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!
Zucchini persists, a happy constant. Life is changing a lot–unlike my friends in Texas, who have endured nearly three months of 100+ temperatures, I can feel the fall moving into North Country. It starts with a subtle gust of cooler wind, whirling at my feet. I hear a few more crows cry, and the smell […]
Gazpacho is always a surprise. I’ve never made the same batch twice, because the market and my mood are never the same. I am a big fan of blending my gazpacho, although I also like it chopped. It depends on the goal: if avocado and lots of herbs or a green pepper are part of […]
Green on Greens will teach you to do incredible things with vegetables, one of which involves stuffing a chicken with a celery root… Imagine! I haven’t done it yet, but I will let you know when I do. Quite a few pages are dogeared with irreparable creases, but none is more worn than the page […]
It’s not tomato season yet, although they’re coming up soon… here in Houston at least. I eyeball my little, green fruits every time I come home, weighing them in my mind’s eye, wondering when I’ll have to put up chicken wire to keep the eager squirrels from running off with my loot, as they always […]
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 […]
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 […]
The time has come, the gardener said, to talk of many things… of shoes and ships and ceiling wax, of eggplants and kings. Ok, so, eggplant may not be the most poetic of vegetables, but really, they are fit for kings. There’s nothing an eggplant couldn’t do, I think, spongy wonder that it is. You […]
If you love the idea of savory summer vegetables steaming in a deep bowl, the scent of herbs and spices rising to your nostrils, you’ve likely tried your hand at ratatouille. But, for as many delicious summer stews you’ve enjoyed, you’ve probably also faced many a limp blob of hot, mushy mass inappropriately called ratatouille. […]
This spring, I worked as an organic gardening teacher at a Houston public school. It was at once inspirational and terrifying, as most new experiences are. My sister, who has been assisting at a summer camp, recently theorized that children grow up by sucking the life out of everything around them. A haunting way to […]
I' m always looking for a new twist on the tomato, especially as my favorite summer fruit begins to wane. I had a request for panzanella this weekend and was delighted to find a recipe in Edible Nutmeg, the Connecticut farmer' s magazine that specializes on local food and produce. I quadrupled the recipe for […]
