This dish really ought to come with a passport.  It has undercurrents of India with its cumin and coriander.  But the Haloumi cheese is pure Greek. The chickpeas could be Indian or Italian or German. And if we called them “Garbanzos”,…

         Duck a l’Orange lives in our memory as one of our first introductions to restaurant food.  In Montreal, where we lived, it was fairly ubiquitous on the city’s better menus.  We loved it for its sweetness and its crunch.  For the dark duck meat…

         Few things are more of a convenience in the kitchen than keeping a bag of Costco shrimp in the Freezer. Cleaned, with their tails intact, they are very economical and they come in several sizes of shrimp—from very large to small and somewhere in between.  Whatever…

         For us, fall starts bang on Labor Day.  That’s it for Andrew being at the beach.  His real estate business in the city totally takes over his every weekend.  We will be lucky if he gets to Bridgehampton once between then and Thanksgiving.  This…

At the Mercado Central in Santiago, you can dine on all the fresh seafood from the market… even if you’re not entirely sure what it is.          I’ve had the good fortune to travel to South America several times.  But I have only touched down…

       I’ve told you some of the story of Joanne Chang, the Harvard educated economist who threw in the towel and went on to open “Flour”, a Boston bakery and cafe that’s grown to three locations. That was between opening a marvelous pan-Asian…

Who can resist tomatoes that look like this? After I made these golden-seared chicken breasts with their moist center of plump ripe tomatoes, melted cheese and pungent garlic sauce, I wondered if I could call this an original recipe.  But when, exactly, is a recipe…

         One of the great joys of cooking for me is finding flavor combinations that work together beautifully even though they come from completely different cooking traditions.  That’s what this dinner does. It takes a wonderful Cajun dish from Bon Appetit  full of shrimp and…

         I was quite surprised to see that my Facebook Birthday reminders numbered 10 for this week.  It was by far the highest number I’d seen in a while and I wondered what on earth had caused this minor baby boom.  So I did some…

           As promised earlier this week, this Chewing the Fat is all about the phenomenal cookies Andrew baked for the Hampton Classic, our annual Horse Show that’s a fixture of our summer calendar.  People raved about them!  And small wonder.  Andrew went all out…

  Our Table Decor Yellow Calla Lillies and Horses   Summer Corn and Scallop Salad adapted from Sylvia Lehrer Andrew’s Cookies and Michael’s Color Co-ordinated Devilled Eggs          The Grand Prix marks the end of The Hampton Classic Horse Show, one of the pre-eminent equestrian…

This gorgeous photograph is by Karen Wise.            Once in a great while, a cookbook transcends just being a repository of recipes and becomes something more:  It tells the story of a place and its people, of its unique culinary heritage and the food…

Almond Cake with Slivered Almonds and Marscapone Whipped Cream Almond Cakes in their “Hurri-Cakes” incarnation           The first time Andrew made this magnificently moist, indescribably rich almond-to-the-core cake, it was one of two birthday cakes he provided for a friend’s very Big Birthday.  The second…

Andrew and the Birthday Girl Last week was the 12th birthday of our godchild, Olivia.  Now since Andrew and I saw her within her first hours here on earth, it’s sometimes unbelievable that all those 12 years have passed with the speed of summer lightening. …