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...

With everything going on in the world right now, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about where we are and what we have. The whole concept of Thanksgiving has never been more apt, or more poignant. With bombs and guns and dead children washing up on strange shores, and petty arguments dominating our headlines at home...and we’re going to pause for a moment to gorge ourselves on food, accompanied by shitty debates with our, um, difficult family members, followed by gorging ourselves on the ugliest orgy of retail excess you can imagine, as we gouge each other in the eye to get to the last super-discounted game system in the store. It's all fairly depressing, really. Thankful for Autumn decorations & the house to put them in I’ve been watching the news – the worrisome, tragic and trivial – and I’ve been looking around. We have so much to be thankful for. So much with which we are blessed. So many riches we forget to see or appreciate or pause to really be grateful for. ...