I do not often write “fan mail.” In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve done so in the past. My letters have gone to an eclectic list of people, including a game show host, a child star, and a writer.

My first letter went to Bob Barker, former host of The Price is Right. I watched that show all the time as a kid, especially over the summers when my brother and I sometimes stayed at my grandparents’  house. Dziadzi, my grandfather, always watched it, so I started watching with him. Over time I got increasingly annoyed that the contestants had to be at least 18. So I wrote Bob Barker a letter suggesting he start a similar game show for kids. A few weeks later I received two black-and-white photographs in return, one of Barker and one of “Barker’s Beauties,” the three women who showcased the show’s prizes.

I sent my next letter to Chad Allen, who played David Witherspoon on TV’s Our House and who I had a huge crush on. I often dreamed that I was a part of David’s world: I was in a building that burned down during his retreat and I needed him to rescue me (not very feminist of me, I know); I was the female drummer when he started a band, thumping out the beat to Billy Idol’s Mony Mony while he sang. Because I wanted Chad Allen to personally respond to me, I wrote on the envelope “This is not a request for photographs.” Still, I got a black-and-white photo in return and a form letter, typed and stamped with his name.

My third letter came probably fifteen years later, when I sent a note to Elizabeth Gilbert after reading Eat Pray Love. I read the book several times after my brother died. It helped me to know that she was having a hard time and that she found a way to get through it. I wrote to tell her this. This time I received a personal response, a handwritten postcard that I still have somewhere, probably tucked between the pages of a book for safe-keeping.

I tell you all this to point out that I only write fan mail occasionally and only when I feel strongly compelled to do so. In this case, I’ve been checking in on Molly Wizenberg’s blog every now and then, and I’ve learned that we have some things in common. We both like prunes; we both like to cook simply; we’re both pregnant. I guess that’s the potentially creepy thing about blogging: people you don’t know can know an awful lot about you, especially when you’re popular.

But honestly I probably never would have gotten in touch if I hadn’t found several references to Bruce Springsteen on Orangette. A Springsteen show is the only concert I will attend every chance I get, and will pay for no matter what the price.

(As an aside, if you’re a Springsteen fan and you find yourself in Philadelphia between now and September 3rd, I recommend the Springsteen exhibit at the National Constitution Center. It’s well worth the admission price just to hear the two original, Beatles-influenced songs that Bruce recorded with his first band, The Castiles.)

So because of Springsteen, I wrote Molly a letter to tell her that I love the way she writes about food. Every recipe is connected to a story, whether it be times she spent at home or in Paris with her father or her budding relationship with her husband, which developed thanks to her blog.

But more than that, what I really love is the way she describes food. Listen to what she has to say about the dessert coeur à la crѐme (a cross between cheesecake and mousse) in A Homemade Life, her book of short stories and recipes:

“It was also very pretty: a velvety ivory-colored heart whose surface was quilted daintily from the cheesecloth that lined its mold, with a deep red puddle of pureed raspberries on the side. It was beautiful in a precious bed-and-breakfast kind of way, but it went down like a New York cheesecake, in lusty, sauce-slinging gulps.”

I love that last line. I aspire to write a last line like that.

With my letter this time, black-and-white photos and personal responses aside, I just wanted to tell her that.

Have you ever sent “fan mail” to famous bloggers (or celebrities or game show hosts, for that matter)? What makes you want to write this type of letter? Tell us about it.

Courtesy Flickr user Carol VanHook

My friend Ryan came over for dinner last night and, as he works in an elementary school, we wound up talking about school lunches. He has an interesting idea about getting kids to eat healthier foods during the school day: The battle may be, in part, about presentation, he says.

In Ryan’s school, many of the kids are eligible for free and reduced school lunches. For those are aren’t, a full meal costs only $2.10. “You can’t make lunch for that price,” he says. If parents want to make lunches that include the same components – an entree like chicken and cheese flatbread or nachos with beef, a vegetable like broccoli salad or a squash medley, a fruit, a salad, and a drink – he may be right. The result is that most of Ryan’s fourth graders eat a school lunch every day.

