Serenity & Spice

The last few years have been tough. It doesn’t seem like this pandemic is ever going to really end and personal setbacks have me questioning my purpose. As with all traumatic breakups, I’ve been experiencing triumphant highs and extreme lows this year. Even my cat is tired of my shit.  This is the first time in seven years I will be single during the holidays. I’ve been searching for a movie to fit my current situation, but all I can find are cheesy Hallmark rom-coms. Can’t there be a movie about a cynical but quirky food blogger that likes beer and says “fuck” at least five times a day having a magical Christmas on her own?  I need to do things that are nourishing for my soul. Go out on the town. Support local businesses. Spend time with the friends that have stuck around. Maybe make some new ones. The holidays are not about presents or having someone to snuggle up with. Maybe next year, there will be a workaholic businessman with whom I can get into yuletide shenanigans. Thi...

Last week, I may have come off as a bit negative. Recently, I’ve realized that most of the writing I have done in the past year, if not for this blog or the time I participated in NaNoWriMo , has been for therapeutic purposes. Although it has helped me emotionally, it has not helped creatively. For this post, I will focus on something more positive. You can’t be sad with ice cream. My initial plan was to build a sundae that would completely represent everything I loved about myself when I was a kid. I was creative, silly, energetic, brave, and I tried to be kind. Who we were as children is probably the purest version of ourselves. That was before the stress and trauma of everyday life alters our personality. Seven-year-old me would not have been afraid to go after what she wanted. She was awesome! Do you think it's possible for a person to re-raise themself? I don’t own an ice cream maker, and given the limited space I have available in my kitchen, I don’t see the point in getting ...

  As I write this, it is a cold, gray afternoon. The meteorologists predict snow, but as this is the South, what little flurries we get won’t stick. There will only be patches of ice on the road tomorrow. It feels like we are in a holding pattern. The future is unpredictable. This collective stress started as nerve-racking, then became comical, and now is exhausting. It's time to make chicken and dumplings. This is a family recipe, and it’s crazy stupid simple. Growing up, my mom would make this when it was cold and rainy like it is now. Served hot, it makes everything better. The recipe my mom had written out for me is very generic.  The measurements are what you feel is right and everything is to taste.  It’s strange because my mom has always been a micro-manager.  This recipe card is probably the most trust she has ever put in me to do something.  The chicken is any part of the chicken as long as there are no bones. The dumplings themselves are a mixture of 1...

In my last post, I talked about taking pressure off yourself to save your own sanity during the holidays.  It just occurred to me that I may be a bit of a hypocrite as this time, I have probably created the most involved and expensive baking project to date. I present to you traditional mincemeat pies .  Why do I use the word traditional, you ask? Since the Crusades, mince pies have actually included meat until being phased out of the recipe during the Victorian era. The modern version without meat remains a Christmas staple in the United Kingdom. The reason they didn’t quite get the same iconic seasonal status here in the United States is because we were colonized by Puritans who hated Christmas and anything fun. The first step in this three-step process was making candied citrus peel .  Some of the ingredients for the pies were hard to come by, and as no grocery store here carried these, I followed the suggestion in the recipe to make your own. Each step is simple but r...

As you can probably guess, the name I use is a nod to my German heritage. My grandmother's family was German, but it begs the question, what kind of Germans were we? Were we the good Germans? Were we the kind that just wanted to drink beer, listen to Beethoven, and not kill everyone? In the last few years, I have found myself reacquainted with the beer culture that I had grown up with. I have always felt that this is a world of joyous camaraderie. The people aren't petty or bias. Brewers usually let their beer speak for itself.  Despite personal differences, there's always a hearty congratulations when someone has made something truly special. For this post, I made beer pretzels using The Hunter Oktoberfest from Lost Forty Brewing . This isn’t so much of a challenge, but food for thought; pun intended. I found the recipe on one of my favorite food blogs, Half Baked Harvest . Sadly, we did not make the chipotle queso. I say “we” because this time, my boyfriend joined me.  J ...