Hi Reader, When I was a kid, beans were not optional. Ho-no! They appeared with the regularity of my godfather's Saturday-night stock car race. White beans with pork, black-eyed peas with tuna, lentils simmered until they slumped into submission. My mother insisted they were “good for you,” which, in childhood, was code for “culinary punishment.” This is what AI thinks I looked like as a child, sifting through a pan of chickpeas. But somewhere along the way, I stopped sulking and started...
3 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, Every year when the first chill sneaks into the air, I’m hit with the same scent—apples and cinnamon—and suddenly I’m thirty-something again, standing in my postage-stamp-size kitchen trying to impress a man I’d met only weeks before. (Spoiler: I succeeded. He’s still here, three decades later, eating the evidence.) The One in my impossibly small kitchen in Brooklyn, tucked under a staircase. That first autumn, way back in 1993, was our season of Love Food. We knew nothing about...
5 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, Every October, I perform a little ritual that The One insists is more dramatic than the final scene of a telenovela. I stand in front of my Bradley smoker, cover in hand, and put Brad to sleep for the winter. This summer, Brad and I didn't hang out. At all. First, I had a relapse of Lyme disease symptoms (yay, me), which laid me low for a while. Then there was our trip to Chaumont, NY, to visit our dear friends Keith and Roberta. THEN there was the wedding of my college...
10 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, I have a theory: autumn isn’t really a season—it’s a mood swing in a cable-knit sweater. One day you’re smugly sipping your pumpkin spice latte, the next you’re staring down the barrel of daylight savings with the kind of dread usually reserved for dental work. When I was a kid, my mother believed the cure for any malaise—be it heartbreak, the flu, or my theatrics over multiplication tables—was a pot of something simmering on the stove.Her chicken soup was Prozac before Prozac, her...
15 days ago • 3 min read
One-Pan Macedonian-Spiced Chicken I call them zombies. Recipes I remove from the site because they haven't gotten the amount of love as other recipes. But I save them just in case I need to bring them back from the dead.Well, this week I was reviewing some site stats in Google. Over the past three months, I found that there were almost 10,000 clicks for Macedonian chicken. The only problem is...that it was removed last year. Somehow, somewhere out in the interwebs are links to the recipe that...
20 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, I’ll confess: my first attempt at baking bread could’ve doubled as a doorstop. My mother called it a "cement brink,” yet my father, always the gentleman, chomped his way through his slice, his jaw working like a set of pistons, giving me a thumbs up. While the loaf sucked, its smell—oh, the smell—was ah-MAZ-ing. That yeasty sweetness that makes a kitchen feel like the center of the universe. Eventually, with patience (and a stern talking-to from Julia Child on PBS), I learned that...
24 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, When I was a kid, dinner wasn’t a leisurely Norman Rockwell spread (despite what The One thinks!). It was more like a fire drill. My mother would be clattering pans while hollering down the street for me and my cousin Barry to get our butts upstairs. Meanwhile, the homework wars were already raging at the table: my father bellowing about long division (as if he were Euclid reincarnated), me whining that numbers were cruel and unusual punishment, and my mother trying to make sure no...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, It’s not quite summer. It’s not quite fall.It’s that blurry, in-between stretch where routines return and comfort starts sounding really good.So here’s my farewell-to-summer lineup. End-of-Summer Lineup Steady and made for this exact moment. Please, take what you need. WHAT'S INSIDE... Easy Pot Roast, Potatoes & Vegetables Pasta Alla Norcina Tuscan Style Roast Leg Of Lamb Bacon-Wrapped Meatloaf Shepherd’s Pie With Onions & Cheddar Caçoila | Portuguese Stewed Beef Individual Chicken...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, Think soft flickers of candlelight, a hint of citrus in the air, something light and flaky on your fork...This is seafood for summer evenings, designed to melt the day right off your shoulders. Summer Seafood Dinners Let it flake, melt, swirl, and hush the day right out of you. WHAT'S INSIDE... Flounder With Lemon Butter Sauce Steamed Halibut With Ginger Pan Seared Scallops Crab Cake Burgers Shrimp With Chorizo Garlic-Butter Shrimp Pasta Tuna Salad With White Beans Salmon Cakes...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
