On a beautiful early September day, following a late summer swim, my friend Kristina and I found ourselves in one of those classic general stores that are still to be found in Vermont, selling local handicrafts, artisanal cheeses,  hand-scooped cones, everyday necessities like scouring powder and laundry detergent, and one remaining apple pie, looking very handmade and beautiful. We would have that pie for dessert that evening. Why not make some ice cream to go with it, I suggested. My favorite flavor is vanilla (or even just sweet cream), but Kristina wanted something more exciting, something with things in it. She suggested rum raisin, a good idea for apple pie.

Kristina had just been telling me about a trip to India she had taken with her brother and sister-and-law, where every dessert she’d tried had cardamom in it, and not a little  bit, but a lot. She was sick of cardamom-flavored desserts. I like challenges. This was a perfect opportunity to create something with cardamom that she will like.  

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The Dowdy Corners Cookbook Club has finally begun, after thinking about it for more than a couple of years. Actually, a small group of interested friends, neighbors, and friends of friends, has already been reading and cooking from the club’s first cookbook Entice with Spice, a very accessible introduction to Indian home cooking. The launch of the DCCC blog has been a bit slower going, plagued, as I am, by a double handicap of technophobia and perfectionism. (I’m used to working on printed books, and so I have to remind myself that blogs are loops of on-going adjustment, feedback, adjustment, feedback . . . .) Plus there is a heck of a lot of difference between being a content provider and reacting to something that’s already out there. (I’m a book editor by trade, and I’ve always been sympathetic to authors when they say they’re stuck with a certain passage of text or section of a book—and the blank screen is facing them.)

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