i'm sitting at the table with a pile of freshly baked bread because i've just spent yesterday catching up for my time without it last week.

did you miss me, pita? did you miss me, focaccia?

[the bread stares back in silence. molly feels uncomfortable, and then unaffected. she peels a potato off of the pony-shaped focaccia, eats it, and goes back to work.]

how was your passover, orthodox easter, and/or weekend??

my passover was mostly spent in louisiana, a few hours west of new orleans, at the home of tabasco sauce. the factory, headquarters, and research and development pepper fields are hidden by massive ginormous mossy trees and surrounded by swamps and bayous, and the bayous are filled with alligators. there's a tiny post office and an archives building, and i stayed in an old large mansion down the road from the factory with blogger friends and ghosts of old tabasco family members. or something like that. it might sound scary, with all of the alligators and ghosts, but it wasn't at all! the alive humans were so friendly that i just assumed the ghosts and alligators would be too if we ever came into direct contact. the trip was really beautiful. quite humid. fascinating. made me want to invent something as cool as universally loved hot sauce.

anyway, i'm back now for a few good weeks, spring planting is well under way (eggboy is officially coated in his thin semi-permanent layer of dirt), and i've got some fun pop-ups and parties coming up that i'm cooking and baking for. so i've been whipping up a few new experiments as menu possibilities! some of them have been good, some of them bad (like the donuts on this cake, they were so sadly mediocre), and some of them great. like these oreos. they're pretty effing good. they're butter and sugar and chocolate and tahini, transformed into dark crispy cookies and sandwiched with smooth nutty tahini buttercream. aside from the fact that the two components balance each other as well as meryl and charlie, i love them because they'll keep well for a week or two in your fridge and longer in the freezer. and what better mother's day present than a freezer full of homemade oreos?