Lemons and Poppyseeds comments: 45

I finally finished tying the quilt shortly after I took this photo. It was all I could do not to take it out of the dryer (I always wash and dry my quilts [on warm] the minute I finish them), put my pajamas back on, and hop back into the bed. But instead I made a poppyseed lemon cake. I'll let you know how it turns out. How both turn out!

While the Dough Rises comments: 89

Winner: Most Kissable Nose 2012.

If you haven't made the Dutch oven bread yet pretty pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease
try it right away.

I seem to have stalled out after my quilting frenzy. Now all I do is just sit around watching our yard turn its delirious shade of florescent green. Well, actually before I sat around yesterday I weeded the front parkway since about four hundred dandelions bloomed in approximately twenty minutes. Weeding is seriously exhausting. It always looks so much prettier after you do it, but hellity hell dandies. You do make me work for it.

Some answers: 1) No, I dont stand on a ladder to take overhead table photos, but I do have an articulated LCD screen on my Canon camera that tilts toward me so I can see what I'm shooting. This is the second third camera I have had with an articulated LCD screen and I definitely would not buy a camera without it. It's awesome. 2) Yes (and thank you very much for asking), I might start selling photos because I own a very nice professional-quality photo printer that I don't use enough and it is just sitting there doing nothing and it might be really fun to have prints. 3) But not before I figure out how to redo my web shop because my web shop pretty much sucks and I have to fix it. 4) I'm not sure if I will do a quilt pattern and/or a new cross-stitch kit for the sampler on the black background. But I might. The quilt is a super weird size. I think it's like 100" x 100". Maybe I'll just write the pattern exactly how I did it and you can adjust it however you'd like. It would be really easy to make it a little bigger or smaller. 5) I forgot the last thing I was going to say. Crud. 6) Oh yeah, I just remembered: I still need to ask Brady if they named the farm yet!

Sunshine Day comments: 45

The weather here has been so glorious the past few days it's almost all I can think about. And talk about. I think my life revolves around the weather more than I think it does. Getting outside into the sunshine this weekend was like a dream. We had my family over for Easter lunch and got to spend most of the day outside. My mom made that beautiful strawberry shortcake!

I'm off to the woods before the rain starts up again. Back in a bit!

Spring Plans comments: 62

Loveliest friends for dinner Tuesday night. I made a salad with roasted vegetables, chicken tikka masala, and basmati-rice pudding with cardamom (my version of kheer). I'd make a double batch of this pudding next time. Maybe triple. 'Cause I wish I had some right now!

I was so lazy yesterday I didn't do anything. Well, I sat on the sofa and hand-sewed the binding on my quilt while watching Bravo for about six hours. It rained, again, all day. The thing I don't like about the rain in Portland isn't really the rain. It's the cold that always seems to come with the rain. It's really cold rain. It's never, ever warm rain. Even in summer. Cold water hitting me in the face just . . . I don't know. It's not that fun.

However, the ornamental pear trees that are blooming like crazy all over my neighborhood right now? Oh my gosh.

It's time for us to work on the front parkway. The old, spindly, unhappy roses are coming out and three raised beds for a parkway veggie garden are going in. Obviously, much willow edging will be needed. Oooo, that just made me kind of excited. Don't you think willow edging is adorable? And functional. I worry about the neighborhood dogs getting into my garden. Don't even think about it, you. No.

*Update: Any advice for keeping the kitterses out?

Chicken Stew with Biscuits comments: 83

Ina's chicken stew and Stephanie's sweet potato biscuits. I was first made aware of the brilliance of this combination one night at dinner at Melissa's, and I am forever grateful. I have made the stew with Ina's biscuits many times before, but Stephanie's biscuits are exponentially better. Don't make Ina's, seriously. Make these. This dinner takes a while to make, and I knew it would take slightly more effort than I had available, so I bought a roasted chicken instead of roasting one myself, and froze half of the unbaked stew and biscuits (separately). After dinner I promptly collapsed in an overfed but happy heap, and then burrowed back into my shavings pile at 8:45 p.m. last night. A new routine.

Thank you for the freezable suggestions! I think I'll clean out the freezer and do some stocking up this weekend. I truly love to cook but I'm possibly the worst meal planner you've ever seen. If I have to plan ahead I just tend to stand helplessly in the middle of the kitchen and look scared of everything. Because I am. Time for a crock-pot cookbook, too, I think. My crock-pot history is really hit-or-miss. Some of the things I've made have been good, some of them honestly inedible. Which is sort of tragic, after six or eight hours of "cooking." To find out you need a plan B at 6 p.m. But I really do love stewy-type things that go over noodles or rice in the fall and winter. Anyway, time to get organized in the kitchen.

