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Our New Year’s Eve Tradition (2025) Part 2

The day before New Year’s Eve, I dug out our French tart pan with its removable bottom and made dessert: Tarte aux Pommes from Julia’s book, with an occasional glance at La Rousse. Not my first turn with this dish, so it didn’t take forever and the scent of the apples baking was ambrosia-like. A few days before that, I cavalierly added some lemon juice and sugar to some heavy cream, and to my delight—and surprise—it turned into a passable version of crème fraiche to garnish the tart. The penultimate… 

Our New Year’s Eve Tradition (2025) Part 1

Ever since our son moved out, over twenty years ago, we’ve had a special New Year’s Eve dinner tradition: We cook a special meal together. Some years we’ve skipped cooking in, to do something outside our home, like a dinner-and-show event, but most years, we pick a theme and create a meal. We’ve done Chinese themed meals, Italian themed meals, plain-old Canadian themed meals (hearty and comforting). But until 2025, we’d never done a French themed meal, so that’s what I decided we’d do. The men wisely decided that they’d… 

All The Mod-Cons (Pt2)

Insurrection of the Doors and Drawers All of our new cabinets and drawers in our new house have what is called “soft-closing” mechanisms. This means there’s a sweet spot from where they close themselves quietly. Very convenient if the person closing them finds the sweet spot. Useless if the person closing them doesn’t, because then they just stay open, threatening heads passing by the upper cabinets and legs walking past open drawers. After over seventy years, my husband has not acquired the skill-set to close a door or drawer. But—pardon… 

All The Mod-Cons (Pt1)

Rebellion of the Plug-Ins – Part 1 We have a new house. While we didn’t buy any new furniture, we did acquire new appliances. All the “mod cons” (modern conveniences) as the real estate ads say. Now, I can’t imagine a situation in which I would want to—or need to—connect with my oven or washing machine via Bluetooth, but I could. There are apps for that, for all the new gadgets. Really. What I noticed as soon as we moved in is that just about everything that is plugged in…