Last Saturday, a dear friend dropped by unexpectedly and delivered a fabulous, edible present that was local– very local. It wasn’t honey, or fish caught in the Sound, it wasn’t even a vegetable that he had cared for and grown on his patio. It was something that he had foraged. I’m not even sure why, but this made it all the more exciting– I was thrilled! Inside an old shopping bag, was a jumble of dirty ramps, the roots still clinging to the rocky soil in which they were buried.
For those of you who are not familiar with ramps, they are also called wild leeks, but I think that they have a taste all their own. It is a bit like green garlic– delicate and highly fragrant. However, they are far too pungent to be eaten raw. But when cooked they are mellow and sweet, [...]

I love mashed potatoes, always have. When I was young I even appreciated potato buds. You know, those dessicated flakes of potato to which you add boiling water and a pat of butter? I even liked those. Guilty. I have always loved their warmth, their smooth consistency– for me, mashed potatoes are the ultimate comfort food.
Well, nowadays my palate has become a wee bit more sophisticated than it was when I was seven. I still love mashed potatoes, but now will eat them mashed with buttermilk, with a sprinkling of chives, with the skins on, or even– mashed with another vegetable. Take celery root for instance, that often ignored vegetable sitting at the market next to the other root vegetables. It’s delicious!
This knobby vegetable is crisp when eaten raw, supple when cooked, and tastes like celery, without all of those pesky strings. [...]

As in the soup, because I made my own cream of mushroom– for a very specific purpose. This week I had my first tuna-noodle casserole. I did not grow up with casseroles. My dad never liked a one-pot meal, and my mom didn’t really care, so I had a childhood free of Durkee French Fried Onions. Frankly, I never liked tuna fish from a can until I was in college, so a tuna casserole was not in my culinary lexicon.
But recently my mother started making them for herself . Maybe she was finally feeling that empty-nest syndrome, or maybe she was hearkening back to her own childhood in the 1950s, filled with tuna-noodle casseroles. Either way she started to rave about them. At first I was appalled; this casserole always sounded like a train wreck to me. But then, as I started [...]

Is everyone gearing up for, hands down my favorite holiday– Thanksgiving? I know that I am. There is pie crust to be made, bread to tear for stuffing, and a rustic pate to be assembled– and that is just on today’s schedule. Tomorrow the real work begins; but I am hard-pressed to call any of it work. Gathering together with loved ones, and cooking a fantastic meal, hardly seems like work to me.
For the past several years, brussels sprouts have always been the green vegetable of choice for the Thanksgiving meal. They are synonymous with holidays for me– as synonymous as a cruciferous vegetable can be!
I recently started blogging at iVillage Food. There, I will have a weekly column about eating seasonally. So what was one of my first entries? You guessed it, brussels sprouts. If you have yet to [...]

I bore the extra heat in the kitchen to roast these carrots. They were so small, and so sweet, they were simply crying out to be roasted. Olive oil, salt and pepper, and a bit a of ground cumin was all that they required to make one outstanding side dish.
from Nosheteria

It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? In recovery from California, and one too many meals eaten out, this is what I made– tabbouleh-esque salad. Bulgar wheat, an English cucumber, shaved red onion, and a mess of parsley tossed with some nut oil and a good squeeze of lime juice. Delightfully boring and perfectly delicious.

from Nosheteria

Why is it that picnic food, i.e. summer food, in this country is so often drowning in a quagmire of mayo? Two mainstays of these white-washed foods are coleslaw, and potato salad, two delicious foods in their own right. Who doesn’t love a potato, and how can you object to mounds of feathery chopped cabbage? But whenever I spot these down-home delicacies at a picnic, they are baking in the sun, getting that lovely yellowish, leathery skin on top. Aesthetically it leaves a bit to be desired, and immediately gets me thinking about airborne bacteria. E-coli anyone?
I found a way around this problem by making a German-style potato salad, tossed in a Dijon vinaigrette with crumbled bacon; but coleslaw remained intractable. It had been years since I had enjoyed more than a bite or two of the stuff, and all of the mayonnaise alternatives seemed [...]