Langes de boeuf (aka lovely French cookies)

When I'm at the library I like to pick up books on subjects I don't know anything about.  That's how I end up with  Writing Picture Books and Graffiti Planet.  More often the books I pick up are related to cooking or baking -- like this one: Puff, by Martha Holmberg.  It's a cookbook completely dedicated to puff pastry.  I didn't know anything about puff pastry before, and now I have several hours worth of puff knowledge (making and eating), as well as several dozen delicate and delectable cookies (as well as several dozen more unbaked cookies waiting in the freezer).

What is puff pastry?  Wikipedia starts by defining it as a light, flaky, unleavened pastry containing several layers of fat.  Fat, in this case, is the butter.  The rolling of butter into the dough creates a flakiness during baking as the water in the butter evaporates. 

Guest Post: A Dark and Stormier Dinner Party

I'm Racheal, guest posting for my older sister, Eron. I live in Pittsburgh, teach public speaking while working on my doctoral degree in rhetoric, and only cook on occasion.

Eron has an amazing talent for integrating cooking into her everyday life. She cooks with a sense of ease and grace, as though it's no big thing.

But nothing could be further from the truth for her. Preparing meals is, in some ways, the biggest thing. Food is the sustenance of our physical bodies, but it is also sustains the community created in the act of breaking bread together, traditions and cultures, and our planet. Eron’s kitchen is a hopeful one, at least in part, because she has faith in the practice of preparing food: I can make a meal that means something for myself, and for others. Cooking is significant, an act of love and responsibility.

As inspiring as I find this, I can’t say I manage to integrate this sense into my own daily life. I’m pleased when I cook anything from scratch. I made myself a BLT the other day and told people about it. I was that proud. So when Eron asked me to be a guest blogger, I happily agreed, and then spent the next week obsessing over what I was going to cook. And of course, if I’m going to cook, we may as well have people over to share it. My boyfriend invited two of his friends over, and I started making a menu.