Welcome to Part 2 of my Christmas cookie bake-a-thon! (Part 1: Butterscotch Bars)

The thing about baking is that unless you're a pasty chef, or exceptionally gifted in the kitchen, or happen to have memorized countless ratios of fat to sugar, you can't really bake without a recipe.  It's different for savory dishes, like a stew or salad, whose recipes afford lots of room to add, subtract, or substitute ingredients according to your taste.  That's why baking recipes are still so important to me, why 90% of the recipe hunting I do in my life is geared toward cookies, pies, and cakes.  It's also why it's so important to share the good recipes when we find them.  Bakers must be a society of sharers.

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Ah, September...I don't know what the weather's like where you are, but here in New Orleans, it's pretty darn wet.  But once the rains of Lee move northeast, we should get some fall-like weather, topping out around 75 degrees!  Practically winter.  I'm always ready to do some roasting as soon as the major summer heat subsides, and I'm jumping the gun a little here, but with good reason.  We're making this scrumptious jalapeno-roasted pork from Susan Spicer's wonderful cookbook, Crescent City Cooking, so we can use the leftovers in a Labor Day/Paul's Birthday jambalaya tomorrow.  Hooray!

[two pork shoulders (double recipe) about to go in the oven]

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Fact: smoothie + bread = breakfast.

I love a good smoothie.  And I love me some homemade bread.  I think there's some kind of law against baking during the summer in New Orleans--when I ask for parchment paper at the corner store, they look at me like I'm nuts.  I guess I am a little nuts, but darn it, I'm gonna keep making bread because I love it and this is when I have the time.

Smoothie A: My classic, all-around go-to blend of vanilla yogurt, orange juice, a banana and frozen strawberries.  Blip it up and drink it down.

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