Category: Fruit

  • Okay, fine, I'll admit it. My new kitchen scares me. I'm intimidated, by the old stove that spits fire and smells of gas, by the unlined cabinets, filled with my familiar things, yet still dark and different and cavernous, by the linoleum floor and Formica countertops that hide crumbs and dirt and make me feel…

  • The wall of heat has arrived. Like a thick syrup, it's encircling the city. On days like this, what always surprises me is how strongly I seem to suffer from weather amnesia. It's been 98 degrees before – many times before, even – but when I first feel that wretched miasma of heat and filth,…

  • Sometimes, the best recipes are really more instructions rather than recipes – instructions that manage to entirely change the way you think about food. Like when you learn that sprinkling flaky salt on a sliced tomato wedge will transform the taste of the tomato in your mouth. Or that a drizzle of good olive oil…

  • It really wouldn't have been fair not to follow up this post with a more detailed one, because despite the shrunken crust, this tart really is one for the recipe files, the lamination, the hall of fame. It comes from Maury Rubin, of City Bakery fame and the author of the fabulous Book of Tarts…

  • It's been quiet around here, I know. It's not that I haven't been blogging, it's that I haven't been eating. People, it's too damn hot. All I can stand to do, besides drinking so much water it's coming out of my ears, is eat a yogurt every now and then, or maybe a graham cracker…

  • When the cupcake craze swept Western civilization a few years ago, I felt a bit left out. To me, the cupcakes being peddled by faux-fifties decorated bakeries uptown, downtown and midtown alternated between too sweet, too dry, too pasty, too waxy and too fussy to justify the absolute mania they spawned. I understood the homemade…

  • After my vacation, when I could blissfully expect others to take over the reins at the stove and produce any number of delicious things (rabbit with rosemary or homemade tagliatelle with meat ragu and fresh peas, for example); where melons and apricots and tomatoes and zucchini tasted like the versions of themselves that we dream…

  • Seeing this recipe printed in the New York Times made me jump with joy (well, really I only sort of leaned forward in my ergonomic office chair and squealed – under my breath – but you get the point). Because if you haven't been to Frankie's Spuntino in Brooklyn or on the Lower East Side…

  • Cooking skills and deftness in the kitchen mean precious little if you are missing either of the two following prerequisities: an attention span of more than .02 seconds and a memory that goes back at least 45 days. The former would have prevented me from scorching a spiced wine sauce into unrecogizable blackness last night…

  • There are days when living in New York feels like having found a spot to curl up on in an pearl-laden oyster shell. Those days I walk around the city feeling love and magnanimity towards everyone I pass: surly cab drivers honking at dithering cars, delivery guys on teetering bicycles who insist on driving against…