vegetables

2012: The Year in Glorious Vegetables

December 31, 2012

I took a lot of pictures of vegetables in 2012. This is partly because I was working on The Glorious Vegetables of Italy, which will be published in the fall, so I was paying extra attention to my subject. But mostly it’s because vegetables are beautiful and deserve to be photographed. (BTW I am no [...]

Read the full article →

A Love Child at the Thanksgiving Table

November 18, 2012

I recently posted this Instagram photo of something new (to me) called Kaleidoscope sprouts. I discovered that lots of others had never heard of them either. My friend Colleen commented, “My two favorite veggies had a love child?” That is exactly what happened. Kaleidoscope sprouts, also known as flower sprouts, are a clever cross between [...]

Read the full article →

Nose-to-Tail Fennel

October 8, 2012

Fennel is a generous vegetable. It graces the table in spring and early summer, where it keeps company with asparagus and baby onions, and then again in fall, when it cozies up to eggplant and peppers, then apples and winter squash. In supermarkets I often see bulbs of fennel tightly wrapped in plastic, their stalks [...]

Read the full article →

Hello, Tomato Season…

August 23, 2012

Right now, across the country, farmers’ market stalls are teeming with tomatoes. Fat, lopsided heirlooms, green-striped zebras, shiny round cherries, and plump Romas among them. When it’s tomato season I eat them every day. Every day. I make tomato salad, with or without mozzarella. I put them on pizza and poke them into focaccia. I [...]

Read the full article →

Laundry Is Forever, Fava Beans Are For Now

April 16, 2012

It’s fava bean season, and I’ve just returned from picking a basketful of fat green pods from my lovingly tended terraced and trellised hilltop garden, with its fairy tale view overlooking that quaint medieval village… and…CUT! The truth is, I feel a little disingenuous writing about fava beans. I don’t have any growing in my [...]

Read the full article →

Frances Mayes’s Tuscan Table

March 15, 2012

Virtually everyone who has traveled to Italy can describe a moment in which they were transported by food—whether a platter of plump, cheese-filled ravioli bathed in butter and sage; a silky, paper-thin slice of prosciutto draped over a warm puff of fried dough; a glossy cone of hand-dipped gelato. For Frances Mayes, author of the [...]

Read the full article →

Cavolo Verza {Savoy Cabbage}

November 28, 2011

That beautiful specimen you see in the photo is a head of Savoy cabbage. Italian cooks do wonderful things with this cabbage, which they refer to as cavolo verza. (The name Savoy refers to the historical region in northern Italy in which the cabbage thrives, and also to the House of Savoy, which ruled newly unified [...]

Read the full article →

The Family Dish: Slow and Saucy Romano Beans

October 24, 2011

Green beans like to hang around, and I like that they like to hang around. Long after the corn and tomatoes and eggplant have departed from farmers market stalls, the piles of green beans remain, along with their cousins, flat-pod romano beans. In summer, I barely cook green beans, steaming them just until they are [...]

Read the full article →

Garlicky Lentil Soup with Carrots and Tuscan Kale

October 13, 2011

Honestly, I had no idea that so many of you apparently love lentil soup as much as I do. A few weeks ago I got an email from a reader requesting a recipe for my garlicky lentil soup. And then another, and another, and so on. I had mentioned the soup in a short Q [...]

Read the full article →

“Basic to Brilliant” Sweet Potato Spoonbread

October 3, 2011

(Photo by Hélène Dujardin from Basic to Brilliant, Y’All) I still remember the first time I came across a recipe for spoonbread, in one of my mother’s old cookbooks. She had a small, diverse collection, and as a girl I enjoyed paging through them, especially a small, spiral-bound book called The Savannah Cookbook. It was [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries