Guest article by Tyler

As part of the preparation for our Christmas feast, we obtained an Imperia Pasta Machine from Williams-Sonoma, initially for the construction of wild mushroom ravioli. We had a really pleasant experience making the ravioli. Despite being a manually operated machine, once you get the hang of how to work it, it’s quick, simple, and produces fantastic pasta as advertised.

We decided to give it a second workout, and this time to actually use the pasta cutting attachment, by making some spinach fettuccine. And, as usual with anything we make involving flour, we made an attempt to get some whole grains in there as well. Without further ado:

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My husband has a sweet tooth. Rather than fill him up with candy, I usually bake healthier quick breads for him to snack on while he’s at work. I don’t usually post the recipes or pictures for these breads, as I don’t really consider most quick breads worthy of an article. Can you imagine writing down all the possible toppings for a pizza? It’s analogous, in my mind. There are so many variations on quick bread. Practically everybody and everybody’s grandmother’s second cousin removed has a recipe for pumpkin bread or banana bread. Everybody swears by their own rendition. Honestly! Making bad quick bread is a challenge, and compared to yeast breads, they’re nothing. So why the fuss?

Despite that argument, recent disappointments have forced me to reconsider my position on not posting quick bread recipes. I speak, of course, of the damned lemon-poppy seed bread and (likewise) other citrus breads.

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My thoughts were drawn to my grandmother the other day. I never knew her very well beyond the self-interested childhood sphere of age eight, when she died quite unexpectedly just after her 50th anniversary. But there was one fact I could grip with stark clarity: she was the wife of a missionary. She married my grandfather fairly young and traveled with him extensively, going so far as to raise her own children in another country thousands of miles away from her friends (and possibly any family, not that I understood her to have any happy connections). It was baffling to me for many years. I was a progressive liberal and a budding feminist with a strong streak of individualism. What could possibly motivate a woman to up, marry, travel hell-knows-where at the whim of a man who is now practically the epitome of far-right religious Midwest values, and then have three children? And how could this person possibly be related to me? It seemed impossible that we shared the same genes.

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