The entrees are similar to what we were served when I was in public school (cheese pizza, tacos, chicken nuggets). But, on the days Ryan has lunch monitor duty, he works with what he’s got. He has his students rotate their five-compartment lunch trays so that the salad and fruit are directly in front of them and the entree is in the back. The kids eat more salad this way, he says.

Our conversation reminded me of what Cornell University’s Brian Wansink is doing to change school lunches, according to a recent Psychology Today article. Wansink also reorganizes how healthy foods are presented so that kids will eat more of them. In one school, children ate three times more salad after the salad bar was moved to a location where they had to walk around it to get to the rest of the food. Wansink has other tricks too, including presenting fruits in pretty containers and moving chocolate milk behind regular milk in beverage cases.

It seems that the foods schools offer for lunch may soon improve, thanks to the government’s new nutrition standards for national school lunch and breakfast programs. The new rules include offering fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and fat-free and low-fat milk at every meal.

But to me, working with what schools have on hand still seems like the smartest, fastest, and easiest way to get children to eat healthier foods during the school day. I wonder what kind of improvements other schools could make right now just by thinking about food presentation.

Do you think presentation plays a role in getting kids to eat healthier foods? If you have kids, what do their schools offer for lunch? Are their options different from the options you had as a kid?

For those who celebrate or commemorate it, I hope you have a wonderful Memorial Day. Today many of us in the WordCount Blogathon are posting a Wordle, a word cloud design of popular words used on your blog or website. I got a kick out of the fact tha two of my largest (and, I’m guessing, most used) words are “meat” and “cream.”

Enjoy, and head on over to Wordle.net to create your own word cloud for your blog, website, or Delicious account. Come back here and post a link to it, if you like.

If I had a larger kitchen, I would want to buy these vintage pans from Patrick Sutton Home in Baltimore. They were originally used to cook over an open flame, but Patrick Sutton is selling them as a set to hang on your kitchen walls. It’s a fun idea that could also be a great conversation starter too.

Got any good kitchen decoration ideas? Share them in the comments section.

About once a year I get the urge to write about my brother, who was killed six years ago today. I’ve posted about his love for protein shakes and about the time he told a girl he had a pot roast in the oven so he could get off of the phone.

I thought these were the only connections I could make between my brother and food, so this year I planned to post only a picture of us as kids. I love this shot for its 80s references (Rainbow Brite, Ms. Piggy, headbands, Reebox), for our dress-up clothes, and for the fact that Pat is laughing and I am smiling and we are having a good bit of fun. Together.

Then I remembered that we had most of our fun together at the beach in Ocean City. Other than hot dogs and peanut butter crackers made with Sociables, there was one meal we always had at the beach: Maryland crab soup.

My family had crab soup on our annual one-week vacations. The way I remember it, my grandfather would go crabbing on the Bay and bring his catch back to the condo in his cooler. My grandmother would then pick the crabs and make the soup with crab shells and beef broth and packages of frozen peas, carrots, and corn. Or, if my grandfather didn’t catch anything, which I think happened in later years, they would buy the crabs.

I never ate this soup though, and I’d bet money that Pat didn’t either. Being from Baltimore, I’m ashamed to say this, but we were not crab people. To this day, I do not love picking crabs. After Pat died, I learned he didn’t either.

And he hit the reason why right on the head. My mom told me he once said he thought picking crabs was too much work for too little reward. I completely agree.

Still, today I will take a seat at the brown paper-covered table when my family gets crabs. I will even participate, breaking off the claws of an Old Bay-crusted crab first, then using my knife to pry open the main shell and to scrape away the intestines and the mustard. I will even eat the meat inside and think it tastes good, a bit sweet from the meat and spicy from the Old Bay.

But after one or two crabs I’m done. It is too much work.

I much prefer to eat crab meat as part of a meal, either as a topping for fried green tomatoes, in a crab salad with oranges and herbs, and or in Maryland crab soup.

