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!
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 [...]
Christmas! And I’m staring at a half a plate of Russian Tea Cakes, lips white with powdered sugar. Like ginger snaps, these were not my first choice as a child, although they have moved high up the list of foods to appreciate. First of all, they are not super sweet—don’t be fooled by their coat [...]
Until my Aunt Lorraine brought buckeyes into our home, food was just food. Discovering the finer flavors in life doesn’t usually come via a plate of peanut butter and chocolate, but this is precisely how it went for me. As a child, I lusted for the simple, forbidden things: Lucky Charms; McDonald’s chicken nuggets; Charleston [...]
I’ve been baking a lot of cookies lately, recreating my past. It’s funny how many cookies there are out there—and which ones happen to remind me of being a small thing at Christmas. Sneaking batter from something unfamiliar, no matter how good it tastes, just doesn’t bring me back to where I want to be. [...]
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 [...]
On Friday, I sat at my desk and watched fat puffs of snow fall from an all-white sky. Ordinarily it would not be such an occurrence for me to be distracted by drifting snow on December 4th. But last Friday, I was really, really mesmerized. At times, completely lost in a faraway fantasy, which may [...]
Have you been to Big Sur? If so, you know there are few words to describe its blue-gold beauty. I will say this: walk as much as you can, love the person you are with, and don’t miss the meatball pizza at Big Sur Bakery–a very cozy place for dinner. Go there in the morning, [...]
I have a conflicted relationship with Mark Bittman. Not because I’m jealous of anyone who can actually make a solid living cooking and writing about it, no, no no, certainly I would never hold someone in contempt for that. But what I would hold against someone is writing a cookbook called “How to Cook EVERYTHING,” [...]
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 [...]
