which is a traditional soldier bread. I’m almost embarrassed to call it baking, because the ingredients are flour, water, and salt, but I brought it and the students were super excited. 3 months ago

Friday would have been my fella’s birthday. It was obviously a bummer of a day, but Saturday night a couple of friends took me out for dinner, and then we went back to my place and ate a birthday cake that I’d made in S’s honor. The cake was a little dry, but there was a lot of buttercream frosting, and sprinkles, and that made up for a lot.

Yesterday two good friends who live in Utah came up for brunch. I made an egg bake and this brown butter banana strawberry bread which wasn’t too hard but still a good lesson that butter goes from brown to burnt and gross in mere seconds. We had a lovely afternoon drinking champagne and talking about weird geologists and Louis Armstrong’s affinity for fried eggs and Christmas trees. 4 months ago

My grade-level team is quite lovely, and since it’s so small we all celebrate each other’s birthday. Today was the first, and we brought in breakfast. I told everyone that my snacks would ALWAYS be homemade, and odds were that they’d be something I’d never made before. Luckily, the pumpkin cake with pecan streusel from Veganomicon was a crowd-pleaser, and even the girl who doesn’t like pumpkin liked it. 8 months ago

I meant to bake something to bring to Chicago with me, but I was incredibly lazy before I left, so I skipped it. But before the cookout, my friend and I did some epic grocery shopping. My friend was looking at cakes at Whole Foods, talking about how she should get our friend Z, visiting from Dubai and the whole reason behind my trip, something celebratory. I looked at her and scoffed at the fact that she’d contemplate buying some ridiculously expensive cake there. I immediately declared that I’d bake something when we got back to her house. She seemed a little skeptical, but I decided right then and there that I’d make a fruit pizza. We googled some recipes and bought everything right there. What did people do before smartphones?

I’d never actually made a fruit pizza, but for once, thinking “how hard could it be?” didn’t bite me in the ass. I used this recipe, which was so simple. And then I realized the glory of cooking for people who never cook, because all night my friends said, “I can’t believe you MADE this,” like I’d done something more labor-intensive than essentially frost a large sugar cookie and put fruit on top of it. 8 months ago

I was reading Home Baking, one of the prettiest cookbooks in the world, and I found a recipe for pepper-bacon bread. I’ve fallen pretty squarely off the vegetarian wagon, but I still thought that was way too much work to bother with for our little house. We’re only two people. And a cat, but he really only likes peanut butter sandwiches and weird vegan food like nutritional yeast.

But anyway, there on the schedule for teacher opening week was a potluck! What better way would there be to ingratiate myself to the rest of the staff?

I took two days to make it. This yeast was fermented as all get-out, and that made it smell a little funny, I’m not gonna lie. Perhaps this was why it wasn’t as well-received as, say, the seven-layer taco dip. Which is the only thing that teacher knows how to make, he informed me. NOT THAT I’M BITTER. Looks like I’m gonna have to dial it back for any future potlucks. More for me, though. 9 months ago

MY BEST FRIEND IS COMING HOME. Only for a day, so she can move her stuff out of her ex-boyfriend’s, but I haven’t seen her in months. And then she’s moving it all back up north, far away, in with her new boyfriend. I’m meeting him for the first time. Maybe I’ll hate him so I can subtly sabotage their relationship and get her back here quick. Probably I won’t. Sigh.

She won’t be here for too long, probably just for a couple hours’ worth of sitting around whining about the state of the world, what we do best. I’ve got a rhubarb cake (from the rhubarb compendium) in the oven. Who knew rhubarb was worthy of a compendium? 9 months ago

Hippie wedding and no money…hmmm, I think I shall bake a wedding gift. I made, but of course, granola muffins. When she opened them, E informed me she loved granola, which was surprising to no one. I used what my parents had at their house, which was a nice chocolaty, almondy, craisiny granola, and cranberry honey. I have a bad habit of doing exactly what cooks are supposed to not do, which is not make things for people that they’ve never made before, but how hard is it to make muffins? They looked good. 9 months ago

One of my besties is getting married this weekend, and three of us, but mostly two of us (to be fair, the other one lives in Alaska) are throwing her a bachelorette party. Since we are a) kind of boring and b) spread out all around the country, we’re just getting a hotel room at a casino and hanging out, because we’ve all been wracking our brains trying to remember the last time the four of us were in a room all together, and the most recent thing we’ve come up with was about 11 years ago. Yikes. (I feel sorry for the one other girl who’s coming. It’s going to be really difficult not to start half our sentences with “hey, remember in high school when…”)

Since I am poor, and my friends know it, I’m trying to weasel my way out of paying for so much with my mad creative skills. I made a banner-it’s something an 8-year-old could have done, but it’s sparkly! And I also made a chocolate layer cake with mocha buttercream frosting. And if that can’t get me some points in a ladyfest, I don’t know what can. 9 months ago

One of my good friends from college is in town from Chicago, taking her daughter to the Mall of America.

When they’re done shopping, which could be a while, because KW was pretty psyched when I told her there was no sales tax on clothing here, we’re going on a picnic at one of my favorite places to take out-of-town guests, Minnehaha Falls. The giant waterfall should be enough to entertain the youngun (it always entertains my boyfriend) so she and I can reminisce about all the stupid drunken things we used to do, which are not appropriate for children’s ears.

There’s a batch of peanut butter cookies cooling on the wire rack right now, ready to be packed up at a moment’s notice. 10 months ago

The occasion being, I looked in my fruit bowl and figured I’d better use up the limes sitting in there before they turned to stones, then wondered how long I’d had the coconut sitting in my fridge.

So I adapted the lemon poppy seed muffins recipe (my second successful recipe adaptation lately, btw) from Vegan Brunch and made coconut-lime muffins. They turned out just dandy, if a couple were a little burnt on the sides.

PS: Did you think of ELO when I said “turn to stones?” I hope so, even though I didn’t do it intentionally. Here’s a version of it from Minneapolis’s favorite cover band, ELnO. 10 months ago

After finishing the giant cooking goal I’d worked on for years, I felt a little aimless in the kitchen. I wanted to have, if you will, a higher purpose to my cooking, and ideally one that would involve sharing food with others.

So tonight: the owner of our local coffeeshop, who’s become a friend, has sold shop, and is moving in with his parents for a while to, I imagine, lick his wounds. Today is the last real day of business on his watch, so tonight he’s coming over for a celebratory/goodbye dinner with the boyfriend and me. The menu: soy sauce chicken, stir-fried potatoes, cucumber-pear salad, old-fashioned lemon ice cream, and green tea shortbread cookies from here, a cookbook I’ve used before and totally love. The all-American/Chinese meal, if you will. 10 months ago