The weather whiplash we’ve been experiencing lately requires agility, both at the market and in the kitchen. Take last week, for instance: Those single-digit days had me entertaining thoughts of a fork-tender chuck roast or choucroute garni, fragrant with juniper, but no, I didn’t act fast enough. The forecast turned balmy, and the morning I set aside for […]

Garlic is the most potent member of the allium family (which includes onions, leeks, shallots, and so forth), and its great abundance at the farmers market this time of year tends to engender awe and, sometimes, confusion. “My girlfriend sent me out to shop for dinner,” a twenty-something said last week, holding up one of […]

Butternut squash, introduced to the public in 1936 and working hard ever since, doesn’t have the cachet of kabocha or the drama quotient of a Blue Hubbard or Red Kuri. What it does have going for it is widespread availability, great versatility, ease of peeling, good, reliable flavor, and now … cuteness. That’s right. Say […]

Like almost any expat southerner, I am besotted with the shell beans of summer. The native American legumes, often referred to as peas, have pods that must be removed before the moist, tender beans (ie., seeds) can be cooked. Black-eyed peas, pink-eyes, lady peas, cream peas, purple-hulls, and the small, pale butter beans called sieva, […]

“A trip to the farmers market can be as inspiring and as uplifting as a trip to Yosemite,” Marion Cunningham once wrote, and that is especially true in August—it is such an opulent month. In Manhattan, the Union Square market is brimming with tomatoes and corn, peaches and melons, eggplants and peppers, yellow crookneck squash […]

Good cookbooks are soothing and aspirational all at once. They fall squarely in the “I can dream can’t I?” department, which must be why many people like to read them before they go to bed. I used to be one of them. A few years ago, though, I branched out with an evocative, beautifully illustrated […]

“There’s never too much June,” my mother would declare this time of year. No kidding. After a long, cold spring (on May 28, Climate Central tweeted there had been more daily record lows by that date than in all of 2012), kitchen and market gardeners are racing to catch up to the calendar. And, at last, […]

I came to rhubarb relatively late in life. It’s not something I grew up with, and a few slices of generically sweet strawberry-rhubarb pie (and one brief encounter with a slithery compote) left me, shall I say, underwhelmed. That is, until about five years ago, when gardening friends from Edinburgh taught me a thing or […]

I cantered around the Union Square market on Saturday like I was warming up for the Preakness. I came to a screeching halt, though, at the tented tables staffed by Lani’s Farm, from south Jersey. Something smelled really, really good. Sure enough, I found Eugena Yoo (who manages the farm with her brother, Steve Yoo) behind […]

We have all been there: Trying to plan a company meal around a guest who is—well, not a picky eater, exactly, but a staunchly unadventurous one. This can be especially fraught when your idea of familiar food is not your guest’s idea of same. Take roast chicken, for instance. One of my favorite things to […]