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!
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. […]
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 […]
I have just finished a short, intense love affair. I am afraid my lover will not be visiting again soon—he’s just too much for a girl to handle. He makes me do crazy things, like sit in the kitchen for hours, hot and red-faced. He takes his time. He makes me sit inside the house, […]
Where I come from, the weather is pretty cool and the seasons are rarely vague. The transition from spring to summer to autumn to winter and back again is tidy, without a lot of fuzziness in between—except for those May days still plagued by freezing rain or the all-too fleeting Indian summer afternoons that sometimes […]
I am predisposed to love September. There’s no better season than the onset of fall, I say, with its cool currents slipping in under the warm air; the sound of geese squeaking in the morning, shuttering in their bulbous bodies before they decide to fly away. And nothing beats wild grapes along the side of […]
Nobody tells you that when a boy gets down on one knee and asks you to be his bride that you will become a slave, slave to the nuptial process. Don’t get me wrong, if ever there were occasion to be indentured, this is it, but it is a big, big time suck. You end […]
