On esoteric fruit
I first tasted quince the first time I had dinner with my first editor, an exceedingly kind, thoughtful woman of whom I nonetheless was terrified, because she was very New York Publishing World, and because she was my first editor. She had let me choose the restaurant, which only ratcheted up the stakes. I’m surprised that I don’t remember what I wore, because I surely would have labored over the decision with a degree of care most commonly seen among people handling live explosives. The evening went better than I had expected: she told a funny story about her cat and gracefully ignored my elaborate, enthusiastic mispronunciation of the white wine she’d ordered. And when we arrived at dessert, she opened the menu…
Read moreAhhhh, finally
This post is to point out something that, well, if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already noticed: Orangette, the old gal, got a facelift. The feel of this site is important to me, as I know it is to you, and I hope you’ll find the new look as clean, calm, and pleasant as the old one. The whole idea here was not to add tons of bells and whistles and shiny things, but simply to make this site easier to use and more useful for all of us. You’ll see that we now have a real, honest-to-goodness recipe page, and that recipes are categorized not only by ingredient(!), but by season(!), by course(!), and even occasionally by holiday. (You’ll also see that…
Read moreDecember 10
I come to you today for three reasons: 1) it is so windy outside this morning that my entire house will shortly be carried away (to Oz, I hope) and I want to leave you something to remember me by; 2) there is a fat, freshly baked loaf of banana bread on my kitchen counter that is not for me, and we all know how this will end if I don’t occupy myself; and 3) though no one needs encouragement to buy more stuff, I enjoy a nice holiday gift guide. What follows is a quick, and possibly too late to be useful, tour of some of my favorite things to give and receive, accompanied by a selection of photographs…
Read moreDoop dee doo
A couple of years ago, late one winter morning, we were out running errands in the neighborhood, and we stopped into La Carta de Oaxaca, on Ballard Avenue, for an early lunch. June was still in a high chair and not yet fully proficient at chewing anything with crunch, so we ordered their sopa de pollo for her, a rich, brothy chicken soup served in a bowl big enough for mixing cake batter, with the meat still on the bone and big hunks of zucchini, carrot, and chayote. I shredded the meat onto a plate and chopped up the vegetables with the side of my spoon. She ate with her hands, the juices running fast down her forearms, which were then still…
Read moreNovember 6
This one goes out to my friend Natalie. One night early last month, she and hers were over for dinner, and I made an applesauce cake with caramel glaze for dessert. As they left, she asked about the recipe, and she’s been patiently waiting for me to post it ever since. In the intervening weeks, our kitchen faucet sprung a leak – a leak that must have actually sprung a month or two before that, because by the time we noticed it, it had thoroughly saturated all the wooden surfaces below and around it, making them buckle and curl like waves on an ocean, a special ocean that smells like rot. We called Natalie and Michael, because they are handy…
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