My friend KBell makes socks for a living. But it’s what comes out of her kitchen that’ll really knock your socks off – the world’s most perfect brisket.
That’s a boast, I know, that is bound to generate some heat. But what you have to know about Kbell’s brisket is two things: She’s ridiculously generous about sharing her recipe, which actually hails from her mother Selma Bell of Gloucester, Mass. And, for all I know, from Selma Bell’s mother, too. The Bells from Gloucester are like that, a tight-knit (so to speak) family. But the second and probably more important aspect of KBell’s brisket is that it’s pretty much fool-proof.
The key is in the timing. If you’re serving the dish for Friday night, say, you need to make it on Thursday. That way, you refrigerate the meat overnight and can easily hack off the extra globs of fat in the morning and then thinly slice the beef against the grain and, voila – the perfect brisket is simply heated up 45 minutes before you serve it, au jus.
These cookies I hold near and dear to my being. When I was with my grandma, I could simply be me. I could be my sweet self, I could be my bratty self, I could be my intuitive self, and I could be my quiet self. We had a special relationship. I was the youngest of 7 grandchildren and my childhood was riddled with illness. 
My husband is on active duty in the US Army, and for our first holiday
season together we were living in a little town called Sierra Vista,
Arizona, which is adjacent to Fort Huachuca, where he was stationed.
Since we had only been married since the previous January and we were
just starting our life together, we couldn’t afford to go home to our
beloved California and our families for the holidays, so we were
toughing it out in Sierra Vista alone.
I’m a California Jew. If one were to compare ethnicity in terms of packaging, we’d be ‘plain wrap’. Both my folks were Jewish, but Mom was an Atheist and Dad, well, he grew up in the little town of Chloride Arizona and Grandpa Harry was the Sheriff. Once, when I was a kid, I brought a stray cat into the house. Dad hated cats. The center of his face turned purple with rage. “You git that ornery varmint outta here!” Get the picture?