THE TWO MOST ANTICIPATED VEGETABLES OF THE SUMMER ARE HERE! Our sweet corn and the ripest, reddest tomatoes of the year!  It’s hard to know which is the most welcome but I found a very different way to enjoy them both in a wonderful appetizer. …

All hail Super Bowl Sunday! Las Vegas, the Chiefs, the 49ers and the most pressing question: Will Taylor Swift make it there from Japan? One thing is sure, people will eat their way through Super Bowl 58 just as they have every year. Through the…

Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, married her husband Jeffrey when she was 20 years old. Jeffrey Garten was all of 22. A few years ago, Ina published a cookbook called “Cooking for Jeffrey (A barefoot contessa cookbook, Clarkson Potter 2016).  It was her tenth and…

According to Christian David Reynoso, his version of Shrimp Toast started life as a Staff snack at Zuni Café in San Francisco. This great appetizer can also serve as a main dish which is how we served it. A lemony, garlic-y aioli is loaded with…

Some holiday discoveries are well worth making all year round. This is one of them.  It’s from Melissa Clark in The New York Times. It’s one of four recipes created for New Year’s Eve 2020. In “A Finger Food Countdown to 2021”, Melissa created two…

This meal is a sum of its parts: A sublime Fried Chicken, my take on Sicily’s Caponata and great Pesto topping a crispy toasted Baguette. When I was looking around for something special to serve as a supper for guests, I came across this extraordinary…

America’s Cookie Goddess creates the perfect nibbles for Cocktail Hour Dorie Greenspan must be considered the Goddess of Cookies.  The baking guru claims to have woken, more than once, in the middle of the night to bake a cookie she dreamed about. At least that’s…

ONE OF SPAIN’S MOST FAMOUS TAPAS, PAN CON TOMATE IS EASY TO MAKE After our ten-day trip through Portugal in July, it seemed a shame to be just an hour and a half by air from Barcelona and not go there—especially since Andrew had only…

        A couple of years ago, I read a very detailed recipe for a tomato Tarte Tatin in Bon Appetit. I worked with the recipe and came up with two versions of the dish. Now that Tomato season is in full swing, I revisited this…

Salad lovers are in sheer heaven now and will be through the rest of the summer.  The ingredients for perfect salads are everywhere. And the earliest part of the season yields the tenderest of greens. Arugula has its bite but it’s far from bitter which…

It’s getting close to Crab Cake season which I would define as soon as the Summer Cocktail Party Circuit gets into gear.  So any mention of a Crab Cake recipe gets my attention.  Most Crab Cakes fall far short of expectations. They are larded with…

         My passion for mushrooms only grows stronger in the fall. And I am always on the lookout for new ways to prepare my favorite fungus.  I was very excited to see a recipe that paired mushrooms I’d never even imagined combining with mushrooms—Cinnamon and…

Galettes are a cookie in French Canada and a Buckwheat Crêpe Breakfast in France…           One of my favorite posts on Facebook recently was the following: “You can’t expect everyone to love you. You are not pizza”. And neither is this fantastic concoction from Food…

        I don’t know how we got to the last week of August so quickly. But it’s been a wonderful summer here and every chance we’ve gotten, we’ve enjoyed great salads all made, with few exceptions, with ingredients found within five miles of our house. …