holidays

Dicembre Dolce: Panna Cotta alle Spezie

December 12, 2012

Raise your hand if… * yours is always the last house on the cul de sac to put up holiday lights. * you have yet to buy ~ let alone decorate ~ a tree. * the only batch of Christmas cookies you baked is long gone and you have yet to bake more. * haven’t [...]

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Easter Break: Savory Cheese Biscotti

April 4, 2012

It is time to come to grips with the fact that I will never run my household the way my mother ran hers. How do I know? Because when I was growing up, by this time Easter week my mom would have: * Made and frozen her pizza rustica, a classic savory Easter torte, so that it [...]

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A Favorite Cake to Welcome the New Year

January 3, 2012

Buon Anno a tutti! Happy New Year. As I sit here writing and thinking about the year ahead, I am (literally) surrounded by the past. During the Christmas break, my husband and I decided to start a long-overdue project to clean and reorganize our basement. So far, we have said farewell to five huge bins [...]

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Dicembre Dolce: Panforte di Siena

December 12, 2011

For most of my life—right up until last week—I despised panforte, the celebrated Christmas fruit-and-nut confection from Siena. Every year at about this time, a flat, sort-of circular pleated package containing a dense hockey puck of a—what? Was it a cake? a torte? candy?—would appear on our buffet, purchased by my mother. She would unwrap [...]

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Bar Nuts

November 21, 2011

I inherited my passion for cooking from my mom. But my dad is the one who got me hooked on cookbooks. For a few years in the 1990s, my dad gave me a cookbook every Christmas. I do not know what precipitated this tradition (my mom was always the holiday shopper in the house). And [...]

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Pandoro: A Holiday Bread to Trifle With

December 29, 2010

Panettone, the sweet, yeasted domed Italian holiday bread studded with raisins and candied fruit, has legions of fans in Italy and around the globe. I, however, am partial to the other Italian holiday bread: Pandoro. Pandoro (the word means ‘golden bread’ in Italian) is a tall, star-shaped leavened sweet bread that is produced in Verona, [...]

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Christmas Eve Calamari on Leite’s Culinaria

December 21, 2010

(photo by William Meppem for Chronicle Books) What does Christmas smell like to you? Maybe it’s the sharp, resinous scent of freshly cut pine trees or the warm, enveloping fragrance of cinnamon and nuts in freshly baked cookies. But to me, Christmas smells like squid…Read more about my favorite Christmas Eve dish on Leite’s Culinaria.

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A Little Christmas Bling

December 13, 2010

Every year, thousands of people head to the Mall to see the National Christmas Tree. I head to La Cuisine, in Old Town Alexandria, to see the trees in the window displays, beautifully and lavishly decked with sparkly food ornaments-hundreds upon hundreds of them. Each year I purchase one (or two) to add to my [...]

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Sane Entertaining

December 10, 2010

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of being a guest on the Kojo Nnamdi Show, on WAMU (88.5) radio in Washington, D.C. My fellow guests were Meagan Hegenbarth of RSVP Catering, and Chris Lowery, store captain at Trader Joe’s in Bailey’s Crossroads, VA. Among the topics covered: what to serve at a progressive holiday [...]

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Leftover Inspiration: Stuffing Dumpling Soup

November 26, 2010

There are only two Thanksgiving leftovers I’m really interested in. One is the carcass of the turkey, for broth; the other is the stuffing, for without stuffing there can be no stuffing dumplings to poach in the broth. Stuffing dumplings! Such an inspired idea. I with I had thought of it decades ago. Indeed, I [...]

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