My sister-in-law, Julie, is an amazing cook and food stylist and writes a column for The Baltimore Sun called “The Recipe Finder.” When I saw her at Thanksgiving, she was—having just cooked all week for her lazy-ass family—beginning prep for the column’s annual Holiday Cookie Contest. Read More

Okay, I came back from the east coast this week, stopping in Chicago where it was cool and brisk and autumnal and gorgeous, as it should be in October. I stepped off the plane (admittedly a little crabby due to my American Airlines 4-hour delay) into a hellish heat—I think it was 100º–and I almost wept but thought better of it and just cursed.

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The trouble with going to the farmers’ market is that everything looks so gorgeous I buy enough to feed everyone in my zip code. Then I go home and realize that I actually have to do something with all this bounty, as in, cook it, at which point I have been known to utter a mild curse. Read More

So as the days of summer dwindled, so did my supply of summer fruit. The bowl that I filled on Thursday with the bounty from the farmers’ market was down to a few lonely items by Labor Day. Read More

Because of its color, it took years for me to get my kids to eat pasta with pesto sauce. Pasta was one of their favorite foods, but only if it came in white. The girls even found red sauce undesirable for a long time, but green was completely out of the question. It was way too suggestive of the odious world of vegetables. Read More

My husband loves tomatoes. Raw tomatoes, that is: he will not eat them cooked. (He has the same peculiar picky streak with regard to carrots: loves ‘em raw, hates ‘em cooked.) His sister Julie, on the other hand, does not only dislike raw tomatoes, she finds them repulsive. She will not eat anything with seeds, including olives. A pomegranate would give her a nervous breakdown. Tom’s other sister, Ellen, won’t eat spaghetti sauce, hamburgers, meat loaf, cheese of any kind, jelly (hello?), peas or lima beans. Like her father and Tom, she also dislikes onions and garlic, and, a la Julie, ix-nay the tomatoes and olives.

It’s just another example of how kids are genetically designed to drive their parental menu-planners crazy. Read More

Having recently become a part-time resident of NYC ‘s Upper West Side—so recently, I don’t even know if it’s correct to capitalize those words—it has become my personal quest to zero in on what this neighborhood has to offer in the way of food. Read More

Those of you out there who love bacon in any format (even in a sundae, topping a Cinnaburger, or dipped in chocolate) will totally get this.

Now  the world of personal hygiene has been turned on its ear with the invention of bacon soap!  Not only can you smell like a couple hundred pounds of smokey pig fat but I’d suggest you make this a go-to gift item! Then sit back and just watch those thank you notes pour in. Read More

Tom, my picky husband, will eat little meat or fish, leaving me constantly desperate to find new chicken dishes. Luckily for me, there are a few takeout places I can go to that offer chicken dishes Tom likes. Read More

One of NPR’s great revelations recently (aside from my favorite story about the winged tree newt) was this recipe for Almond Butter Cookies. Read More