Initially, I set out to write this piece, after a year into the pandemic, about my grandmother’s orange cake. I never finished it, haven’t even opened the site until today, when I checked the date on this draft: February 2021. In a matter of weeks my entire life would change but how was I to […]
How are we holding up? Some days I wake up feeling normal and then I remember that the proverbial storm is still in flux, and not quite proverbial. Nothing is normal, but the world still has to go on as if it is. I haven’t put on real clothing in almost two months. I’ve been […]
There’s one thing my mom bakes often: her apple cake. Every Jewish holiday is marked with the smell of cinnamon and sugar folding in on each other and seeping over the top of the baking dish, under doors and through vents. She always makes two: one for whatever company we’re having and one for the […]
It’s been a little over a week now that I’ve been tracing the pattern in the floorboards from kitchen to bedroom. Sans a whole of 30 minutes in the outdoors, I’ve seen nothing but familiar walls. My neighbors, on the other hand, threw an impromptu bonfire about halfway through. Five or six gathered round a […]
I don’t know how you got here, the events that lead you to my doorstep. I don’t care all that much, just happy to have you. Whether you’re new to the neighborhood or already having your mail forwarded, it’s probably become clear to you that this site is not about breakfast. In fact, there’s only […]
The public held a vote and decided that despite my lack of ability to do pretty much anything for myself, I’m all grown. It really came as a shock, but now I’m in the aftermath and have been trying to manufacture a life. I started with a to do list that had but two items […]
It’s a Thursday evening, I’m a teenager and I swoosh the door open to a welcoming, albeit potent, whiff of golden onions sizzling in canola oil. If you’d like to tell me there’s a better smell than sautéed onions, I would have to not-so-politely inform you that you’re in fact very wrong. Would you like […]
I was honest with you all at the start of this whole thing, right? Let’s see, I confessed that I am not a chef? Check. That my experience of food is one that’s about emotion and passion? Check. My knowledge of food is all grassroots and most of it is based on an ad hoc […]
On Fridays, for Shabbat, Ima baked Kokosh, a Hungarian rolled dough cake that melts in your mouth as the chocolate bursts through the buttery dough. You could smell the melting cocoa and sugar as far as the recreation center at the end of our Canarsi neighborhood. Neighbors would stop on the sidewalk and take it […]
This post is a little late on the draw, so let’s rewind and pretend that I didn’t procrastinate and we’re still in the festival of lights. Latkes is the first food that pops into people’s heads when they think “Chanukah.” Jewish or not, the fried potato pancakes with their fluffy center and crispy outside are […]
BREAKFAST with MYSELF 