My feelings toward spring are the very definition of bittersweet.
On one hand, the season ushers in warmer weather, which quickly gives way to the soul-wilting heat, humidity, and bugs for which NC is famous.
But.
On the other hand, we get dogwood blossoms, and my April birthday, which brings with it obscenely frosted Dewey’s birthday cake.
And the warmer weather brings spring berries to make my strawberry cake. The cake recipe comes from author Ruth Reichl, and the frosting’s from my mom.
Joyland Strawberry Layer Cake
Cake:
2 sticks butter, softened
1 cup sugar
3 large eggs, room temp.
2 ¼ cups cake flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons real vanilla
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 8 or 9-inch round tins.
Cream together butter and sugar until very light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each.
Sift together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Mix into butter mixture. When mixture just comes together, mix in sour cream and vanilla until batter is fully blended.
Carefully spoon batter into prepared cake pans and bake for 25-35 minutes. Start checking after about 22 minutes and remove from oven as soon as toothpick comes out clean, but moist. Cool in pan 5 minutes and then turn out onto cooling rack to finish cooling completely.
Vanilla Simple Syrup
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract
Heat sugar and water in pan on stove until the sugar is completely dissolved. Stir in vanilla and let cool.
Mom’s American Buttercream
3 1-pound boxes powdered sugar
2 teaspoons salt
3 scant teaspoons cream of tartar
1 cup butter-flavor Crisco
3 egg whites
¾ cup of water (or less)
2 tablespoons vanilla
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
½ cup strawberry jam
Dump all ingredients except the jam into mixer. Beat ingredients at low until it starts to come together. Put water in at this point, a bit at a time. Once it gets to creamy frosting and piping consistency, let it go on medium-high for 4 minutes.
Remove two thirds of the frosting, cover, and set aside. Add jam to remaining frosting in mixer and let it go on medium-high until it’s completely incorporated and smooth (2-3 minutes).
Assembly
1-pint fresh strawberries
1 cup white chocolate chips
Brush both cakes generously with simple syrup.
Cut tops off cake so they’re straight and level and put cut pieces into a food processor until they’re small crumbs and set aside. Slice each cake in half, horizontally. Pipe one ring around the outside top of three layers as a dam, then fill with strawberry buttercream, and smooth down. Stack onto cake board or plate, topping with unfrosted layer then put into fridge until frosting firms up.
Frost with about half the remaining frosting. Smooth it as much as you can. Gently press the cake crumbs around the sides of the cake until it’s fully covered.
Cut the stem off the strawberries and place, cut side down, onto paper towels. Melt the white chocolate and dip the bottoms of the berries about 1/5 the way up. Place on parchment-covered pan and let set and harden.
Using a large star tip, put a border around the top and bottom of the cake. Place stars around the top in a decorative manner and top each with chocolate-coated strawberries. Cover and refrigerate at least six hours or overnight before service.
This cake is spring-y and beautiful and taken to Easter dinner will make you the talk of the day. 
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This week’s Indy has a piece I wrote about the food of the Full Frame Festival, a Durham documentary fest.
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Are you having a bad day, week, month, year?
I’ve got great tidings for you. The problem is neither in your stars nor yourself. You’re not to blame.
The entire list of previously awesome things that are now atrocious due to millennials is too long to list, but what follows is some of the more hair-raising examples.
Shopping malls; the places where we grew up, hung out, met crushes, fell in love, then bought our wedding dresses and rented turquoise tuxedos. Those whippersnappers now shop online and patronize locally owned small businesses. They are responsible that those giant cathedrals for the worship of conspicuous consumption, and its ensuing unnecessary credit card debt are quickly becoming empty things of the past.
The game of golf. For some reason kids today don’t see the allure in dressing in ugly candy-colored matching sets and riding a kiddy car around acres of land tortured with chemicals, chain saws, and mowers into perforated, make-believe Edens so they can hit tiny balls with sticks and pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege.
Next time you run into a grocery store and those thousands of boxes of sugar-frosted, vitamin sprayed, artificially colored and flavored breakfast cereal have dwindled to a mere few hundred, blame those kids. For some reason they think they’re too good to eat pseudo-food full of ingredients that were created in a lab in Altoona.
