“Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona duit!” They say that everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, so you had best fortify yourself for the long, festive day ahead, starting early, with a full Irish breakfast. You will need to prepare yourself for the onslaught of green beer, corned beef and cabbage, chocolate Guinness cake and Irish coffee, not to mention marching for miles in the nearest St. Patrick’s Day parade. There will be lots to do and see, and you can’t let your energy flag.

Breakfast is too early in the day for a celebratory pint of Guinness, I must emphasize, without scolding. We are not in college. This is not Key West. There are rules. But otherwise you can revel in a hearty full Irish fry up: sausages and bacon, eggs, fried soda bread, good Irish butter, tomatoes, mushrooms, and maybe throw in some beans. With tea, lots of tea. To the unsuspecting, this looks very similar to a full English breakfast. Try to keep your countries and traditions straight.

Here is a guide Traditional Irish Breakfast

Epicurious also has options about a proper Irish fry up

Read More

I still recoil with horror at the notion of corned beef. The memory of cooked cabbage odor haunts me all these years since I last smelled it, wafting up the stairway from my mother’s kitchen to my lair at the back of the house. I will NEVER cook a cabbage. As always, we will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with chocolate and Guinness, as God intended.

While other families are preparing corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick’s Day, we will be digging through our cookbooks for another chocolate stout cake recipe. We will honor the blessed saint, the foe of snakes, in our own sweet way: with chocolate stout cupcakes. I love a good cupcake – perfectly proportioned with an ideal ratio of icing to cake. Food52’s Chocolate Stout Cupcakes I still have bottles of Guinness in the pantry from last year’s celebrations – I think I might have to buy some fresh, just to be sure that everything is perfect.

If you’d rather have cake, be my guest. Please, just save us a couple of slices. 
Chocolate Stout Cake

Recently I chatted with one of our neighbors when I was out for a morning walk with Luke the wonder dog. This fellow always carries a mug and I have assumed he was taking his coffee for his early morning strolls. (I cannot walk the dog, listen to Slate Gabfest podcasts AND carry a Diet Coke and a dog poop bag in the mornings. I have a limited skill set, I’m afraid.)

Luke wanted to get acquainted. While going through all of the usual dog rituals of sniffing and leash dancing, I found out that the neighbor’s dog is named “Guinness.” I asked if there was a good story about the dog’s name. Maybe he had a secret Lulu Guinness handbag collection, or was noted in the Book of World Records for some perilous feat? Sadly, no. His dog was named after the Irish stout. He is a very dark, very tiny, yapper of a dog. Perhaps he has his own fantasies of a more picturesque neighborhood, one where he is strolled along the cobbles down to the pub late on a golden summer afternoon, to lift a pint with his human. A nice little daydream that Guinness entertains, instead of resigning himself the prosaic suburban reality of the early morning stroll down our street, only to endure the indignity of Luke getting sniffy and overly familiar. And now I wonder what our neighbor is really drinking…

St. Patrick’s Day is Monday. “Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona duit!” Luke is looking forward to another sidewalk encounter with our neighbor’s dog. We can stage an exclusive St. Patrick’s Day parade through the neighborhood. We’ll even bring a mug of Guinness. Shhh.

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy,
which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
—William Butler Yeats

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

It’s another cold and bleak midwinter day and I am holed up wearing a turtleneck, a sturdy L.L. Bean sweater, wool socks, and lined legging – and I am still cold. I think a lesson to be learned is that one should not visit Florida in February, because re-entry to the real world is rude indeed.

Mr. Sanders and I drove to Jacksonville Beach, Florida for a few days of R&R with our daughter, and her family of whirling dervishes over the long Valentine’s Day weekend. The weather wasn’t approved by the Florida tourism board – it was cool and breezy – so we never unpacked shorts, or bathing suits. But it was warmer than it is here, and there were sunrises and sunsets like nothing we get to see normally. There were congregations of white cattle egrets stalking through drainage ditches, and squadrons of pelicans flying in precision formations along the waterline. There were crowds of sandy, barefooted beachgoers waiting in lines for healthy green smoothies and açaí bowls for breakfast. Later we sat in folding chairs on the sidelines of a flag football game, shivering in a light drizzle, watching parents buzzing after their children. The Floridian version of winter clothing entails hoodies, and maybe socks. No one is holed up at home wearing L.L. Bean, or wool.

