links: interesting reads

a taste of yellow: lemon petits fours, at use real butter. In this lovely, poignant post, Jen writes about her fight with cancer, alternating between anecdotes/introspection and lovely pictures of very complicated petits fours she baked for LiveStrong day. An amazing post.

And two fantastic posts about the food shortage -- one emotional, one intellectual.

No Words, at Tea & Cookies, and The Ultimate Guide to Understanding the Food Crisis: How it Started, Who it Hurts Most, and How to Solve the Problem, at Cheap Healthy Good.

Travel Thursday #9: London in Winter with Flowers, at A Life (Time) of Cooking. This may not be interesting for you, but it does bring back memories for me.

Russian black bread for my mother, at Tea and Cookies. Together with an older post of Tea's, A Very Special Day, this post provides a great glimpse at the personalities of a mother and her daughter, and a brief illumination of the fascinating, complex, and contradictory relationship between the two women. The first post is also wrapped around the baking of Russian Black Bread, one of the most fascinating, complex and contradictory recipes I've ever seen. Shallots and vinegar and chocolate and fennel, espresso powder and cornmeal and bran... Appropriate, I'd say. Strange and sometimes conflicting ingredients, a long arduous process, and a result that both Tea and Deb from Smitten Kitchen proclaim extraordinary. Mothers and Daughters, eh?