Hi. I’m Isabel, I cook and scribble. I make a lot of food and do a lot of writing, and Bread & Courage is what I have to show for it. It started as a simple food blog called TASTE but evolved into something more—a place where I express my love of food, community and the environment. Thanks for spending some time here—and be in touch!
Our parsley has become a rather intimidating shrub. I go out to the garden every day and trim it back, but its leaves only seem to multiply, bushier by the day. Before this year, I had only ever seen parsley in little diminutive stems, often contained by tiny terra cotta pots. I felt bad plucking [...]
Thank you, citrus, for gleaming through these gray winter months. I’ve got an appointment to have my teeth cleaned on March 16, and I’m sure my dentist will admonish me for my very much eroded enamel, but what can I say? A grapefruit a day keeps the blues away. It certainly has for me. Scurvy [...]
If I were asked to name some of my favorite things, great tomato sauce would quickly come to mind. So would traveling and staying someplace just for the sake of staying: as my friends Caleb and Deidre did on their honeymoon. Caleb and Deidre also happen to be cooks—mostly of the Italian variety, though they [...]
You know those people who resolve piety in the New Year, embracing soups and fruit juice and brown rice baths? Well I’m not one of them. But I do love soup. It makes me feel warm and clean and hale. This year I was especially in need of some elixing.
It started, as with all great [...]
It’s not really fair for me to have to write about shrimp and chorizo stew right now. I’ve just bent backwards, twisted my innards in a hundred directions, fallen forward, lifted halfway and generally wrung out my body and all of its angles. And why does all of this movement make a soup so unfair? [...]
Last weekend, we feasted in the snow. We were drawn to warm foods—spicy shrimp and chorizo soup, a cheesy crostata and maple gingerbread. It was a real winter meal, save for the cherry tomatoes, which begged to be picked up with their winking green stems and shiny red orbs. They looked like tiny Christmas bulbs.
Before [...]
Recently, I had a chill. Last Sunday, I believe it was. I may have behaved a bit badly on Saturday and warranted it. But whether it was the inklings of an illness, or just a bit of a post-champagne grog, I’ll never know: the soup I made that day cleared all of my troubles [...]
As I mentioned recently, there’s little I like more than to cook away a Sunday. I’m particularly happy for my Sabbath kitchen this time of year, when starchy root vegetables take center stage: roasted sweet potatoes, butternut squash, carrots and delicate fingerlings really make my heart sing. We don’t get a lot of it around [...]
No matter what, I cook on a Sunday. Nothing makes me happier than being by the oven for most of the day, putting up food for the week ahead. There’s something really nurturing about taking care of myself this way: with a little foresight I can have satisfying, comforting food no matter what disasters might [...]
So not everybody is crazy about eggplant. That baffles me, but I understand it—especially coming from people who don’t often prepare their own, and are victims of slimy, spongy, bitter mush. Nobody wants to eat slippery vegetables with gritty seeds and acrid hides.
But eggplants can also be the best of what a vegetable can be—crispy [...]