A Spring Pizza comments: 39

Seldom do I invent anything to eat. I almost always cook from someone else's recipe. Very occasionally, I make it up as I go along. Sometimes when I make it up as I go along, it is really lame. This was one of those times when it was not lame and I was really psyched. I actually made something good without a recipe!

Well, I take that back — I did use a recipe for the dough, but I pretty much know that by heart. Ever since I learned how to MB from this book, I have used their "Loaf of Fresh White Bread" recipe for pizza dough, as they suggest. You can cut it into four pieces and make four individual pizzas (or pop half in the freezer and make more pizzas next week). For these pizzas, I rolled the dough out into two wobbly, 1/4"-thick circles, put them on a Silpat-covered half-sheet pan, and preheated the oven to 500 degrees F.

I trimmed and then arranged half a bunch of very thin stalks of asparagus in a baking dish, sprinkled them with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and popped the dish into the hot oven for about 8 minutes, until the asparagus was roasted and slightly browned. I took the dish out and let the asparagus cool a bit, but I left the oven on.

Then I sauteed the white and pale green parts of one leek (slice it in half lengthwise, then cut each half into 1/4" slices — be sure to clean the leek well, too), seasoned the slices with salt and pepper, and then mixed in about 6 oz. of mascarpone cheese. Stirred this all together until the cheese melted; added a bit of cream here to thin it out. Tasted for seasoning again.

This made enough sauce to cover two individual pizzas. I spread the sauce over the pizzas, arranged the asparagus on top of the sauce, then added a about 1/3 pound (for the two pizzas) of medium-sized raw shrimp, which I had sliced in half lengthwise and coated in a bit of olive oil, salt, and pepper. (I had originally thought I would add a bit of thinly sliced prosciuotto and some mozzarella, but decided against it — I just wanted the flavors to stay very simple and fresh this time — but it would probably be good with these other things, too.) Then I popped the pizzas in the oven for about another 8 or 9 minutes until they were crispy and bubbling, and, oh! So good!

We had a great conversation while eating the pizza: "This is so good!" "I know, right? This is great!" "Totally great!" "Wow, this is good!" "I know, isn't it?" "Totally!" Etc., etc., etc. And they say married people run out of things to talk about!!! NOT!!!

Curried Sweet Potato comments: 31

There were so many poignant reflections in Friday's comments — thank you for all of those. They carried me through the weekend (which was terrarium warm) and made me remember things. I remembered us sledding with my dad in the forest preserve a few blocks from our house — that strange gravel field near the railroad tracks bordered by a ring of tree-covered embankments, how incredibly cold and white it would be on those Sundays, how big and black and bare the trees were, Arthur Rackham trees, the bright sleds and snowsuits, how our shouts and laughter would carry through the quiet woods. You could hear every word.

Do you like curry? Some people don't. I don't think anyone in my family likes it. Turns out, I love it. I love almost every type of curry, green, red, yellow, massaman, Thai, Indian. It's all good. This is curried sweet potato soup (and goat cheese biscuits) from Joy the Baker. I really think that this soup would appeal to everyone, even people who don't like curry, because as Joy says, it's not really curry-y. It's just delicious. I made it exactly as her recipe said to. It's sweet and spicy and savory, and topped with a sprinkle of goat cheese and served with the goat cheese biscuits? Every bit as good as she said it was going to be. Gotta love when that happens.

Goat cheese is a taste that I like in very small bites. A little goat cheese, in my opinion, goes a long way. Here, paired with the sweetness of the sweet potatoes, it is wonderful, and balances everything out. And nothing's easier than a drop biscuit. This one is like a savory cloud, but crispy on the outside. Anyway, you should make all of this. I should make it again, 'cause it's all gone.

My Go-To Birthday Cake comments: 139

For many, many years, one of both parts of this cake have made their ways into almost every birthday cake I've baked for someone else or requested for my own birthday. I am super picky about cake. The one I made for Keels on Monday — Hershey's Deep Dark Chocolate Cake and my mom's Cloudburst Frosting — is probably the only way I really, really like it; chocolate cake with chocolate frosting is way too much chocolate, yellow cake is good, I cannot stand cream-cheese frosting, buttercream is okay but Cloudburst is lighter and better, etc., etc., etc., etc. I'll drive you crazy if you let me. I've tried a couple of variations on this chocolate/white frosting combo (adding pastry cream layer, using a different cake recipe), but to me the cake you see above and the recipe I'll give you below are just about perfect together. The cake is so heavy and so dark and so moist, the frosting is light as a cloud. If you put it in the fridge for about an hour before you serve it? Oh. Do that.

