Hooray For Molly !

Last Night I Curled Up

With The First Thirty Pages.

Got up This Morning

and Drooled my way thru

Thirty More.

YUM

Can't wait to try "calming" myself on

Banana Bread with Chocolate Chips and Ginger.

What a Delight !

Her Softly Told Stories, Her Wonderful Recipes.

Sharing Her Life.

Sharing Love.

...I started a blog called Orangette, a space where I could store all my recipes and the long-winded tales that spun from them. I named it for one of my favorite chocolate confections — a strip of candied orange peel dipped in dark chocolate — and started to fill it with my favorite people, places, and meals.


I wanted a space to write about food. That's all, really. But what I got was something much better. I got an excuse for long afternoons at the stove, and for tearing through bags of flour and sugar faster than should be allowed by state law. I got a place to tell my stories and a crowd of people who, much to my surprise, seemed eager to listen and share. What started as a lonely endeavor came to feel like a conversation: a place where like-minded people could swap recipes and dinner plans, a kind of trading post where cakes and chickpeas are perfectly valid currency. I'm not the only one, I learned, who believes that the kitchen, and the food that comes from it, is where everything begins. What started as a simple love for food grew to have a life of its own — and a life that, in turn, has changed mine.


Now, of course, all this is not to say that my kitchen is full of sunshine and puppies and sweet-smelling flowers that never wilt. When I cook, there's often a lot of cursing. I've made soups that tasted like absolutely nothing, as though the flavors had miraculously united to form a perfect zero sum. I once charred a pork loin so thoroughly that it looked like a tree stump after a forest fire. I have eaten my fair share of peanut butter and jelly and two-dollar beans and rice from the taqueria down the street. But I still believe in paying attention to those meals, no matter how fast or frustrating. I believe in what they can show me about the place where I live, about the people around me, and about who I want to be. That, to me, is the "meat" of food. That's what feeds me — why I cook and why I write.


That's why this book is called A Homemade Life. Because, in a sense, that's what we're building — you, me, all of us who like to stir and whisk — in the kitchen and at the table. In the simple acts of cooking and eating, we are creating and continuing the stories that are our lives.

~Molly Wizenberg