The two former meals are a bit too light for my brother, but I like to think he would eat crab soup with me if he was here today. Maybe the two of us would enjoy a bowl in the kitchen at the beach while the rest of my family sits at the table, working hard at picking their crabs.

Maryland Crab Soup
This is my grandmother’s non-recipe for crab soup, one that she still makes every year in the summer. It’s just a guide really, so it’s a perfect “recipe” for those who don’t like to follow directions in the kitchen. I recommend buying crab meat at the seafood or grocery store. It’s much less work.

Unfortunately, the last thing I want to eat is soup these days. It’s just too hot. So that’s why this posts lacks a picture. But you can imagine the soup: a rich crab and beef broth seasoned with spicy Old Bay and filled with vegetables and sweet lumps of crab. It’s kind of like a minestrone soup for Marylanders.

Crab shells
Beef broth, homemade or store-bought
Soup bones (beef bones)
1 14-ounce can tomatoes, diced or pureed
Cabbage
Celery
Onions
1 bag (or more) of frozen peas, carrots, and corn
Crab meat (either backfin meat, if you like lumps of crab, or claw meat)

Add your crab shells, beef broth, and soup bones to a large soup pot or Dutch oven, enough to nearly fill the pot. Bring the broth to a boil, then reduce to low heat. Add the tomatoes, cabbage, celery, and onions, and simmer for one hour. Remove the crab shells and soup bones.

Stir in one bag of frozen vegetables (we like peas, carrots, and corn) and let them defrost for a few minutes. Run your fingers through the crab meat to check for shells, and discard any that you find. To finish, stir in the crab meat and cook until heated through. “And then you have to put some Old Bay in it, to give it some flavor,” my grandmother says. So add Old Bay to taste and serve.

If you have a recipe for Maryland crab soup, please feel free to link to it in the comments section.

I love chocolate chip cookies, but making them can be a boring task. The steps – softening the butter, measuring the sugar and flours – are incredibly standard. Most of the time they feel like a chore.

That’s why I like this chocolate chip cookie recipe from Cook’s Illustrated. Instead of softening the butter, you melt it in a saucepan or Dutch oven on the stove, then stir it constantly until brown flakes slowly form and the butter begins to smell nutty and fragrant.

You’ll still need to measure the sugars and flour, but you won’t need a mixer to make the dough. With only a whisk and a wooden spoon, everything is stirred together in a process that is pretty close to the normal Toll House cookie recipe (sugars, vanilla, and salt first, then eggs, then the flour mixture).

Cook’s Illustrated also recommends making large cookies, about three tablespoons of dough per cookie. This, the editors say, leads to cookies that are crisp on the outside and soft and chewy inside: the ideal texture. To measure, I like to pat down the dough in the bowl, and scour it like a pizza into eight wedges. Then I use my hands to shape each wedge into two cookies.

The best part though is that the entire process is much more fun than making standard chocolate chip cookies. And the size of the cookies makes them a bit more special for a party or gift-giving.

Do you have a cookie recipe that you love these days? Share a link with us here. 

There is a secret to making ice cream, and it took me a very long time to learn what it is. It’s going to sound obvious when I say it, but here it is: You have to use heavy cream.

If you’re resistant to using heavy cream, I understand why. It packs a whopping five grams of fat per tablespoon, and you’ll probably be using a cup or two in your ice cream.

But you’re results won’t be the same if you try to substitute half-and-half or milk or Greek yogurt or any other lighter, more figure-friendly dairy or dairy substitute you can think of.

I have tried to make many less-fattening ice creams in my Cuisinart, using soy milk, 1% milk, and half-and-half. They are always a disappointment because of their texture.

If I freeze these ice creams for a little while, to the point where they’re soft and even slightly soupy around the edges, they aren’t so bad. But too much time in the freezer gives them an icy texture that I don’t like.

If you use real cream though, the ice cream will remain thick and smooth when frozen, almost like a custard if you follow the vanilla ice cream recipe below. This ice cream is so rich that a few spoonfuls are all I need.