The dervishes, boys aged 4 and 10, needed to be re-fueled constantly, like sharks on patrol: pancakes, strawberries, carrots, pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches, apples, blueberries, mac and cheese, smoothies, organic chickpea flour cheese snacks, organic seaweed snacks, crackers, celery, avocado, lemonade, Triscuits, cookies, bananas, and more grilled cheese. We thought about grilled cheese a lot.

Why does grilled cheese belong to the young? It is just as tasty now as when I walked home for lunch in elementary school, when my mother would fry up an American cheese-based sandwich in the smallest Revere Ware frying pan and crank open a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. Ah, those childhood hot lunches! I did the same for my children, except I used store brand cheese product, whereas my mother bought sliced American cheese by the pound from Benny’s Butcher Shop around the corner on Belltown Road. Benny would stand behind the marble counter, rhythmically slapping a square of waxy paper between each piece of cheese as he sliced it, before wrapping it all in crackling white butcher’s paper, and tying the bundle with a neat red and white string bow.

Usually, for wintery Sunday lunches, Mr. Sanders will make his grilled cheese with Swiss cheese, and I still prefer the oozy store brand. Last night we needed warmth, and ventured into adult territory. We upped our grilled cheese game: posh bread, upscale cheese, and opulent add-ons.

I used to think that adding bacon to a grilled cheese sandwich was innovative and fancy. Sometimes including a slice of tomato was an interesting variation. But you can easily expand your repertoire just by rethinking the bread you use. This will elevate your grilled cheese sandwich experience: artisanal sourdough bread. Whoa. But you can also experiment with ciabatta, brioche, Challah bread, Kaiser rolls, or baguettes. Don’t take my word for it: Escoffier Leave the Pepperidge Farm white bread behind. Visit your local artisanal bakery and find something fresh and warm and delicious. Maybe add some fresh pastries to your order for breakfast tomorrow, too. Yumsters.

Then wander through a deli and pick up some Gruyère cheese, and some good cheddar, and invest in a nice wedge of Parmesan cheese. Wander around some more and wonder at the clever packaging and cute containers for sun-dried tomatoes, capers, pesto sauce, pickled jalapeños, chutney, sriracha, and gherkin pickles. Grab some sweet onions, basil, and bacon. Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Grilled Cheese Sandwich includes Romano and Asiago cheese, kimchi, butter, country bread, salt, and olive oil.

The Tasting Table has some great suggestions, too: Tasting Table

Punchfork suggests: Opulent Grilled Cheese

And this is very luxe indeed, with Brie, Gorgonzola, figs and prosciutto: Sugar Love Spices

Chins up! We are almost through February. The daffodils are starting to poke their heads up. I have some crocuses already blooming in the back yard, so spring is on its way. Pull on your hoodie and your wool socks and make a nice hot lunch. You’ll feel better for it. Winter’s not over yet.

“In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone…”
Song by Christina Rossetti and Gustav Holst

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

It’s Friday, the fourteenth of February, and you are reading this at your desk after a nice turkey sandwich, smugly looking forward to the weekend stretching before you. I hope you have done a little planning. It is Valentine’s Day. It is Friday. Fridays require a little flair, a touch of panache, a little extra effort, particularly if you want to enjoy the weekend. I suggest chocolate.

Homemade, store-bought, ordered from the dessert cart, frozen Sara Lee poundcake topped with ice-cream and chocolate sauce, Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, Hershey’s Kisses from the convenience store, a Whitman’s Sampler (for irony) snatched up at grocery store. These are realistic gestures of love and affection and true regard. If you are considering carnations garnered at the gas station – don’t bother. They do not sing of love and inspiration – they signal the impending rueful tales of woe. And don’t go for the over-priced roses that were flown in from gigantic farms in Latin America – they will be dead in under a week. You could use that money to invest in a sizable bower of daffodils. Plan ahead before you head home this afternoon.

Mr. Sanders and I have rarely spent Valentine’s Day together – it might be a major contributing factor to the longevity of our marriage. Most years he has had to attend an annual boat show in sunnier climes, leaving me to my own devices. Though there was the year when he was home, forgot about Valentine’s Day sentiment, and stopped at the grocery store on his way home and snatched up one of the last, limp, cellophane-wrapped bouquets of carnations in the place. You know the ones – already sitting in a shopping cart near the check out lane – not even a full dozen. He arrived home to find happy, scrubbed pajama-clad children, a home-cooked meal, flourless chocolate cake, and a nicely drawn Valentine. It was memorable.

