Irish Daisy

I love fall – it’s one of my favorite seasons. I love pumpkin spice. I love pumpkins. Gourds make me happy. The days are less hot, which is nice, and the evenings cool off quickly, which is nice. Cool evenings are the best because they coincide with pumpkin-spice season and I can bear to turn on the oven again. Which means I can bake pumpkin bread again. Which means baby puffs are ecstatic – when they’re not in an all-out brawl over the loaf. One Loaf to Rule Them All It all started five years ago, my kids’ obsession with pumpkin bread. Five years ago I had to abandon store-bought loaves and mixes, and come up with my own recipe to accommodate Badger’s allergies. ( This is also when my sister’s gift of a KitchenAid stand mixer saved all our lives – making cakes and breads from scratch requires a ridiculous amount of mixing ) After a lot of experimentation, and some questionable results, I found a solid recipe that yields moist, yummy pumpkin bread – two delicious loaves at a...

It’s pumpkin season, so I was going to write about pumpkin bread…but, you know what, screw it. I’ll write about pumpkins later because there’s something else going on right now that’s a little more important. What’s going on has a lot of feelings clamoring inside me, it’s brought up a lot of things that I don’t look at very often, things I don’t take out and examine. But it’s all here right in front of us now and the fear, anger, worry and long-festering rage can’t be ignored – so, I’m writing about this instead. Not Okay In response to a now infamous tape of two men casually discussing, and one boasting about, sexual assault, author Kelly Oxford started a conversation on Twitter under #notokay . She tweeted about her first sexual assault at age 12 and invited other women to share their experiences. She said she intended to erase the tweet if no one responded. Hundreds of women replied within hours, thousands in a few days. It’s in the news, it’s all over social media, bu...