It feels like years since we last had friends over for dinner, but the last couple weeks have seen a nice return to conviviality. We hosted a revival of “book club” with a group of friends that first started meeting before Ben was even born. When the kids were little, we often hosted because it…
Double, Double, Toil and Trouble
I love fall, especially when it dishes up the beautiful golden-warm weather it has recently, but this fall I am sometimes finding the contrasts and unpredictability of daily life unmooring. I want to be outside soaking up the last slanted rays of sunshine, but work beckons. I’m enjoying my cooking sabbatical, but since I’m no…
Lean In
Had the blue-sky warm summer weather held even one more day, we probably would have gone with the last of summer’s bounty to cook this week, but Sunday felt like fall in Williamsport, so we put on sweatshirts and steamed up the kitchen windows roasting pork with fall veggies. Ben had been hankering for a…
1984
Let’s start here. My high school classmates gathered a couple weeks ago to celebrate our 40th high school reunion. Living so far away with no current ties to Rocky Ford, I have not gone to a single reunion, but I am a little sad to have missed out on seeing friends I have known forever. …
Teach
This week Ben wanted to put a twist on his familiar chicken parm by making chicken parm sandwiches. Since he had 4 consecutive cheesesteak meals last weekend (not including breakfast – that’s what burritos are for), I figured a couple poultry-based meals wouldn’t be the worst thing. Ben knows the making of chicken parm like…
True Grit(s)
If you are from the Williamsport, Pennsylvania area, you know that Grit was a newspaper published in Williamsport for 111 years, before moving to Topeka, Kansas in 1993. What you probably don’t know is that when I was a kid living in Colorado, I was briefly a Grit “newsboy,” getting a shipment of newspapers every…
Sorted
We returned from our family vacation in the UK on August first, and then I immediately began my sprint to the first day of school. I haven’t had much time to reflect on the trip, but as you can imagine, food acquisition was always Ben’s number one focus. Our eleven-day trip included Stonehenge, Bath, Glastonbury,…
Sandwich Generation
We were driving home from my Aunt Wilma’s funeral in Virginia when Ben requested cheesesteak sandwiches for our BDW meal. As I was just opening my mouth to speak, he couldn’t take a chance on anything other than a yes, so he threw in tater tots. “Ah,” said Phil, “he’s gone for your Achilles heel.”…
The Soup Counts!
Is soup a meal? According to Kenny Bania and Ben, it is not. Whenever I suggest making soup for Ben’s Day Wednesday, Ben finagles a way to add items to the meal or to avoid it altogether. This week I made his suggested grilled chicken and veggie pitas one day and had him join me…
Reverse
We are on the cutting edge here at BDW. Most food bloggers attempt to create unique dishes that reflect original recipe ideas, but we are so ahead of our time that we instead tried to copy our favorite Lean Cuisine frozen dinner. I believe this is best known as the old “switcheroo” and can be…