Sometime in the distant past I proclaimed I’d finally mastered the no-knead ciabatta recipe. Wrong! Whatever my stupid self in the past thought, I didn’t have it down. Each loaf of ciabatta came out like pita bread, with the air…
Monthly Archives: May 2011
Simple Toys are Best
I’m such a rube. I keep thinking children enjoy toys, but they don’t really. They like simple things than can act as springboards for their imagination. I was the same way as a kid. In fact, I’m the same way…
On Writing
I started this blog with the goal of practice. Sorry, happy readers, but everything you read here is all my rough work. I needed a way to get my writing muscles limber and strong, and there’s no substitute for just…
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with: blog, blogging, historical fiction, novel, query, short story, vox, writing
The Mad Kitchen Scientist
I couldn’t have been more than three years old. My brother, two years my senior, decided it would be a fantastic idea to get into all the ingredients in the pantry and I was the perfect man for the job. …
Food, Grown
Child Harbat still isn’t that big on vegetables. As a baby she downed terrific amounts of anything green, pureed and spoon-fed into her smiling mouth. Now she finds a microscopic fleck of basil on her pizza and picks it off,…
Good Product Design
Last year I wrote about a grease spatter guard made by Ikea that has a very small handle in the middle, requiring you to reach into the scorching corona of danger to lift up the guard. Clever, no? At work…
Is Halloween Over Yet?
If you think the Handmade household is completely organized and up to date with all holiday decorations, I’m about to blast your assumptions into deep space. I give you exhibit ‘A’. Young children and those with heart conditions should look…
Baguettes: The Final Frontier
Really I’ve been putting this off for far too long. I have a workable and tasty sourdough recipe, an oven setup that works well, and all the tools to make a baguette. What’s been holding me back? Fear. A baguette…
Formative Years
I’ve heard it from my wife, from friends, and can identify it in myself. Many of the things we have at our very core come from a period in our lives we can hardly remember. Some of my wife’s earliest…