Then again, if you decide to be a rebel and use a lighter dairy alternative and  you like the results, I hope you’ll come back here and tell me how it’s done.

Vanilla ice cream
Slightly adapted from Aja Cage, as featured in Baltimore Magazine

I followed this recipe close to the letter, but I noticed that the Baltimore magazine version doesn’t say when to add the cream. You can pretty well guess by reading the recipe, but I figured I still listed when I used the cream here.

Also note that Aja Cage, the chef from Salt restaurant in Baltimore, uses this recipe as a base for other ice creams. I think it’s delicious on its own, though next time I would add an extra vanilla bean or a teaspoon more of vanilla extract to up the vanilla flavor. Then again, I really love vanilla, so experiment and see what works best for you.

1 cup 2% milk
Pinch salt
3/4 cup sugar (divided into 1/2 cup and 1/4 cup)
1 vanilla bean
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups heavy cream
5 egg yolks

Add the milk, salt, 1/2 cup of sugar, vanilla bean, vanilla extract, and cream to a medium sauce pan, and cook over medium heat until bubbles form around the edges. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and 1/4 cup of sugar.

When the cream mixture is ready, slowly pour it into the egg mixture in a steady stream, whisking constantly so the hot cream doesn’t cook the eggs. Return the entire mixture to medium-low heat and stir constantly. It will thicken very fast. When it coats the back of a spoon and you can draw a line through it, it is ready.

Strain the mixture into a container with a fine mesh strainer and cool in a bath of ice cubes and water. (You can also let the mixture rest in the refrigerator for several hours until cool, which is what I did.)

When the ice cream base is cool, it will be very thick. At this point, follow the directions for your ice cream maker. I have a Cuisinart, so I spun my ice cream for about 30 minutes.

While it’s spinning, I also like to dig in with a spoon every five minutes or so (as long as I’m not sharing it with company) and taste the ice cream. Seeing it thicken is fun, but tasting the ice cream’s changing texture is the best part about making your own, I think.

Photo courtesy Flickr user jonmatthew photography

The Blogathon’s second theme day asks us to reflect on what we’ve learned as bloggers. If we were to start blogging today, what would we do differently?

There is one thing above all others that I would change: I would pull a Lindsey Buckingham and go my own way.

There is a lot of blogging advice out there. Some of it is contradictory, like the number of times you should post a week. Some successful bloggers recommend posting three times a week, while other just as successful bloggers say to post once a week. 

Some of the advice is standard. Stick to your topic. Post on the same days of the week every week. Organize your thoughts into easily readable lists.

Some of it is organizational. Write and schedule your posts ahead of time. Keep an editorial calendar. Regularly host guest bloggers or submit your own guest blogging posts to other sites.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the advice, especially when most, if not all of it, is very good advice. But here’s the question: What advice works best for you and your goals, and what advice can you ignore?  

I’ll give you an example. Here are three of My Morning Chocolate’s Top 5 Posts of All Time:

Ow! My Eye! – What to do when hot pepper juice gets in your eye
How to make pain au chocolat (a photo essay)
Recycled crafts: How to make notebooks with food packaging and old paper

Notice a theme? They are all how-to posts. So, knowing that these are the most popular posts, I should write more “how to” and service posts to boost my stats, right?

Well, yes, conventional blog wisdom would say to do that. But I don’t always want to do that. I rarely do, actually.

Instead I’m much more likely to respond to some advice I got from fellow food blogger Beth at 990 Square. When I took a few very long blogging breaks this past year, she suggested I write about what’s going on in my life.

And she was right. I”m most interested in writing essays these days, even though – and I know this is shocking – stories about my life don’t get nearly as many hits. But I’m ok with that because one of my blogging goals is to practice creative nonfiction writing.

Which brings me to a second piece of advice: If I started blogging today, I would recognize that my goals for blogging would likely change over the years. We grow as people, so our blogs will naturally evolve too.  

