Stewed tomatoes are delicious hot, cold, or at room temperature. This makes them convenient to have on hand during a hurricane—or whenever you’ve been too greedy at a farm stand and consequently find yourself on the home front with lots (and lots) of tomatoes turning soft-ripe at precisely the same moment. Botanically speaking, tomatoes are […]

Butter beans are suave—there is no other word that sums up their flavor, their texture, and their effortless ability to swing from down-home to haute. At roadside stands in the South, you’ll find coolers full of them—hand-picked, shucked, bagged, and ready for the pot. No such luck here in New York City. Still, a recent […]

The neat, workmanlike, and—let’s face it—really cute bunches of onions stopped me in my tracks. Vince D’Attolico, delighted at my reaction, unloaded the last of the crates from his Hudson Valley farm and stood back from his stand at Union Square to gauge the overall effect. “It’s a Dutch variety I haven’t tasted for twenty […]

Summer weekends are for rusticating. Sometimes, we head down to visit friends in southwestern Virginia, where a typical Saturday might be spent mowing a field, hiking up to the Blue Ridge Parkway … or lolling in a porch swing with an absorbing read and a long, tall glass of something cold. Dinner is straightforward, often […]

  Up until the late ’80s or so, the only parsley you would see in its raw form in this country was a jaunty boutonnière (or prom-worthy corsage) of curly parsley on dinner plates across the land. My mother even garnished our meals with the stuff, turning my little brother’s intense love of a record album […]