With this brisk, wish-I-had-a-jacket weather, people at farmers markets are embracing autumn with open arms. I, for one, am not jumping the gun. We’re going to be eating apples for months, remember? But even though I’m clinging to summer’s stone fruits (and the last of the snapdragons and zinnias), a bit of finesse in the […]

The fetishization of baby yellow summer squashes and zucchini (which is a type of summer squash) began with restaurant chefs, and who can blame them? On the plate, the barely cooked vegetables look dramatic and delicate all at once, whether served whole or sliced into little pale golden or green coins. And it didn’t take […]

“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 […]

Most Americans are squeamish about viscosity, and so tend to pigeonhole okra as a quaint southern specialty. It has its place simmered in a gumbo, pickled in a spiced brine, or enrobed in a cornmeal batter and fried, they say, but still. There is a mighty fine line between tolerant and patronizing, and what I find […]

I never developed a true appreciation for blueberries until about 20 years ago, when I spent summer weekends knocking around the New England coast. It was there I had my first taste of the small, intensely flavored wild ones, and soon carried a small plastic pail tied to my knapsack as a matter of course. […]

“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 […]

When: Saturday, May 25, at the start of the long Memorial Day weekend. Where: Whole Foods, Union Square. Eddy, my favorite man behind the meat counter, threw a doleful glance at his array of kebabs, steaks, and ribs. “It’s too cold and rainy to cook out,” he said. “So far, everybody’s been asking for meatloaf mix and […]

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 […]

There aren’t enough hours in the day or enough days in the week, it seems, but that’s life. What keeps things on track in the kitchen are things I can make quickly, with little effort yet a big payoff. The simmered asparagus I wrote about last week is one example, and another is glazed carrots. […]