I won't say I've been doing a lot of cooking, but certainly more than usual.

The three and a half hour cake

I volunteered to make dessert for my book group. And since it was Rosh Hashanah, I wanted to make an apple cake. John has only excellent cookbooks in the house, intricate perfectionist cookbooks. Let's just say you aren't going to find a box of jello thrown into any of these recipes. So, he picked out a fabulous apple coffee cake for me to make. It was fabulous. I might say it was the best pecan cinnamon sugar appled layered cake of all time. I made two of them. It took me three and a half hours! Sure there were eight eggs to separate, and the pans to grease and flour. But I get a little neurotic when I'm cooking. Was it really ½ a teaspoon? Did they say teaspoon or tablespoon? Maybe I should check that one more time. I was showered in praise for these cakes but next time I'll start them 5 hours before I need to be out the door.

the green smoothie

Eating Well and I are on a kale kick. This month they provided a lot of recipes featuring kale, and I am trying some out. I happen to love kale, so it wasn't a big stretch. But I am the type of person that needs a recipe for everything. For instance, I've never made a smoothie--you know that concoction of frozen fruit and some mysterious proportion of ingredients--because I didn't know how. But they had a recipe for a kale smoothie. Some of you are gagging right now. I admit it is bright green. If you aren't interested in drinking really bright green food, I don't recommend it. But, I kind of like green and it was tasty enough. Not three and a half hour cake tasty, but it also didn't have twelve tablespoons of butter in it. (Or was that supposed to be eight?)

green soup

More kale, add spinach, add a Japanese yam which I don't know why we bothered with the pretty purple and white tuber because the whole thing got whirred to smithereens with my handy dandy immersion blender. It was ok. It was definitely green and healthy, but it didn't have enough umph for the 1.75 hours I spent on it. John's going to help me figure out how to kick it up a notch before I tackle the other four green soup recipes in Eating Well because they all have the same base.

Go green!