Happy Easter! If you are in Europe, you probably have a long weekend, so enjoy that. If you are not, you get to take the power back by spending fifteen minutes reading about food and its preperation.

Reductress is usually a joy, and yesterday's How to Make the Top Layer of Your Crème Brûlée as Fragile as His Masculinity is a particular highlight. It also seems to contain some actually useful tips for making a crème brûlée, so perhaps this is going to be the weekend where you start your new life as someone with a kitchen blowtorch! They are so much fun.

Before you pour the custard into the dish, dust some sugar over the sides of the bowl to add crispness to the edges. Once baked, the caramelized sides will add the kind of support and coddling that the crust of this dessert needs, much like the masculine whisky drink your man needs to feel confident out at a bar. Heaven forbid they give him a straw!

http://reductress.com/post/how-to-make-the-top-layer-of-your-creme-brulee-as-fragile-as-his-masculinity/

What nicer computer based treat for yourself on a Friday morning than to read Choire Sicha's profile of Ina Garten? It's still right there! You will feel so reassured and happy all over again.

"Like yesterday," Ina said, "she made a fresh fig jam, and put all the stuff in the pot and she thought, 'How is this going to happen?' And I thought, 'Oh, I can totally understand why it looks like it's not going to happen, but it will.' So I just wrote into the recipe, 'Don't worry! It's going to work!'"

http://www.eater.com/2015/9/30/9394261/ina-garten

Did you know! It's quite hard to find anything on the classic of the women cooking genre, Like Water For Chocolate, that is not SparkNotes or a website that wants to be SparkNotes. Here you go, though:

The fact that Esquivel has chosen discourses not just outside the canon but specifically associated with women’s values and experiences allows her to set forth an alternative to the hegemonic standard, based upon the real women’s lives.

http://offscreen.com/view/chocolate

Happy eating,

Alex.