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 [...]

Apart from Thanksgiving, when it’s pressed into service for stuffing and the relish tray, celery is the old maid of the crisper drawer. A few stalks are used here and there for soups or stews, or cut into thirds and filled with peanut butter or pimento cheese for a quick snack or down-home hors d’oeuvre. But [...]

The little bivalve mollusks called cockles are found in sheltered estuaries and tidal flats throughout much of the world, and a flourishing cockle bed may be packed with more than a million of them to the acre. Most of those we see at American seafood markets are New Zealand cockles (Austrovenus stuchburyi; known to the [...]

Every April, my mother and I would spend hours in the woods, wading in bone-chilling mountain streams to pick watercress before it flowered and disappeared until the following spring. Somewhere, my mother had picked up the knowledge that the plant had been used as both food and medicine in ancient times, and each year, I’d [...]

April mornings at the Union Square Greenmarket haven’t been quite as warm as the weather reports would have you believe. A light breeze still has the chill of winter behind it, and everyone hugs the sunny side of the street. Tempting pots of jonquils aside, my weekly expeditions remain more about foraging for the least-gnarly [...]

The trick to pulling off a dinner party on the fly is the first course: Nail that, and you have everyone at the table in the palm of your hand. This year, my thank-you-Jesus starter (especially appropriate at Easter) has been asparagus mimosa. It is, as my great friend Rick Ellis says, “classic, classic, classic.” [...]

The most efficient pantry I’ve ever had was in the smallest apartment I’ve ever lived in—a studio on the top floor of a brownstone on Berkeley Place, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The kitchen, which was teensy but shipshape, boasted an old-fashioned porcelain double sink (luxurious suds up to my elbows was how a dinner party [...]

Leeks are a slow-growing crop; the beauts you see here were planted last summer. They’re as stalwart and noble as whoever is outside this time of year, digging them out of the frozen ground. I bought plenty—enough for a pot of leek and potato soup and then some. Beneath that rugged appearance, you see, the leek [...]

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 [...]

It was bound to happen sooner or later: The temperature dipped down into the single digits and made itself at home. Last Saturday’s trip to the Union Square Greenmarket began, then, with swathing myself in Heattech—Uniqlo’s fabulously comfortable thermal line of turtlenecks, T-shirts, leggings, and socks. Forgive the shameless plug, but the stuff really works, and [...]