With Easter just passed, who isn't thinking about eggs? When I was a kid I loved dyeing and decorating eggs. But instead of using hard boiled eggs, I thought it was infinitely cooler to de-egg my Easter eggs.
I remember using one of my mother's sewing needles to punch holes on either end of the uncooked egg. Putting my mouth against the egg, I'd huff-and-puff and blow until the raw egg dropped into a bowl.
Admittedly that was a lot of extra work and there were risks. Making the holes and blowing into the egg could crack the shell. Worse, all that huffing-and-puffing sometimes led to hyper-ventilating, so my mother kept an eye on me, just in case I got dizzy and fell off the chair.
In my child's mind, that extra effort was worth it because the feather-weight shells, brightly dyed and covered with decals, were so much more artful than the heavy hard boiled eggs.
Way back in March of 1990 I started making a cheesecake from a recipe that I clipped from an issue of the Brainerd Daily Dispatch. It's called Absolutely Sinful Chocolate Grasshopper Cheesecake. Its pale shade of green comes from the addition of green creme de menthe. I've always enjoyed serving it as a perfect dessert for a St. Patrick's Day celebration.
I love soccer so I get really excited when I go to visit my dad in
London where it’s soccer season all year long. England as you probably
know has an undying passion for the sport, they treat it less as a game
and more as a way of life. For example, on a sold out night at
Emirates Stadium after Arsenal scores the crowd collectively expenses
100 times the world’s energy output for a day in the 30 seconds after
the goal. Like baseball or basketball in the US, football in the UK
permeates the culture – it’s everywhere. It has both a light and dark
side, and can go from having fun with your mates to total warfare very
quickly.
I’ve spent most of my life turning up my nose at mushrooms. That all changed last summer when I discovered the sublime flavor of chanterelle mushrooms plucked fresh from the forest floor and sauteed in butter with garden-fresh sage leaves. I blogged about my foraging experience in Duluth with Dick Ojakangas last summer. Beatrice Ojakangas immediately transformed our chanterelle harvest into a luscious appetizer.
Calling Vermont winters “long” is like saying I have “salt-and-pepper” hair. My hair is gray, the winters are endless, and even the craggiest New Englanders start to get a little squirrelly once Christmas is over. This situation is exacerbated by something called, “the January Thaw;” a cruel, meteorological joke which, somehow, allows the weather to warm up sufficiently for a couple of days to melt all the snow.