Jumbled Together (Russian Tea Cakes)

Russian Tea Cakes may be my very favorite variety of cookie. Also known as Italian wedding cakes, Mexican wedding cakes, Flexicans, polvorones, butterballs, and snowballs, you may know them best just as those buttery little spheres coated in powdered sugar, studded with finely ground nuts, and flavored with a variety of subtle seasonings. With their snowy white coats and elegant proportions, they make the perfect cookie to serve throughout the winter, arrayed on plates with doilies or tucked into gift bags. They're innocently sweet, utterly inoffensive, and melt on the tongue beautifully. Russian tea cakes, as the name suggests,  are the ideal pairing for strong tea served with lemon or cream and sugar. Less traditionally, but just as deliciously, I encourage the adoption of the "Russian coffee cake" and also offering coffee or cappuccino as accompaniment.

Cake: it's what's for dinner

Short and Sweet (Strawberry Kiwi Salad)

I wanted something light and fresh for dinner tonight and, as it so happens, we had plenty of strawberries and kiwi fruit leftover after a weekend visit from our darling nephews. I feel a little guilty calling this a recipe, as a list of ingredients could just about cover it, really. We'll just file this one under "lazy" and celebrate that it's something you can throw together at a moment's notice.

Does it help if it's extra tasty?

My Modern Family (Plum-Berry Crumble)

Hello, ladies & gents!

Enthused by sheer culinary joie de vivre, and the fact that I had a ticking time bomb in the fruit drawer by way of a crate of blackberries, I bring another recipe tonight: plum-berry crumble. I had intended to save this treat for Wednesday. See: right now, every Wednesday night, my modern family gets together to watch Modern Family. I've already come to look forward to the event.

Sarah and her husband, Seth, keep their family farm around the hill and down a dirt road that slowly clambers up the mountain. At the moment there's a full herd of goats for the milking, a flock of laying hens, and three hives of busy, busy bees. They tap maple trees to render the syrup in the Spring and collect elderberries, blackberries, and raspberries in the Summer. We are very lucky.

We're also very unlucky in that Modern Family airs after our nephews' bedtime.

Weaponized cuteness