Normally I wouldn't reprint a recipe as-is like this, but I live in fear that Hershey's will change their link or delete their web site or somehow I won't be able to find it again. The only thing I do differently from their recipe is switch out 1/2 of their 1 cup of boiling water with 1/2 cup of very hot coffee (you don't taste the coffee, but, as Ina taught me, a little bit of coffee brings out the flavor of the chocolate). So, with apologies to Hershey (and a link for high-altitude directions and more info):

Hershey's Deep Dark Chocolate Cake

2 cups sugar
1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup Hershey's cocoa (I use either the regular or the Special Dark, whatever I happen to have)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup boiling water
1/2 cup steaming hot (brewed) coffee

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour two 9" round cake pans.

2. Stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in large bowl. Add eggs, milk, oil, and vanilla; beat on medium speed of electric mixer for 2 minutes. Carefully stir in boiling water and coffee (batter will be thin). Pour batter into prepared pans.

3. Bake 30 to 35 minutes or until wooden pick inserted into center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes; remove from pans to wire racks and cool completely.

Now, the frosting for this cake is my mom's old recipe for something we in our family called "the milk and flour frosting." When I was growing up, she always made it for chocolate cake, too. We have never been able to find an official recipe for frosting like this, probably because we don't know what its official name is. When I first put it on the blog several years ago (and if you hang around here you'll remember me talking about several times since), I renamed it more romantically and called it Cloudburst Frosting. This frosting had a long history in our house of being very temperamental but it is totally worth it. We think we have it down now, but you have to do it exactly this way. You just do. Don't ask me why. We really do not know.

Cloudburst Frosting

1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup WHOLE (it has to be whole) milk
1 cup softened butter
1 teaspoon almond extract
2 cups sifted confectioners sugar

In a small pan, gradually add the milk to the flour, whisking them together into a totally smooth mixture — you don't want any lumps here. Simmer (barely) until thick over low/medium heat, whisking constantly so you don't get any lumps. (Do not walk away from the stove for even a minute — trust me. If you do get lumps, just push it all through a sieve.) You want it to be the consistency of pudding. Remove from heat and let it cool completely but NOT in the refrigerator (Mom says if you put it in the fridge it won't work). Let it cool for a few minutes, and then push a piece of plastic wrap down on the surface of the mixture (so a skin doesn't form) and let it sit on the counter for an hour or two or three until it's completely cool. Cream together the butter and almond; add the confectioner's sugar and beat on high for several minutes until it is very fluffy. Add the milk/flour mixture and beat until it is super fluffy. The frosting will sometimes appear to separate when you add the milk/flour mixture, but just keep beating it on high until it whips up into smooth, fluffy clouds.

To frost the cake, trim off the top of one round so it is flat, and mound half of the frosting on it. Put the other round on and mound the other half of the frosting on it. I never frost the sides because 1) I'm lazy and 2) I think it looks a lot prettier with bare sides. Top with accessories. Chill before serving for maximum deliciousness.

*Update: Sounds like this is called "Butter Roux Frosting" and is a traditional red velvet cake topping. Yay! Thanks guys!

Riverside Silverlight comments: 72

I made my go-to birthday cake

and baked some bread for turkey sandwiches

and we headed out to the woods.

The light was silver, it didn't rain (miracle), and was actually quite warm (warm relative to the freezing downpour that is our new normal here in P-town) down by the water. There was even a touch of humidity which felt absolutely wonderful. (That's something I never, ever thought I'd say in my life. But there it is.)

It was so beautiful. It smelled like pine trees and river. I love the sound of the water gurgling by.

Happy, happy birthday, dearest Keely.

Oh how I love days like this.

Pumpkin Pancakes comments: 42

Pumpkin, spice, and everything nice (i.e.: cinnamon whipped cream), all on a plate for an early-morning Halloween breakfast. These pancakes are from the always-inspiring Joy the Baker, and they were absolutely delicious. And very filling. I could not finish them. Possibly only the second thing in my life I haven't finished. If you're having an easygoing Saturday morning like we are (the fire's lit, I've got crochet on the hook, the dog has been walked, and Andy is . . . dyeing a t-shirt in a pot on the stove), I highly recommend these. They even have whole-wheat flour in them. Good.