This past Sunday afternoon I assuaged my conscience, and baked a batch of Dorie Greenspan’s Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies for Mr. Sanders’s early Valentine. I am paying the Valentine’s Day love forward. This is the best recipe I have found for chocolate chip cookies. I love it because the oatmeal gives it the appearance of health food and I can freeze more than half of the dough, which feels like money in the bank, knowing there is cookie material waiting for any possible emergency; better than money spent on roses that have an embarrassing carbon footprint.

Dorie Greenspan’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

I use my electronic kitchen scale for this recipe – Dorie calls for 340 grams of semisweet chocolate. I followed the recipe on the back of the Nestlé bag for years, obviously, and just dumped a bag of chocolate chips into the dough. Now I use Ghiradelli 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate because I am a grownup who prepares for sentimental gestures, but a bag of Ghiradelli weighs only 283 grams. It is a good thing I finally checked. I have been cheating Mr. Sanders and his children for years! Now I weigh out the prescribed amount of chocolate chips. Purists would say that I shouldn’t be using waxy chocolate chips, but should instead be chopping the chocolate – but there are limits to my devotion. But you go ahead and eyeball the amount of chocolate you want to include in your annual show of love. I’m aiming for a little overkill. I also sprinkle a smidge of Maldon salt over the cookies, so they are not cloyingly sweet. This is real life, after all.

Mr. Sanders is home this year. The happy children are off on their own, and it is just us and Luke the wonder dog here tonight. We are going to make pizza, watch No Offence on Britbox, and read for a while before bed. Life is good.

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you…I could walk through my garden forever.”
― Alfred Tennyson

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

You’ll have to go somewhere else for your Super Bowl snacks ideas this year – although – between you and me – you really can’t do much better than a party-size bag of nacho cheese Doritos.*

While some writers wait for divine inspiration before angling their fingers over their keyboards, others of us wander dazedly through the grocery store, looking for ideas. During our COVID year I’d rush tearing through Food Lion- colors, packaging, smells, people! It was all there. I found myself photographing some loose carrots on our kitchen countertop over the weekend: the low angle of the sun setting made the carrots radiate an unearthly orange glow that I think I have only seen in the incandescent light of the genre paintings by the Vermeer and Leyster. This week, while on another motivational stroll through Food Lion (after I had scoped out the extensive and flashy Valentine candy display) I was drawn to this display of radicchio. Look at those colors! Raspberry, magenta, plum, magenta, amaranthine, violet, amethyst, fuchsia, aubergine and carmine! What could I do with those colors in real life? It’s time to make a colorful winter salad.

I love a nice leafy, crunchy salad. I was raised on iceberg lettuce salads, so the discovery of romaine lettuce in college shifted the tectonic plates of my tetchy palate. I used to eat sun-warmed tomatoes out in the garden every summer, but grew up eating tasteless, refrigerated, hothouse tomatoes in my salads all winter long. Luckily time does march on, and we can avail ourselves of healthier greens all year long. Our local farmers have also come into the twenty-first century and are ready to nourish us with their winter bounties. Look for parsnips, garlic, turnips, rutabagas, leeks, lettuce, spinach, kale, chard, potatoes (sweet or regular), and cabbage.

It might be a new year, but that doesn’t mean that I am any less inclined to take the easiest way out in preparing dinner. There is nothing like enjoying a lighter-than-air salad for a summer dinner, though in the winter it needs to be much heartier than our summertime frolics with cool cucumbers, airy vinaigrettes, and artful splashes of lemon juice. We need calories and heft right about now, just so we can go outside and do battle with snowy sidewalks, and scrape the windshield while the wind blows and the snow is still falling.

I also like to use up leftovers when I make salad, no matter what time of year it is. This is our new budget in action – less waste! In the summer I will shred leftover chicken and fling it across a bed of crisp lettuce, with a handful of sunflower seeds and some chunky homegrown tomatoes. This week I warmed up a leftover chicken breast, and sliced it, and nestled it on a bed of spinach leaves. I cooked the last three slices of bacon, and then used the resulting bacon fat for frying the best, and crunchiest, croutons (made from a loaf of old-ish French bread from the weekend). I nestled a couple of still-warm soft-boiled eggs within some of the spinach curls and scattered the bacon over everything. A heavy, homemade vinaigrette, redolent with garlic, was drizzled over the plates. Add candles. Yumsters. A warm, nutritious salad, and an efficient use of leftovers. You could even add a side dish of (canned) soup, if the shoveling has gone into overtime, and you are feeling generous.

