The Lovely Art of Cooking for Me, Myself & I - No. 81

My tips, Nancy’s tricks, plus baking solo with Lula’s coconut tarts

Join your fellow Subscribers — and me — today for our first Open Thread to talk cooking for one, or anything else on your mind! You will receive the email thread at about 11:30 am est. And I’ll be around to chime in and answer questions for about 30 minutes in real time.

A meringue-topped cupcake for one. Beat an egg white with 1 rounded tablespoon sugar and a drop of coconut extract until stiff, spread on top of the cupcake, then place in a 350-oven until browned. From A New Take on Cake.

I HADN’T BEEN BACK IN NASHVILLE LONG when I got a call from a beloved neighbor I hadn’t seen since childhood. Her name was Lula Estes, and she was an artist known for her oil portraits and warm smile.

Lula invited my husband and me over for dinner, and I recall an evening of laughter and little coconut tarts for dessert.

Lula asked me to come into the kitchen as she reheated three coconut tarts pulled from her freezer. She placed them in her toaster oven while we scraped the dinner plates. I would go on to share that recipe in my book The Dinner Doctor, and it is one I think about today because it has the flexibility to feed a lot of people but you can bake one at a time just for yourself.

I definitely got the feeling that Lula baked those tarts for herself.