CHEWING THE FAT

              One of the most anticipated arrivals at our local farm stand is the peaches.  These deliciously juicy fruits with their beautiful golden flesh are the height of summer’s goodness.  It’s always a struggle to avoid those awful hard and hardly ripe early…

  A Basketful of Tomatillos          Summer cooking should be as easy as this every day of the week.  These tacos are great fun to make.   Sitting around the table with a stack of corn tortillas, filling as many as you like with a delicious…

Roan and the Birthday Girl, Blythe.          Andrew has quite the reputation for providing a great birthday cake.  Last weekend, he outdid himself by making three! Two were for a seventieth Birthday Party and one was for our lovely friend Blythe, who turned eleven.         …

         Whatever happened to David Rosengarten?  You may remember the marvelously low-key television chef who preceded the food network rampage that made stars out of everyone from Bobby Flay to Giada di Laurentis.  David’s show “Taste” was a wonderful learning experience as David deep-dived into…

Crumb Topping Actual Size    Those boys from Brooklyn, Renato Poliafito and Matt Lewis, are no strangers on Chewing the Fat.  We just can’t get enough of their spectacular baking recipes from not one, but two great cookbooks: “Baked” (Stewart, Tabori and Chang 2008) and “Baked Explorations” (Stewart,…

         Today, I wanted to share a really terrific cake that Andrew made last weekend…twice.  The tangy buttermilk makes the cake so deliciously moist and adaptable to any one of those gorgeous berries that are at our Farm Stands right now.  It lets the flavor…

        Today I wanted to share three recipes that are fast and fun and amazingly delicious all at the same time. A true Molcajete, sold at Williams-Sonoma         First up, a recipe for that great summer favorite, Guacamole.  Every year, we look forward…

        As you can see, our farm stands are brimming with all kinds of beautiful fresh fruits and vegetables.  It’s a delight just to look at everything.  And, as Andrew pointed out, there’s a window of opportunity to combine two fantastic local ingredients into one…

          It was hard to imagine the depths of despair that a lot of people felt when, in the middle of last winter, one of our favorite restaurants abruptly closed their doors.  Not only that, but they auctioned off the contents of the place,…

        Andrew is the baker in our house but that was not always the case. For a long time, I did most of the cooking, including some predictable attempts at dessert.   Although I miss my Tart Tatins, they have been replaced by ambrosial Pavlovas, luscious…

        The Emilia region of Italy has long been considered the country’s gastronomic epicenter.  Similar to the position Lyons occupies in French gastronomes’ hearts, Bologna is said to be Italy’s gastronomic capital.  Given that such universally recognizable names like Prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano-Reggianohail from…

        Have you seen the current crop of blueberries in the markets?  They  are truly enormous and so tantalizing that Andrew couldn’t wait to get home and make a batch of blueberry muffins.   He found an ideal recipe in Tate’s Bake Shop Cookbook.   We’ve baked…

        I don’t know whether you’ve been following the histrionics that have been going on over the re-designed Bon Appetit.  The new editor, Adam Rapoport, has taken over from Barbara Fairchild, who bowed out when Conde Nast moved the magazine from California to New York…

        It’s been a long, rainy spring here.  But true to form, we’ve gone directly from complaining about the cold to exclaiming about the heat. It hit the 90s this week which is way too hot, way too early.  Our garden, however, has never looked…