Homemade Vinaigrette
6 tablespoons vinegar (use the fancy stuff – the ones you got for Christmas)
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1/2 cup olive oil
1 crushed garlic clove
Pinch of ground black pepper
Pinch of nice sea salt

Bacon-fried Croutons
Bacon makes everything better – and you know it!
Cook 3 or 4 bacon slices in a frying pan. Save the grease. (Sometimes I add a little olive oil to make a deeper puddle of cooking grease – use your judgment.)
Add a handful of cubed French bread to the frying pan, cooking for 2 to 3 minutes, until golden brown on all sides. Drain on paper towels. Lightly sprinkle garlic powder, onion powder and Lawry’s Seasoning Salt over the crotons. Using Lawry’s is crucial – make no substitute – not even for “Slap Ya Mama”.

The dark of winter is a good time to introduce hints of color and sparkle to your salad. Reds, oranges, purples, yellows – a veritable rainbow of earthly delights. Cranberries! Apples! Cheddar cheese! Pomegranate seeds! Kale Salad
You can throw everything in a main course winter salad, by cleaning out the produce drawer in the fridge and adding shredded cabbage, carrots, Brussels sprouts, roasted squash, or chunks of apples. Martha knows best:
Radicchio Salad

Radicchio Salad with Oranges

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
—Jack Kerouac

*Food52 Super Bowl Snacks

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

I have retreated to the cozy bedroom to write this morning. I am back in bed-ish – lying on top of the covers, but covered by a thick down throw. It is 19 degrees outside this morning! I have a good view of our front yard, which is swaddled in a thick throw of snow. We haven’t had snow here for at least five years, and the novel beauty of it stops us in our tracks as we trot around the house, performing our daily chores and rituals. A naked shadow of the Japanese maple stretched across the snow yesterday, angled and stark, so like a master’s Sumi-e brush ink painting on pure white paper; sure, fleeting perfection.

Luke the wonder dog had forgotten about snow. He was raised in Florida, hasn’t read too many books, and is prone to forgetfulness, so I can’t blame his incredulity. His first walk yesterday was gleeful and joyous and he ran and kicked up white, fluffy clouds. By the afternoon he was less charmed by the snow, and seemed slightly spooked – everything looked, and smelled, different. I had to shovel a narrow path for him in the back by the raised garden bed so he could see the frozen ground under his cold feet. He then trotted off to happily smell the trail he had blazed earlier, reassured that his back forty was secure. He did not detect even a whiff of a neighboring cat trespasser. And the bare hydrangea bushes, with their few sodden heads, provided excellent cover and privacy. He patrolled quickly, and then came inside to reclaim his position near a hot air register.

Luke and I are clinging to our creature comforts, while Mr. Sanders has been wrapped in layers of flannel, corduroy, fleece, Heattech, alpaca, wool, Gore-Tex, and goose down; shoveling the drive and clearing off his car, happy as a new clam. He had oatmeal for breakfast, and is a furnace of hyperbolic energy. My breakfast bagel and Luke’s kibble are no match for hot, steaming, fruit-topped oatmeal. And if you have to go outside this weekend, instead of retiring to a warm indoor writing space, I encourage you to eat a hot, nourishing breakfast before you put your big boots on.

Mr. Sanders, and Ina Garten, like to cook their oatmeal in the microwave. And they are both practically perfect. Ina Garten Oatmeal

Mr. Sanders makes cold, refrigerated overnight oats 9 months out of the year. He likes to doctor his winter oatmeal with brown sugar, maple syrup, cream, and/or fruit. He suggests banana slices, blueberries, strawberries, granola, cinnamon, a splash of vanilla, pumpkin spices, almonds, Kiwi fruit, raspberries, and raisins are all viable and deelish toppings for winter oatmeal breakfasts. You could also try dried cranberries, honey, applesauce or peaches! Ina likes adding a little chocolate, for a sweet change of pace. Here are some more topping suggestions: Toppings

A more novel approach to oatmeal is to embrace the savory side of life. Add eggs, sausage, cheese, onions and greens to oatmeal! Savory Oatmeal America’s Test Kitchen

Or you can try Cooking for Peanuts’s savory oatmeal – in case you need a new way to serve kale!

