If you’re ready to start planning your Easter menu, I’m here to help! These cinnamon rolls are perfection at an Easter brunch. And the rizogalo, or rice pudding, that follows is a happy uncomplicated ending to an Easter dinner when you’re totally exhausted and need pure comfort. Whole Wheat Caramel RollsDon’t let the name fool […]
March, as I’ve written about previously, is a challenging month in Chicago, for me. It’s too much brown and gray and withered, and too little evidence that there will ever be green again. That branches will ever be anything but dead sticks. That vines will ever be verdant again. March taunts, sneering at me to […]
Maybe it’s the convergence of Valentine’s Day and President’s Day. I’ve been thinking about why I love this country. Having written about the ways it irritates me for the past 15 years, I felt like stepping out of my comfort zone, just this once, and writing about what I love. Here are a few things […]
Dogs are among the wholesome distractions in our lives. Other natural, rational objects of our attention include our children, jobs, and homes, and for a lucky few with well developed executive function, actual beautiful hobbies like weaving or playing an instrument. Cars with knocking engines and muddy paw prints on back seats, trying to take […]
Had I known that getting two dogs was going to prove so diverting that I would fail to write anything at all for ten months I might have had second thoughts. It didn’t happen all at once, as situations with dogs usually don’t. It takes time and several slow missteps to reach peak nonsense. After […]
I came to Orthodoxy as an adult, and I will always feel a little like someone peering into windows; maybe I’m on the patio, but not quite inside the building. On the plus side for me, Orthodoxy will always be endlessly fascinating–something not everyone born into this tradition can say. To me it is a […]
Summer is somehow almost over and I have a story to tell you from the spring. In early May our daughter, home from college, was digging out our old raised herb box, which in a former life was her old sandbox, in order to flatten out the space and turn it into a new area […]