All popovers are not created equal. Awhile back I made a recipe for oatmeal popovers by Marion Cunningham, whom I normally adore. With finely ground oatmeal, and a dollop of orange marmalade baked in the bottom, they sounded superb. Well, turns out they weren’t. They never really puffed (or popped as it may be), and I had a muffin pan of full of deflated batter with marmalade that was too bitter for my taste. Oh well, every cookbook writer is allowed a dud every now and again.
When I was at the market last week, the strawberries finally looked good– rosy, with a sprightly green stem– not a crinkly brown one. I bought a basket, and ate almost all of them plain. But with the final few, I decided to make a more classic popover to redeem the oatmeal debacle of late. And [...]

I was recently talking with some friends about summertime desserts. Mainly about how much I love them. Got a cobbler? Send it right on over! Peach pie is divine! Plum cake? Superb! And then I mentioned an old stand-by for me– the clafoutis. No crust to beat down with a rolling pin, it uses whatever fruit of the season you choose, not quite a cake, not quite a custard. Simple, delicious, and my own prerequisite, great for breakfast the next day. The clafoutis is pretty close to perfect.
One of the conversation’s participants, Seth, had never heard of the clafoutis, much less eaten one (don’t worry, that will be remedied), but he asked if they were anything like a dutch baby. Well that opened up an entirely new can of worms, as some people had never eaten those either. [...]

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 [...]