National Café au Lait Day - Feb. 17th; Chef Tanya Holland

Chef Tanya Holland
Holland is a restauranteur and author of New Soul Cooking, and The Brown Sugar Kitchen Cookbook due out later this year. She has classical French training, and been a contributor to many publications including Food and Wine and Travel and Leisure. Last year (2013), she received the California Travel Association's award of Restauranteur/Chef of the Year.

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February 17th is Café au Lait Day. That's every day for me, in part because I really love coffee with chicory, and you have to drink that with milk.

I have a particularly strong memory of Mom, Aunt Janice and Mamaw (and me for whatever reason) sitting at the kitchen table, with the adults talking and drinking coffee out of turquoise melamine cups. Mamaw used Milnot in her coffee. I don't know if that was a preference or a habit from necessity, but I remember the can of Milnot. 

Not all your memories have to be about the food and the cooking of it; they can also be something as simple as a moment in time.

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National Marzipan Day - January 12th

January 12th is Marzipan Day! Sweet almond paste, marzipan can be eaten like candy (it's often molded into fruit shapes or pigs, and used in recipes. It's also known as marchpane. It's sometimes also used for frosting cakes when rolled into thin sheets. Fondant seems to be more common in the US for that purpose (even though it tastes awful, in my opinion).

When I was a kid, I found a recipe for Marzipan Cookies in my mother's Betty Crocker Cookbook. They were flavored with almond extract, and had a very thick (Play-Doh-like) dough. The instructions called for tinting the dough various colors, and molding balls to look like fruit before baking. Some of the fruits used whole cloves to have the look of the flower end of apples and pears, with pieces of toothpicks for the stems. They were immensely fun to make, but less fun to eat, particularly if you forgot to remove either the toothpick piece or the clove. (Bleh.)

Memories like that will make your cookbook a lot more personal, if you add them. Do you have to? Of course not, but you, and everyone who uses your cookbook, will learn a lot about the family if you do.

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