Snacks – Orangette

Out here, up here

Molly — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 22:17:30 +0000

Today I come to you from Sitka, Alaska, where I’ve been since last Saturday, leading a writing workshop on memoir and place. I’m among the faculty for the first-ever Sitka Arts and Science Festival, a week of multi-disciplinary cross-pollination and collaboration dreamed up by the Sitka Fine Arts Camp and several local partners, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s been cool and misty almost every day, summer-in-Sitka-y. I didn’t bring enough clothing for this weather, even though, after fourteen years in the Pacific Northwest, I ought to know better. I’m re-wearing what I did bring. Today is day four for these leggings, day two for this sweatshirt. I’ve been wearing my cheap Uniqlo down vest, and it spits out tiny white…

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Cooking with a young child

Molly — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 23:40:13 +0000

Today, on the ole blog: some thoughts about cooking with a kid! After the jump! Because I totally get that not everyone wants to read about kid stuff! See you next time! June started school last fall, and we enrolled her in a Montessori school. I went to a Montessori-influenced school, myself, from preschool through middle school, and Brandon once spent a year teaching music in a Montessori school, and without going into a whole bunch of educational philosophy that I only vaguely follow and that, as a result, makes me really sleepy, I will just say that I loved the Montessori method as a student, and that it makes a lot of sense to us as parents. (Let’s ignore, for now, the…

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On esoteric fruit

Molly — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 19:42:05 +0000

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…

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November 6

Molly — Fri, 06 Nov 2015 23:22:00 +0000

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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As ever

Molly — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 01:47:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I got up earlier than usual, while the light was still blue, and baked a cake. We are having a very adult fall – not adult in the sense of, I don’t know, the adult film industry, but in the sense that we now have a child who is enrolled in a real school. I remember only bits and pieces of my own first year of school, but I do remember operating under the happy illusion that my parents were bonafide adults who had things figured out. Having now crossed over to the other side of that illusion, I can report that, whoa, hey, it’s an illusion! June is no fool, but she’s content to play along as…

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June 26

Molly — Fri, 26 Jun 2015 20:47:00 +0000

I am feeling profoundly (or, as my fingers tried to put it, “feely profounding”) inarticulate today in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage. I keep thinking of my uncle Jerry, the first gay person I ever knew, whose death to AIDS in 1988 spurred me to activism as a young kid with moussed bangs and a Silence=Death sweatshirt, and in whose memory June carries one of her middle names. I wonder what he would say today. I’m grateful, relieved, elated, and beyond, that June will grow up in a world that’s very different from what I knew in 1980s Oklahoma. It also feels like a fitting time to reread John Birdsall’s whip-smart Lucky Peach piece, “America, Your Food…

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May 7

Molly — Thu, 07 May 2015 22:05:00 +0000

One Tuesday evening in March, I went somewhat accidentally to the town of Edison, Washington, and bought a pack of graham crackers. Two weeks later, I drove back deliberately, 75 miles each way, just to buy more. Thanks to Renee Bourgault and her wonderful Breadfarm, I got to tell the story, and share the recipe, on (the newly redesigned! fancy!) Saveur.com.

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You win

Molly — Mon, 04 May 2015 08:11:00 +0000

When I moved to Seattle, I lived a gray shingled apartment building on Northeast 67th Street, a speedy bus ride to the UW, where I had just started school. My apartment had deep-pile carpet the color of weak tea and a floodlit view of a parking lot, but it was mine, mine mine mine mine mine mine mine. Even getting a utilities bill was exhilarating: it was in my name! I bought cheap produce at the stand a few blocks east, found a good Thai curry place a few blocks to the west, and got takeout from an Indian restaurant down the street. I started this blog in that apartment in 2004, and I lived there when I met Brandon…

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I like to imagine

Molly — Sat, 18 Apr 2015 09:26:00 +0000

The only bookshelves in our house are in June’s room, one and a half walls of built-ins that bracket the space like a capital L. The previous owner had used the room as an office, as far as we can tell, and we planned to do the same. We set my desk under the window. I had just started writing Delancey then, and I pounded out the early chapters there – or, more often, avoided pounding out the early chapters by watching nuthatches flit around the giant evergreen outside. At some point, we decided that having a baby would be good idea, and to make room for her, we moved my desk to the dining room, replaced it with a crib, and hung…

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Doing it right

Molly — Sat, 14 Mar 2015 09:12:00 +0000

I believe in everyday cake. I may have remembered to floss four times last week, up from my usual count of zero. I may have had avocado toast one sunny morning at Vif, with za’atar, aleppo pepper, preserved Meyer lemon, and celery(!). I may have even rediscovered R.E.M.’s superlative Green after forgetting about it for twenty years and then sung along loudly and with feeling to “World Leader Pretend” and got goosebumps during the bridge like I used to when I was seventeen. But nothing makes me feel like I’m really living, really doing it up right, like having a cake on my kitchen counter on a weekday. About a week ago, my friend Shari posted a photograph of a cake on Instagram and…

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