Last week Chicago experienced record heat. It is certainly the hottest I remember this city which is more famous for its extreme cold than sweltering temperatures. In the middle of the heatwave, my oven broke. I know, I should not be using my oven in a heatwave—but the 4th of July requires cake! I managed to get the cake baked, but it wasn’t easy. All I could think about was heat—both a lack of it, and an overabundance.

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It is 103°F in Chicago, we’ve had power outages and my oven broke a few days ago. I don’t know what to do about the oven, or the heat, so I am taking a break from my kitchen. We just keep making gazpacho, which I don’t consider cooking, and watching movies.

But the heat hasn’t stopped me from reading cookbooks. read more+++

This is one of those recipes that I have been making for years, but never got around to writing about. I first made it a few years ago when Bryan was out of town. I have not been forgiven. Blueberries are Bryan’s favorite and when we saw this recipe on an episode of America’s Test Kitchen, he wanted it badly. I don’t know why I waited until he was out of town to make it—must have been blueberry season. Now, whenever I make this cake he has some snarky comment like, “Oh, you’re gonna make that? Should I go out of town?” I love him.

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The other day at lunch, my friend Anna was telling me about someone she knew who roasted his own coffee beans at home. I made a joke about how ridiculous that was and then remembered that I had a vat of quinine syrup brewing in my fridge—who am I to judge? read more+++

When life gives you mangoes, make mango sorbet.

That’s what I did a few weeks ago when the hype-person for Mangoes (these jobs!) sent me a box of them in the mail. In terms of things you can find waiting near your front door after work, it was pretty good. I haven’t worked much with mangoes. I eat them, occasionally. The “tropical” fruits remain a little bit of a mystery to me. They are never local, here in Chicago, and every time I buy one I feel slight guilt and confusion. Do they have a season? Are there better times to eat them? I only buy them in winter, when there is no local fruit of any kind.

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I spend a lot of time waiting for spring, and feeling excited about the food that will be available in our markets. But when warm weather finally gets here I find myself wanting to sit in a park or  hang out with friends and my kitchen becomes a bit of a ghost town, at least for the first few weeks of spring. The food I do make is simple and not worth sharing here—a basket of strawberries, a salad. It takes a while to find balance in this new season and to resume taking the outdoors for granted.

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These beauties were paired with the rhubarb fool and make a most excellent spoon for scooping up the cream and jam. Brandy snaps are another popular British sweet that doesn’t appear very often on American menus. They’re lovely and often filled with a cream, like tiny delicate cannoli.

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This is probably an odd pick of recipe from April Bloomfield’s beautiful cookbook, A Girl and Her Pig. The young British chef has made a name for herself cooking with animals and all forms of fat. Those recipes looked great, but I got stuck on this one for a fool (like a fool?). For anyone who doesn’t know what a fool is, (insert joke about you being a fool—somebody stop me!) it is a decidedly British treat of fruit and cream. It is about as simple and satisfying as a dessert gets and good for everyone to have in their bag of tricks. There are so many awesome flavor possibilities, but here we are at the start of the growing season and the first “fruit” out of the gate is rhubarb.

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Yesterday was quite a day. Highs and lows. It seems appropriate to now turn to a recipe that is sour and requires patience, but in the end transforms into something beautiful.

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It seems like a good time to share this photo again. It is a picture from my wedding. This is what people in North Carolina and everywhere else in our country are so disgusted by that they want to make laws to prevent.

Patience is not a fucking virtue, we need to fix this now.

UPDATE 5/9/12 2pm: I guess Obama reads my blog?