Gilding the Lily since 2006
I know I write a lot about breakfast. Can’t help it. It is, after all, the most important meal of the day, and Portland has such a cultish breakfast and brunch culture (and let’s face it; brunch is just breakfast with alcohol). It might just …
I usually don’t cook from cookbooks, but occasionally one finds oneself with a surfeit of some wintry CSA crucifer like cauliflower, and after gazing at your kitchen shelf, still shockingly covered in dusty quart jars of pickles, decide maybe you’ll try cooking the damn thing …
Umami is a many-splendored thing. I love just piling it on in my dishes, and I am even known to add a scant whisper (or sometimes more of a prattle) of MSG to my dishes. Oh, lower those eyebrows, you. MSG is harmless. I see …
All this cold rain has the nettles taking their sweet time, but in my spot, they’re up a little. They’re up enough, anyway, about three nodes or so, and I snip off the top two and slip them in my bag. Zephyr whines from his …
…or, Variation on a Theme I know – I talked about making tomato soup only a few weeks ago. Get off my back! It’s been really rainy! And besides, if you had all these jars of home-canned heirloom tomatoes staring at you from your pantry …
For some, winter is the season of dour darkness, of cold feet and of carbohydrate comforts. For others, winter is the season of sunny citrus, acidic and bright. Those of us who hail from climes north of around 40º trend toward the former category, but …
Newberry’s was a five-and-dime that had three locations in Portland: Lloyd Center (now a Dollar Tree), downtown (now a Ross Dress-for-Less) and at the ghost in the shell, Eastport Plaza (the mall has been razed and turned into a movie theater, Jo-Ann Fabrics & Crafts …
Everyone has been complaining lately about the utterly deplorable suckfest that was 2010. I may have been too shell-shocked, too sleep-deprived and too baby-stoned to notice the surfeit of misery apparently all around me (oxytocin’s a helluva drug), but I really didn’t think last year …
Food blogging has sort of jumped the shark, hasn’t it? Has anyone else noticed this? The concept that “when things I like become popular, they are ruined” has never felt truer to me than it does lately, and I think it was therapeutic (and honest?) …
I’m starting to get it, this notion that parenting is hard. Thing is, the parenting part is actually pretty easy. I have an extraordinarily easy baby that pretty much does nothing but sleep and laugh. Taking care of him isn’t the hard part. It’s the …