Recipes

Who’s Your Culinary Idol?

May 22, 2013

I’d like to tell you about one of mine. Laura del Principe is not a Top Chef or an Iron Chef. She doesn’t have ridiculous bleached hair or tattoos running up and down her arms or a line of cookware created in her name. The restaurant she runs with her husband is tucked away in [...]

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Strawberry Festival

May 12, 2013

Every year on the first weekend in June, my dad would take my sister and me to the Strawberry Festival. This was in the ’70s, in the wilds of central New Jersey. Well, technically it was suburban New Jersey, just up the hill from our house and down the road from the Dairy Queen. But [...]

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Homemade Pizza

April 25, 2013

I’ve always been a little disappointed in homemade pizza. Let’s face it, unless you have your own wood-fired oven, which I most certainly don’t, it’s hard to make anything approaching a real Neapolitan-style pie, with that charred, chewy-crisp crust, perfectly puffed around the perimeter and thin (but never gooey) in the middle. I sometimes make [...]

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Panna Cotta for a Crowd

April 10, 2013

I cooked for a bunch of people last weekend. And a bunch of people cooked for me. On Saturday afternoon I dropped off dinner for 12 at my friend Jill’s house. For the last few years, Jill and her husband, Rudy, and several other couples have been the winning bidders on a series of Big [...]

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Cold Spring, Hot Broth

March 20, 2013

Who else feels like spring is draaaaaaging her feet? I’ve been seeing lots of snapshots and mini-rants on social media about late-winter snowstorms, dreary landscapes and chilly days so I know I’m not alone. I have a remedy. It’s this soup, this simple, gentle soup composed of crepes in broth ~ crespelle in brodo in Italian, scrippelle [...]

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Dreaming of Summer and a Tuscan Tour

March 6, 2013

Spring isn’t yet sprung ~ in fact, snow, wind and ice are happening my corner of the world. But I don’t care. I’m looking ahead to summer. I am throwing open the virtual glass doors and stepping out on the veranda, into the sun. A few weeks ago I got a surprise in the mail, [...]

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American Food Roots and Le Virtu’

February 12, 2013

Some of you already know this, but for those who don’t, I’m happy to share with you a new website I co-founded with three other food journalists: American Food Roots. Our mission is to tell America’s food stories, celebrate the many diverse cultures that have contributed—and continue to contribute—to the American food scene, and to [...]

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Winter’s Bones

February 6, 2013

(Pardon the excessive typography on the pics in this post. As if I didn’t have enough distractions, I uploaded an iPhone app called Over, which allows you to play around with text and fonts. I couldn’t resist.) * * * * * The stockpots and soup tureens in my house have been getting a workout [...]

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Crema di Pomodoro. Reliably Good.

January 31, 2013

As I write this it is 71 degrees F outside, the second day in a row of “unseasonably” warm temperatures here in Virginia. By Friday we’ll be back below freezing, with flurries predicted and with wind and buckets of rain between now and then. Such are the crazy weather patterns in the Old Dominion. My [...]

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Baked Pandoro French Toast

January 13, 2013

It’s not often I have leftover Pandoro. Everyone in my family loves it so it doesn’t last long. I still have a clear image in my mind of my son at age 1, toddling around in a blue and white striped one-piece thingie with a sailboat on it, clutching a giant piece of Pandoro in [...]

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