East Village treasures

Back in… ahem… a month that has past, my brother John (one of my favorite dining partners) took me out to dinner for my birthday in NYC. As always we had to go through the process of choosing a restaurant, emailing back and forth with ideas for weeks, and finally narrowing it down to [...]

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Tomatoes: a limit case

Q: What do you do when, on a whim, you buy a peck of tomatoes at the farmers’ market on Saturday (for only 8 bucks!)? And then later, that same day, your boyfriend’s sister who is visiting from out of town bequeaths you with another half of a peck from her garden?
A: Spend Sunday afternoon [...]

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The Poetry of Wednesdays

Sometimes, especially in summer, food speaks for itself:
This Week’s Share

ARUGULA: an aromatic, bright green, salad green with a peppery mustard flavor
GENOVESE BASIL
GREEN BEANS
BEETS or KOHLRABI — sadly, it was kohlrabi
CARROTS (Sugarsnax)
SWEET CORN (Montauk): bicolor kernel with superior, sweet flavor and remarkably tender.
SWEET PEPPERS
FRESH HERBS: [...]

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What A Boy Wants

Lest you think it’s all goat cheese and olive tapenade for the younger set around here, let me describe Nick’s choices for his second birthday meal. We had a moment of gustatory hope when he said he wanted “pink fish” aka salmon, but after considering that for a day, he retrenched to hot dogs. [...]

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The Sweet Contradictions of Summer

I have deliciously mixed feelings about summer cooking. On the one hand, summer is so relaxed, and its straightforward flavors so satisfying, that it hardly seems worth doing anything as elaborate as cooking in any formal sense. Instead, we eat what’s around and what’s around is almost invariably delicious. I can’t tell you how [...]

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Some Reservations

The G3 plus one (11 year old Naomi) made an outing on Sunday to see No Reservations. This is really not a good movie, in any deep way, but if you like food and restaurants and don’t mind a dash of sugar sweet romance, it’s a hard movie not to like, especially on a rainy [...]

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Homage to M.F.K.

I woke up this morning thinking about my favorite food writer, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, whose book, Gastronomical Me is the namesake of our blog.  I missed her birthday by nearly a month (I’m not known for my genius with keeping schedules), but it’s not too late to share with you this brief profile of [...]

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Dear Kroger

Dear Kroger,
Why is there frozen corn on the cob in your freezer section, in late July in Michigan? Why does anyone want to eat corn that way, ever?
Sincerely,
Shana
Does feeling a little freaked out by this scene in Kroger make a girl an elitist?
If it does, forgive me.
Either way, here’s a way I like to [...]

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