My mom asked me one of her usual “explain English” questions on the phone today. “I’ve always wondered why people say ‘you’re a smart cookie’ but not ‘you’re a smart bagel’ or ‘you’re a smart donut.’” She said it in a way that made me think she was going to tell me why, but she just stopped short right after that.
We ended up on Bowdoin Milk Spotters. We should have known, carrying our carton of milk, bouquet of roses, box of rice and carton of eggs to Thorne for some post-Hannaford dinner. This intriguing assortment of ingredients was to make another recommended dessert: payesh, a Bengali rice pudding.
The size of wedding cakes throughout history started out small, grew really big and now lands somewhere in the middle. Wedding cakes originated in ancient Rome, where a scone or barley cake would be cracked over the bride’s head to ensure luck and fertility.
Why buy local when you can buy Irish?
Victoria and I stood in the dairy aisle of Hannaford, debating our many selections for the butter that would go into the puff pastry for this week’s dessert: egg tarts.
In the history of my Moore triple’s traditional Sunday bake day, the only food we cooked but didn’t eat was our grand, seasonally in-demand, gingerbread house. We woke up at 6 a.m. two days in a row and in the freezing cold, lugged ingredients and tools from Howell to Mac House, holing up in the kitchen to design and bake a meticulous replica of Howell House, our affiliate house.
Sheets of silky phyllo dough stretched so thin they’re transparent are buttered, then layered with a filling of finely chopped pistachios, walnuts and cinnamon. Phyllo dough is unleavened so that after it has baked, it does not rise, and the layers settle into each other like the pages of a closed book.