This info has been interpreted that with makeup and filtering no one will ever look old. Maybe not in a photo. But remember, the oldest of the millennials are not even forty yet. The first time a 45-year-old millennial looks into the bathroom mirror in full sunlight after a long night? Amazon won’t be able to get enough vans full of anti-aging products up their driveways.
There are industries that will disappear because young people have no need for the product. But that’s been happening since folks lived in caves and hunted woolly mammoths with sticks and spears. When’s that last time you bought a chamber pot or a buggy whip?
But they are also fiercely protective of each other, their struggles, and vulnerabilities. It may not be their journey, but they are deeply committed to help make the paths of each other as smooth and safe as they can.
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This is the column I never wanted to write.
Because of having exacting standards for potato salad, there are very, very few store-bought or restaurant made varieties that I like. I can really only think of four.
Which was both a bummer and an opportunity. An opportunity because I was still looking for a topic for this week’s column. The same hand that slapped the potato salad-laden fork out of my mouth also handed me something about which to write. I decided to do some online investigation to make Pearl’s at home.
Two things I then knew for sure: the salad was made with russets, and it contained both mustard and relish, so I have to walk back that abomination thing, and the no mustard recipe was a fraud.
4 pounds russet potatoes cooked in boiling salted water until fork-tender
When the potatoes are barely cool enough to handle, peel. Cut all except one into cubes. Chop reserved spud and put into dressing bowl and give it a smoosh until it’s chunky/mashed. Add relish, onion, mustard, honey, mayo, and sour cream. Stir together until well combined. Season and reseason, if necessary.
Add still warm potatoes and eggs. Mix until everything’s coated. Season, cover and refrigerate for an hour. Serves 6-8.
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This week’s Indy has a piece I wrote, all about the life-changing scones Ali Rudel and staff make at East Durham Bake Shop.
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Although I have a deep and abiding love for it, I have a complicated relationship with Costco.
I often venture into that house-sized refrigerator where the keep their veggies and come out bearing a giant amount of this or that. Frequently, it’s their button mushrooms, that come in like a forty- or fifty-pound box.
What do we do with it now?
The other new, but really important ingredient was mushroom stock. I always discard the stems when I use mushrooms, but this time I tossed them into a pot with 2 cups of chicken stock, a handful of dried mushrooms, and a couple bay leaves. I then boiled it until it reduced by half, then strained it.
½ cup + 3 tablespoons butter, divided
Melt 3 tablespoons of butter in large, heavy pot. Add mushrooms, onion, thyme and rosemary. Season, then stir to coat. Turn to medium, cover and cook until the water’s released from veg. Uncover and cook until the liquid’s cooked out, and mushrooms start to brown. Pour in wine and cook until dry. Remove veg and set aside.
Preheat oven to 350. Add vegetables and noodles to pot. Stir until everything’s coated and veg are evenly distributed. Taste for seasoning and re-season, if necessary. Pour into greased casserole dish. Cover with parchment, then foil.
When I told him what we were having for dinner, he asked, “Isn’t this mushroom stuff just like something you’ve made before?”
Have you ever been so tired that you got punchy? Where everything is hilarious and you laugh so hard, so continuously that you’re also crying?
What actually came out was, “Everybody’s a chameleon.”
And it’s kind of getting on my last nerve.
I’d take out the trash and somebody I’d never met would tell me why my grass was more weed than grass and what combo of toxic chemicals would take care of it. Or a complete stranger would inform me that the shovel I’d picked out wasn’t the right tool for the job, even though, he had no idea what particular job I planned on doing.
Financial geniuses would insist we absolutely should renegotiate out mortgage, never mind interest rates were going up; we were just too unsophisticated to understand the complex forces at play.
Then we met a whole new raft of scholars when we were expecting, and again after The Kid arrived.
Lucky for The Kid, we ran into hundreds of child development specialists and pediatricians each time we left the house.
Solid food should be eaten within days of birth or maybe not until the thirtieth birthday. Potty training should be early and Draconian, or child-led and have a goal of the child being fully trained by sometime around high school graduation.
Once one becomes a dog owner, it’s astounding how many authorities you’ll encounter. If you have a mutt, you’ll be shamed for encouraging indiscriminate mating. If you have a full-breed, people will inform you that a rescue dog in a shelter was put down because you have a fancy, over-bred show dog.
