Ham Sandwich Indicted!

A good therapist can run you about $100 an hour, while a bag of chocolate chips, some flour, sugar, butter, and eggs will cost about $7, and at the end of 60 minutes you'll have delicious chocolate chip cookies... ...If that's not a reason to get in the kitchen when you're stressed/angry/depressed/frustrated, I don't know what is. I remember that I first started baking as a means to relaxation while I was in grad school. Mixing together cookies and brownies was a good way to take a break from paper writing, allow some thoughts to distill and sort themselves out, and, when everything was out of the oven, a little sugar boost was very helpful in pushing through those last few hours of a late night. In law school, baking kept me sane--anchoring me to a former (better?) self that wasn't obsessed with tort cases, legal writing, and journal notes. There's something comforting in the process of mixing disparate ingredients into a cohesive, delicious dough--you may n...

Five pounds of romas from the garden...made into sauce, of course! I saw that movie "Julie/Julia" the other night, and I've been thinking a lot about it. Or, more accurately, about what some of it's messages might be/are. The obvious one is that both Julia Child and Julie Powell are "saved" through their kitchen experiences--for Julia Child, it begins as a way for her to spend time while her husband is on a diplomatic mission in Paris, for Julie Powell, it gives purpose to her dream of becoming a writer and an escape from life in an office cubicle. For me, my first foray into "real" cooking came when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, and had little to do with keeping myself occupied, or finding myself. One day, while running errands with our mom, my younger sister and I accompanied her to Pier 1 Imports--a great store for everything you want, but not a whole lot that you actually need. For some reason, we were drawn to a shelf of little enameled/...