…who doesn’t try this deliciously simple dessert. As summer is approaching I can feel my culinary muscles getting sluggish. I don’t want to turn on the oven. It is enough to set a pot of water on the stove to boil. And baking? Well, just forget about it. I am tired, or maybe it’s just that I am lazy. That is why I’m happy to announce the discovery of the strawberry-rhubarb fool.
I had never had a fool– that mix of freshly whipped cream and fruit compote of your choosing– they had always seemed like a bit of a hoax to me. “So it’s some whipped cream, anyone can do that,” I questioned. And the answer is: precisely, anyone can do that. That is what makes this dessert so wonderfully egalitarian.
When I was a little girl we always had large Thanksgivings with all of the fixins’ at home. Except for one [...]

I am not the neatest person. I am not however the messiest– comfortably lived-in is what I like to call it. There are always stacks of paper lying about my desk. Pens don’t always have caps. The coffee table can actually be used to hold a cup of coffee, and sometimes hours will pass before I pick the empty cup up and bring it to the sink. I guess this bleeds over into how I am in the kitchen as well. My counters are always wiped clean, my utensils pristine, but as I write this, the coffee pot has not yet been cleaned-out, still holding the latest murky brew, and there is a package of graham crackers sitting out from last night’s snack. So be it.
I always keep a small pad of paper with me. Tucked into my bag it becomes an [...]

Before Brian became my husband, he was my forever boyfriend. No, he was not my high school sweetheart, but I did meet him when I was still in college. So, he robbed/saved me from regaling you with horrific dating stories, of scrambling around trying to find a date for some holiday party or another. But I do have one.
I was 18, had just moved out from under my parents roof, and I had my first real, honest-to-goodness boyfriend. A Frenchmen we’ll call M. With a penchant for fast-talking, heavy black framed glasses, and a haircut like Tin Tin, M was the man of my post-adolescent dreams. We met on the subway, and a romance was quickly born. We lasted a handful of months, one of which was December, that month of candy canes, egg nog, and holiday parties.
I brought M home with me [...]

Do you remember eating grapefruit as the starter at a savory dinner party? I do. It must have been an early 80’s things to do. Or maybe it was a late 70’s thing, and my mom was simply holding on to a remnant of the past (sorry, mom!). Anyhow, I loved it. It seemed so grown-up and glamorous, to eat a grapefruit instead of a standard old green salad in preparation for the rest of the meal.
To my young palate eating a piece of fruit for the first course was equivalent to the excitement that I felt when a small dish of sorbet was set down in front of me as a palate cleanser during my first dinner at French restaurant. Ice cream! In the middle of my meal? I could get used to this whole fine dining thing! Well, it’s [...]

At the market last week, I just about stopped dead in my tracks. There each one was, assembled in such close proximity that I almost couldn’t bear it. Check out the loveliness of the following: Fuyu persimmons, Satsuma mandarins, and Belgian endive.
If I were Martha Stewart, hostess extraordinaire, queen of all good things, CEO of a multi-billion dollar empire, and owner of several palatial estates along the East Coast, I know what I would have done. I would have bought a basket full of these stunning edibles, arranged them beautifully on one of my 12 foot long, maple dining tables, careful to hide all of their bruises and imperfections, and had a stunning centerpiece to enjoy for the few days that the produce remained rosy.
But let’s get real. Martha may be great, but she can also be a tad, well… unrealistic. I live in New [...]

The berries are gone. At least the good ones are. They’ve rolled up their welcome mats and bid the berry-loving world adieu. It seems like months ago those final rosey apricots, their supple skin veritably bursting with juice, said farewell. Of course, there are those final hanger-ons, the colonels of summer stone fruit: the random plums, the sweet Georgia peaches, and the nectarines—firm, but still holding on.
But these fruits are having to share space in the market. Hold on—fall fruit is coming! Apples so crunchy and tart, their skin so shiny, it almost reflects that the final days of Indian summer fruit are rolling in. Pears, with their buttery, sweet taste, and sumptuous physique are earning their way onto the market shelf, making company with those stone fruits.
For only a few short weeks do we have these two emblems of their respective seasons [...]

For me, the hardest part of going away is not the planning (I guess I’m not really a planner), nor is it the packing (just take all of your clothes and stuff them in a suitcase). It is using up the contents of the fridge for that final week at home, that works me up. Because, yes, in the past I have left that solitary carton of milk on the shelf chilling, and let me tell you, after weeks of sitting alone in the refrigerator, that milk punished my olfactory senses heartily.
Going to the market and buying just a smattering of ingredients has never been one of my strong points. But sometimes, in using up what I already have, it is necessary to actually do a wee bit of grocery shopping, as counterintuitive as it may seem. So cruising up and down the grocery aisles, [...]

I’ll admit it, at first it was the packaging that attracted me to these beauties. Those nubby pint containers, the aqua blue cardboard was complementing the crimson of the cherries so poetically. Really, there could have been slop for sale in those pint containers and I would have had to stop and comment, “Look, the rough-hewn finish of those beautiful cardboard containers so matches the bumpy nature of the slop it contains.” But you have been mostly saved from those ridiculous musings, because instead of slop, there were juicy sour cherries.
Maybe it’s the growing climate, but in California, a place where I spent the bulk of my life (okay, I’ll be honest here, 27 out of 28 years of my existence) the sour cherry is somewhat of a rarity. But at the Union Square Greenmarket, which has been stupendous as of late, they have been absolutely [...]

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you probably know by now, that I love summer. No, it’s not the warm weather, in fact that makes me wilt like a cut flower. And when I was younger, and in school from September to June, I looked forward to the summer recess just like every other child. But as welcoming a break as I knew it to be, I really didn’t need it. I was one of those children who actually liked school. No, the thing I most love about these warm summer months is the fruit, and all that can be cooked (or not cooked with it).
A delicious stone fruit pie is divine; a clafoutis chock full of tree-ripe apricots; and a nectarine cobbler, the juices bubbling out from under the nubby crust, each are list-toppers for me. But sometimes turning on [...]

Ambrosia has always fascinated me, not the food of the Greek gods, rather the good ol’ American buffet speciality. (And maybe by fascinated I should clarify– repelled.) I remember a few family BBQ’s at my grandma house. All the food would be lined up on the dinning room cum buffet table: potato salad, crocks of baked beans, ears of corn, and way down, at the end of the table, a Melmac bowl full of ambrosia.
You would think this salad would be endlessly pleasing to a child’s palate, mandarin orange segments, chunks of pineapple, dried coconut, mini-marshmallows tumbling about. Sounds pleasing enough. But it was the “dressing” that turned me off every time. The thick, globby, preservative-laden dressing, or sauce…maybe covering is the best choice of words for the concoction, which was so dense you could not even see what it concealed. Sometimes it [...]