If you do have a an AKC registered pooch, you’ll discover 90 percent of the population is either a breeder or trainer of that variety. One should treat them like the fur-covered children they are or treat them like wolves and never show affection. 
One guy in our neighborhood has bred every Akita anywhere on the planet for the last 200 years (except ours, I guess). He’s also trained them all to obey him by blinking his eyes.
I think you’ll agree with me, Gentle Reader, that well-stocked libraries are vital to the type of civilization in which we want to live. No one can know what may be the trigger that fosters the love of reading in a young person. And books enrich one’s life in infinite and eternal ways.
My friend, Paul Alborough, also known as international recording star and pioneer of chap hop Professor Elemental, has recorded 
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I went to BJ’s and picked up some Nabs for Petey. And because I got them at BJ’s, there were 36 full-sized packages of crackers and peanut butter in the pack—hey, he likes Nabs, and they were really cheap.
While I was in there, I noticed an old Duke three-ring binder. I opened it to see if there was anything interesting in it. In it was pure comedy gold.
The Kid has always had an interesting imagination, and a way with words. Not long after learning to write, my child wrote a story about a pirate that was both afraid of the water and prone to extreme seasickness. I know that’s my baby, but c’mon, that’s hilarious—I mean, just picture that poor guy. Somebody’s junior high had the world’s worst guidance counselor.
Each morning at camp they had a writing exercise. They were given a prompt and had a set amount of time. Where they went was up to them.
What follows are The Kid’s own words. Comments from me are in italics.
Because the mole men tell me to. They’ve stopped urging creativity and are now focused on digging and building an underground kingdom into which I’ll one day fall while mowing the lawn, never to be heard of again. 
Because they serve a combination of chicken and fish called a chish. Gross.
Because I have a chalkboard full of ideas and I can’t write about just one. Lay’s potato chips of the mind.
There you have it. A hopefully humorous, but more likely unsettling look into the mind of my one and only progeny. Who’s now living as an independent, unmedicated adult.
Did you know that curly leaf, or savoy spinach almost went extinct? With the advent of the triple-washed, bagged baby spinach the demand for it among the big produce companies pretty much disappeared. The flavor is less mild, and all those nooks and crannies on the surface of the leaf makes it hard to thoroughly clean a product which already has a somewhat problematic reputation and history concerning sick-making microbes.
But Petey and I both love a classic spinach salad: spinach, sliced button mushrooms, hard-cooked egg, shaved red onion (Petey’s a hold-the-onion man), crispy bacon shards drizzled with freshly made buttermilk ranch.
I put it into a large microwave safe bowl, cover it with a paper towel and nuke it until it’s completely wilted; somewhere between 2-4 minutes depending on how much I have. Then I turn it out into a colander to drain and cool.
For both sautéed and creamed spinach, you start the same way: onions. Put some butter or oil into a skillet and add chopped onions. Season and cook until they begin to caramelize (the more color on the onions, the sweeter they’ll be, you choose). Then add 2 cups of thawed, wilted spinach that you’ve squeezed most of the water from. Season and add 10-12 gratings of fresh nutmeg. For sautéed, let it cook until it’s mostly dry, and a little browned around the edges. Take off the heat, add the juice of a lemon, check for seasoning, and serve.
For creamed spinach:
Take it off the heat and stir in a couple of heaping tablespoons of whipped cream cheese (this will stabilize the sauce). Then stir in the juice of a lemon. Check for seasoning and serve as is, or over a baked russet or sweet potato.
My new favorite thing is to use the creamed spinach in the place of pesto in pasta. Cook the pasta while the spinach is cooking. When the spinach is finished, and the cream cheese and lemon juice are stirred in, transfer the pasta into the spinach pan with a slotted spoon. Don’t drain it, because you’ll then use enough of the pasta water to thin out the spinach, and starch in the water makes the sauce silky and it coats the pasta perfectly. Then top with more parm.
It’s really good, and frankly I’m not sure how this took so long to occur to someone who normally has at least seventy-five varieties of pasta in her kitchen at all times.
Thanks for your time.
bull city mom 