Baked oatmeal? Ah, the golden era we live in. Baked Oatmeal

Here is a handy oatmeal guide – everything you should know about cooking oatmeal: Delish

Personally, I think oatmeal is best employed in Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes, but I am huddled inside, and Mr. Sanders is out there enjoying the snow. Dorie Greenspan’s Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

“…now and then a giggling trail of mermaids appeared in our wake. We fed them oatmeal.”
—Tove Jansson

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.

I love trailing through food stores, peering through shop windows and admiring perfectly arranged still lives of fruits, vegetables, and meats; getting ideas and inspirations. In Selfridge’s palatial food hall in London a few years ago I marveled at the goose eggs, duck eggs, and quail eggs artfully posed in small packages in a case that also included tubs of duck fat. Interesting. Unusual. Nearby there were the picture perfect piles of roasted meats, and strings of sausages, and boatloads of fish and pretty shiny red lobsters: too many culinary concepts for my addled tourist brain to absorb.

We used to live near a butcher shop where all manner of imported specialities are stacked on every surface, and they were fascinating to consider while standing in line for my two pounds of Italian sausage; one hot, one sweet. Perched on counters and shelves there were day-glow pink pickled eggs in Jeroboam-sized jars, capers small, medium and large, a color wheel of of olive varieties, huge cafeteria-sized tins of La Bella San Marzano Italian Plum Tomatoes, gallons of imported light, plain, virgin and extra virgin olive oils in varying-shaped vessels, dusty packages of pastas, trays of fresh mozzarella, and I could continue the inventory all day. I always feel humbled when confronted by all the ingredients of what must be the potential for many feasts, when all I want is some sausage.

One of the first meals that Mr. Sanders wooed me with was a dish of sausage and peppers. We still prepare it regularly, because it is easy, delicious, pairs well with garlic bread and red wine, it reminds us of our mis-spent youth, and it provides leftovers.

Sausage & Peppers
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 large bell peppers, cut into strips (We like the sweeter tasting red or yellow peppers)
• 2 medium onions, thickly sliced (I like Vidalia or any sweet onion)
• 3 garlic cloves, minced (or be daring and use your garlic press – it will smell heavenly)
• 1 pound hot Italian sausage
• 1 pound sweet Italian sausage
• A generous sprinkle of crushed red pepper flakes
Heat oil in heavy large skillet over medium heat. Add peppers, onions, garlic and sauté 10 minutes. Cook until tender, about 5 -10 minutes. I like to char the edges of the vegetables.

Cook sausages in another heavy large skillet over medium-high heat until brown and cooked through, turning occasionally, about 15 minutes. Slice the sausage into disks, return to the pan and cook until they are nicely browned. Scoop the peppers and onions onto a platter and pile the meat on top. Mr. Sanders likes to add diaphanous curls of Parmesan cheese. Add a salad, a crusty loaf of bread, a tall glass of red wine (Dry January, ha!), and candles.

This is a good meal to make on the weekend, because you can toss the leftover sausage with pasta or rice, and voila! Dinner is already made for a dreary Monday, when no one (least of all me!) wants to cook. Or you can pile it onto leftover crusty bread and have a pretty deelish sandwich. Or add it as a topping to your Friday Night Pizza! We are kitchen geniuses!

Our smart friends at Food52 add potatoes to their sausage and peppers. Sausage & Peppers

Martha has to get fancy, as one would expect, but at least hers is a sheet pan dinner – super easy to clean up. Martha’s Sheet Pan Sausage

I made this Penne and Sausage dish for Monday night pasta last week, and we had it again on Thursday. The next time I try it, though, I will follow the recipe, and will remove the sausage from the casings and will crumble it in the pan, to speed up the cooking process. I also used half a can of crushed tomatoes because it was what I had in the pantry, and it was cold enough that I was not going back out to the grocery store for one more damn thing. I also substituted whole milk for half & half – too lazy to put on my winter coat. The recipe is that good! Imagine how it will taste when an ambitious, thorough cook like you makes it! Skillet Penne and Sausage Supper

Stay warm and dry! Enjoy the creature comforts you can prepare in the kitchen. Everyone will love you for it – even when you use milk instead of cream.

“A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.”
― Carl Reiner

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.