Individual Cheese Tarts

My refrigerator’s cheese keeping bin is always well stocked. That’s because our dinner parties always include a cheese course, and Tom always assumes his double-0 designation when he shops at Murray’s, our favorite cheese store. He invariably buys more cheeses than we planned on, and “somehow” the pieces always looked smaller in the store than [...]

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Blueberry Buttermilk Rolled Scones

Scones have come a long way from their origin as humble oatcakes baked at the hearth on an iron griddle. A clue to their long ancestry is the buttermilk and baking soda still used as their leavening – dating from the days before modern baking powder. Oatmeal scones are still the most traditional version of [...]

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Hamburger Rolls for Superbowl

Very few things can take Tom and me away from our dining room table at dinnertime. Superbowl is one of them. Especially with the Giants playing! So the big question for last Sunday became “What can we eat on plates on our laps on the couch in front of the television?” And the answer became: [...]

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A Simple Apple Tart

I offered to bring the dessert for a dinner party last Saturday. This was foolishly bold, given my notable non-expertise in the confectionery arts. But I knew that our hosts, Lars and Karen, were forgiving friends and moreover would feed us so well and bountifully that we wouldn’t have desire or capacity for an elaborate [...]

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Christmas Cookies!

Oh, the annual agony of choosing what kinds of cookies to bake for Christmas! Or, perhaps more accurately, what kinds Tom and I can bear to forgo this year. I try to keep quantities down so we don’t wind up being reproached by tins of rapidly staling cookies on through the end of January. Yes, [...]

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Thanksgiving Dinner Support: Two Breads and a Dessert

Contrary to our characters as it may seem, Tom and I don’t cook for this holiday. Our tradition is to join a pair of good friends at their table, bringing along a few interesting edibles and drinkables to supplement the bountiful dishes awaiting us there. I always bake breads for the feast. This year I [...]

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Wild Boar Piedmontese Dinner

Returned from our truffle-seeking travels in the Piedmont, Tom and I wanted to recapture the gorgeous flavors of that region’s food in a dinner party. Last week I wrote about the pasta dish we created for it with the black truffles we’d brought home. Three of the other courses of that meal – aperitivo, secondo, [...]

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Plum Cake Cockaigne

At last, the Italian prune plums are in! I’d been waiting all summer, and they seemed to be later than usual this year. When they did show up in my Greenmarket, a few weeks ago, they were exorbitantly priced at $4 a pound. But the good greengrocery stores in my neighborhood had them at $1.99, [...]

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All You Need Is Pizza

My husband regards pizza as the perfect food, supplying optimal amounts of the four essential food groups: bread, cheese, tomato, olive oil. Naturally, therefore, we eat it often. Our favorite local pizza restaurant, Kesté, does fabulous Neapolitan-style pies, but sometimes you just don’t want to go out, so we also enjoy making pizza for ourselves at [...]

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Escarole and Leek Pie; Pugliese Caponata

It’s hard to appreciate the cooking of Italy’s Puglia in the USA. Over the years, I’ve worked with several Pugliese cookbooks, but that region’s cuisine is so minimal, and so dependent on the freshest local vegetables, that unless you have exactly comparable ingredients, the recipes can come out flat, dense, or bland. A new cookbook [...]

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