I had the first snow day of my adult life last week, and I got just as excited about it as I used to when I was a kid. When my alarm went off, I rolled over to check my email, discovered a note from the boss saying we could work from home, and am [...]
I have a distinct childhood memory of being completely disgusted by my grandmother putting salt and pepper on an otherwise perfectly good slice of cantaloupe. This was before I baked my first batch of cookies and saw how salt can bring out sweetness, and long before a Belgian exchange student introduced me to the joys [...]
I thought maybe Brooklyn wasn’t going to get a real summer this year. It’s been cool and rainy around these parts for months. (Which is part of why the Northeast is likely going to have a sad tomato crop.) Then, last weekend, August descended upon us with a vengeance, and a week early to boot. [...]
I get absurdly excited about sour cherries. I think it’s because they’re around for such a short time before they’re gone until next year. I missed them last year. I was busy or out of town, and by the time I got around to them, all I could find was one sad-looking,overpriced container of bruised, [...]
This isn’t so much a recipe as a very easy technique. The first time I had peppers blistered like this was in Spain, and they were a revelation. They were pimientos de Guernica, mild but flavorful little peppers, fried in olive oil until blistered, then tossed with coarse sea salt. The sweetness of the pepper, [...]
It’s all strawberries, all the time, around here, I know. I’ll vary it up a little soon, but there are few things I hate more than to see good food go to waste, so when the last of the CSA berry bounty was still sitting on my counter on Sunday night, and I’d used up [...]
It’s the first day of summer, not that you’d know it from looking out the window. It’s been a very grey and rainy June here in New York, and, while I am grateful that I haven’t yet had to install the air conditioner and can still happily sleep at night with the windows open and [...]
Today the temperature rose to 50 degrees and the sun finally showed itself. I was able to wear a jacket that was not of the head-to-toe, sleeping-bag variety! I didn’t wear a hat! I definitely needed a day like this. Stepping outside was like coming up for air.
By happy coincidence, we had planned an afternoon [...]
My late grandmother believed that it was good luck to eat ham and cabbage on New Year’s Day. I was fortunate enough to have grown up in the same town as my grandmother, so every New Year’s Day my family would drive over to her house for dinner. Holiday dinners happen early in my family, [...]
