pie in the sky

Gene, one of the great and beloved mentors of my life in Appalachia, passed away last fall. He taught me to grow things, as well as the art of patience, and exuded a sort of grace and quiet empa...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2009/08/elegy.html

*** Cross-posted from The Green Fork , the official blog of Eat Well - my new place of employment! *** Like all domestic goddesses born in the midst of the Green Revolution, my mom has a comp...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2009/05/global-grocer-imports-rarity-and-case.html

Maybe you remember last December, when I posted about a regional, season market that was held, for one day only, at New York City's abandoned fish market at the South Street Seaport? New Amster...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/07/new-amsterdam-public-market.html

(If you don't know who the Daring Bakers are, read my summary at the beginning of this post.) The Daring Bakers' June Challenge, a Danish Braid, was a wonderful adventure. As with nearly all ...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/07/daring-baker-danish-braid-full-post.html

My dear readers and fellow daring bakers - I have SO SO SO much to tell you, and I'm a day late for the Daring Bakers (I just typed Darting Bakers, which was a typo, but in retrospect seems appr...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/06/daring-baker-danish-braid.html

Sometimes praise comes at unlikely moments. Like during a slapped-together Tuesday night "dinner" consisting of a heap of steamed asparagus and a messy bowl of unattractive, sticky-sweet chicken...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/06/you-should-see-my-sloppy-joes.html

Play4Life , a cross-national children's food advocacy organization, is hosting a yummy NYC benefit event on Thursday, June 26, called Food, Body, Planet. If you can afford to snag a ticket, come...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/06/local-event-food-body-planet.html

Let me just cut to the chase and say that I am going to bake my own wedding cake next year. Don't sigh like that! Don't give me that exasperated look! It was hard enough, acknowledging that I pr...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/06/cakespiration-round-1.html

Baking bread: that most basic of all acts, despite its complexity. Baking bread: christening a kitchen, blandishing the restive spirits of good fortune back into the warm corners of your home. B...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/05/baking-bread-that-most-basic-of-all.html

I saw this picture meme over at Eyre Affairs and just couldn't wait to try it out, so I took the liberty of tagging myself (Well, Amy had extended an open tag to all bloggers): 1. What is your ...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/04/picture-meme.html

Nothing about my first post as a Daring Baker is going quite how I planned it. For those of you who aren't familiar, the Daring Bakers are a group of fearless pastry entrepreneurs - there are s...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/03/daring-baker-cakes-on-train.html

Just a quick check-in to share this compelling peek into Minnesota's local food politics. Jack Hedin is a small-time farmer who gets penalized for planting watermelons for local markets on land...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/03/forbidden-fruit.html

I miss Ireland. It must be something about my Scotts-Irish genealogy that that made me feel so strangely familiar in that place. I never thought I could feel at ease in a treeless landscape, ...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/02/homeland-craving-irish-currant-scone.html

I first discovered durian as the result of research into its tropical cousin, the mangosteen. I had purchased that little purple fist of a fruit and was investigating its origins when I learned ...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/02/durian-king-of-fruits.html

At Christmastime, my mom likes to tell stories about her penny-saving childhood in rural Tennessee in the 1950s. Each year, her stocking contained treasures like a dollar bill (“That’s fou...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/02/clementines-and-rarity-orange-anise.html

Cookbooks have powerful personalities. Some are coy and beguiling, ornamented with dozens of glossy photographs; others are exotic foreigners with stilted language skills, each complex recipe p...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/02/true-grits-and-tall-tales.html

Heidi from 101 Cookbooks brings us her best-ever curried egg salad . With apples, pecans, yogurt, curry and chives - and Heidi's careful instructions on how to cook up the perfect hard-boiled eg...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/02/weekly-random-roundup.html

Okay, I know I said it wasn't a Diet...but I'd be lying if I wasn't sad about denying myself this moist, buttery coffee cake. (I took these pictures last time I made this a few months ago, and s...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/01/crave-sour-cream-blueberry-crumb-cake.html

(Image pilfered from Busy Moms Recipes ) First, let's get some business out of the way: I can't take any pictures of my recipes because my house is, well, littered with broken cameras. Until I...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/01/resolved-or-orange-scented-green-beans.html

It’s not every slushy day in late December that five thousand New Yorkers delay their last-minute Christmas shopping to brave outdoor crowds in ice-cold rain. But on December sixteenth, droves...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2008/01/wintermarket_23.html

"Now, if we catch a female with a carapace longer than this little gal here," says Captain John Nicolai, ambiguously brandishing a small measuring instrument in one hand and a live two-pound l...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2007/10/my-maine-squeeze.html

Once, a long time ago, in a much greener place called Ireland, a young servant boy named Fionn mac Cumhail was preparing a fish for his master's supper. Now, his master wasn't just any master - ...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2007/06/in-praise-of-salmon.html

Sometimes a place can steal your words. Not even from your lips - like a breathtaking sunset - but from your heart: that warm little room whose walls and ceilings you thought you could define wi...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-missed-you-too.html

There's nothing quite like a taxi driver dropping you off at the entrance of a castle under a full moon and giving you the directions just over the drawbridge, second left past the fountain. Yo...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2007/02/fortified-carcassonne-to-catalunya.html

An artery through Provence, the Rhone river fans out at its mouth into a marshy spread of ventricles to the sea. This region, called the Camargue, is host to a wildly different sort of habitat -...

http://moon-pie.blogspot.com/2007/02/artery-through-provence-rhone-river.html