Food & Recipes

I’m in Connecticut, where I spent most of my life, and I’ve been thinking lately about past summers, including some from the distant past. One of my fondest summer memories is of the first time I made ice cream. It was with my father at our former home in Darien where I grew up. I was probably in my late twenties on this inaugural day of ice cream making. I might have been thirty. I remember making it in the garage because it was kind of a messy process.

My dad had one of those old ice cream makers that required rock salt and bags of ice you had to crush into chips to get the job done. It wasn’t like the ice cream makers of today where you just put the little bucket in the freezer and then pop it into the machine, pour in the liquid, and it churns and chills and you’ve got ice cream. My dad’s ice cream maker was electric, however. It wasn’t so old that it had a hand crank, although I think that could be fun at a picnic with lots of kids to help.

Read moreMaking Ice Cream with My Dad

Apples feature fairly prominently in The Rules of Love & Grammar. There’s an apple orchard in the town of Dorset, where the story takes place, and all of the local restaurants try to outdo one another with their own versions of apple pie.

When I was growing up in Connecticut, we had a couple of old apple trees in our back yard. The apples that came from those trees were tiny, green, and extremely tart. Against what seemed to be all odds, my mother somehow turned those apples into pies. She would scoop them up from the ground and pluck them from the branches. I have no idea how many apples she had to collect to make one pie, but I’m sure she needed a lot. When the pies baked, the fragrance of apples and cinnamon that filled the kitchen was heavenly.

Read moreLove Those Apples