What about you? If you started blogging today, what would you do differently?

When Kenny and I were dating and I was spending time in his Queens apartment for the first time, I would often look inside his refrigerator and freezer for a snack. Many times this ended in disappointment.

At first, it seemed that he had an adequate amount of junk food. In his freezer were a couple of pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in flavors like Chubby Hubby and Phish food; in his refrigerator were cans of Sprite and Coke. This is a surprise I always hope to find when staying over at other people’s homes.

I suppose this goes back to childhood, when my mom, who has a sweet tooth, would always keep sugary foods around. At the very least – and because my mom is lactose-intolerant – we had tofu ice cream in mint ripple or chocolate, the best soy ice cream I’ve ever tasted to this day.

Now if I’m not staying in my own home or my childhood home, it comforts me to know that these same foods I grew up with are close by.

So in Kenny’s kitchen I remember opening the freezer one day, spoon already in hand, and grabbing a comforting pint of Chubby Hubby (which, in an interesting aside, has now been renamed Hubby Hubby in support of marriage equality). I expected the container to be sturdy, thanks to the frozen ice cream inside. But my fingertips pushed through the cardboard. There wasn’t much ice cream left.

No matter, I thought. I only wanted to taste a little bit anyway.

I popped opened the lid and looked inside to find…an empty container.

Completely empty. Maybe there was an overlooked dab of ice cream stuck to the edges, but those peanut butter pretzels and the fudge and peanut butter ripples? Those were gone.

You can imagine how sad I felt. This happened more than once.

Still, despite the initial disappointment, Kenny’s chilled empty containers didn’t really bother me. What a cute quirk, I eventually thought. After all, we were in the beginning stages of dating.

So how does coffee cake figure into this story? White cardboard boxes of Entenmann’s crumb coffee cake, the kind with the thick cinnamon crumble on top, were often one of the fun junk foods in Kenny’s refrigerator. Sometimes the boxes were empty; other times, blessedly, there was still a square of cake inside.

This all happened so long ago that I nearly forget about those empty containers. Then I came home from Ocean City this weekend to find two bright red cans of Coke, opened and hanging out on the top shelf of our refrigerator. Both had only drops of liquid left inside.

So it seems fitting that yesterday, when I felt like baking and I asked Kenny what type of dessert he felt like eating, he suggested coffee cake with a crumb coating.

The cake is sitting in a square pan in our refrigerator as I write this. After it’s gone, I’m tempted to leave the pan there, crumbs clinging to its sides, for him to find, just for old time’s sake.

Raspberry and lemon coffee cake with lemon crumb topping
From Baking Bites

The fresh, tangy raspberries and subtle lemon flavor are the two stars of this simple coffee cake.

I find that the raspberries sink to the bottom of the batter when baking. This is a nice surprise when the cake is done because, you have a couple of options when eating it. You can eat the cake straight up, slicing down through the crumb coating, cake, and raspberries to get a complete bite. Or you can slice the cake in half lengthwise and enjoy two different coffee cakes: one with a streusel topping, the other with a raspberry crust.

To make this version of coffee cake, I used Baking Bites recipe for lemon blackberry coffee cake with lemon streusel with a few small adjustments. Instead of using only 1 tablespoon of lemon zest each in the crumb coating and the cake, I used all of the zest from one large lemon for each component (so 2 lemons total).

The recipe also calls for 16 ounces of berries, which should be 2 cups. But 2 cups of berries for me was less than 12 ounces (yet another reason I should buy a kitchen scale). Still, I stuck to 2 cups of berries in this recipe, but I think you could add more.

Is there a dish or food that you had recently that brought back old memories? Tell us the story behind it.

It’s Haiku Monday, a WordCount Blogathon tradition. In the past, I’ve written about chocolate and kitchen mishaps. This year I was inspired by summer berries.

Juicy, tangy, bright
In coffee cakes, scones, crisps, jams
Sweet summer berries.

If you’re so moved, please share your own haiku below. I’d love to read them.