Sharon Kebschull Barrett

These days, following a recipe feels like a luxury. If you read cookbooks with any regularity, you’ll get one message pounded in: Real cooks don’t follow recipes. Real cooks eat quiche they pulled out of thin air. Cookbooks promise they’ll teach you how to cook without books, how to improvise incessantly. (Although why, you should […]

It all started with a lollipop. Driving through UNC’s campus each day to take my son to preschool, I get an eyeful of the latest in 20-something fashion. What struck me as especially weird one morning, though, wasn’t the low-rise jeans or high-cut boots. It was the fashion for baby food. Well, maybe toddler food […]

I am not, in the fullest sense, a Southerner. Born and raised in Raleigh, I have always considered myself Southern, but I was often irritatingly reminded that that wasn’t enough by older women who pointedly asked where I was from, noting that I didn’t sound very Southern. With a mother from Connecticut and a Nebraskan […]

It was with no small amusement that I read recently of the drop in demand for low-carb products. If obesity weren’t such a problem in this country, it’d be comical how lemming-like people run from one diet to the next. I took my own stab at a low-carb life for a few days at the […]

I’ve hit a new demographic, and I’m not celebrating. I’m now solidly in the over-35 category, as hit home when I bought a rowing machine. Glancing through the instructions, I came across this pearl: “Persons over 35 should consult a physician before using this machine.” I celebrated a birthday, and now I might die from […]

Somewhere in your life, there’s probably a comfort pancake. Maybe it’s the chocolate chip pancakes your mother used to make, or your college diner’s dinner plate-size version, or a Korean scallion pancake. For me, it was eierkuchen, a 10-inch, crepe-like, eggy German pancake that my mother (and her mother) made occasionally for supper. Close behind […]

If it’s winter, it must be time for ice cream. I remember feeling only a little surprised when Maple View Farm opened its new store and began selling ice cream in January–and was promptly packed. With so many warm winter days in North Carolina, why not eat ice cream year-round? For those of us old […]

Life starts to feel complete once you’ve slept in a caboose. My wanderlust has reached a high pitch lately, with dreams of European travel coming, unbidden, at all hours. Since that’s not happening soon, given the tots in our house, my husband instead planned a quick mountain getaway recently. That was all I knew–until I […]

My soup pot has been desperately seeking fall. As a native North Carolinian, I know to be grateful when the thermometer dips into the 70s. Still, I want that thermometer to see how low it can go. For my soups to taste right, can’t we at least drop to 65? When it finally gets cool […]

Children’s menus have turned me into a conspiracy theorist. Never one to fall for such nonsense, I’m deeply uncomfortable about this. And yet, what else should a parent think? The Weathervane sent me over this edge to JFK land. I went to the restaurant with an older friend, thinking this would be a slightly grown-up […]