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 was a latch-key kid. But please, don’t feel sorry for me– I loved the time alone. There was something so settling about a quiet house to come to, with no one pestering me about schoolwork that had yet to be completed. The school bus would drop me off just houses away from where I lived, and I would trudge home, appropriately exhausted. After dumping all of my books, and stacks of handouts, in a basket near the front door, I would make a bee-line for the pantry.
If the pantry were the refrigerator, surely my mother would have reprimanded me for standing in front, letting all of the cold air out. I gazed at the various packages of food for what seemed like hours. Sometimes I would have some cereal, a replay of my morning meal. At times a can of [...]

Ho hum. No introduction need be made to the humble brussels sprout. But come every fall and winter I eat so many of these little cruciferous vegetables, it is not uncommon for my skin turn a pale green color, and begin to flake off oddly in the shape of sprightly leaves. The brussels sprout is hardly some new genus, like the broccolini, and it is not some young thing, like the baby carrot, but this oldie is definitely a goody.
Come October, when the weather begins to cool, and it starts to get dark obscenely early, I begin to tote home parcels of sprouts from the market. And eat them I will, in a variety ways. Roasted, shredded, or steamed. With pancetta, or browned butter, doused in olive oil, and sprinkled with coarse salt. Mmm, yes, I love the brussels sprout. I eat [...]

We all know that Dr. Pavlov, with his multitudes of salivating mutts, has very little to do with a sweet Pavlova dessert, besides a similarity in surnames…but this dessert was so scrumptios it had me salivating, bells or not!
The Pavlova is one of those desserts that is only read about in novels set in the turn of the 20th century. Clarice, the young traveller, gazed across the linen table cloth with a longing desperation at Antonio, who firmly grasped his silver spoon, and with utter obliviousness to the torrent of thoughts in Clarice’s head, plunged it into crisp Pavlova, adorned with stiff whipped cream, and mounds of fresh berries. You get what I mean. And I guess it must be fairly clear that I don’t read much from the early 20th century. But with the first of the spring berries showing their rosy faces at the [...]

Simple can mean many things: stripped down, easy, commonplace, or everyday. Today it has become a bit of a catch phrase when referring to those typical 30-minute meal options. But simple can also mean pure, unadulterated…delicious. This is the type of simple I mean when talking about Vanilla Bean Cream Cake.
Pure unadulterated vanilla, a tender, pound cake-like crumb, perfect for dessert, or even with a cup of coffee for breakfast (cake being the breakfast of champions, of course), the cake was simple, but it was also complex. This cake is definitely ingredient-heavy. With 5 eggs, butter counted not by sticks but pound measurements, and flecked with real vanilla bean seeds, this cake was not necessarily simple in its composition, but rather simple in its taste.
So I went to the library again, this time to scour the shelves for a good baking book. And I found one; Lisa Yockelson’s book Baking [...]