Shirred eggs with bacon sound fancy, but really they’re just oven-baked eggs with some sort of creamy-cheesy topping. And because they’re so very easy to make, especially for company, they are just the sort of dish that every home cook should have in his or her repertoire. I thought of them this morning as I […]
Amy Traverso
It’s not just owner Melissa Jasper’s epic collection of vintage kitsch that draws people into “the Toast” for late-night snacks, leisurely brunches, and everything between–though it’s awfully fun to sit at a ’50s dinette set, admire the old board games and Orange Crush ads lining the red walls, and play “count the Kewpie dolls” with […]
Boston’s best bakery for sweets doesn’t serve a single blueberry muffin. Instead, the treats lining Sofra’s white-marble counter are inspired by the flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East: Persian spiced doughnuts, Egyptian bread pudding, pistachio olive-oil cake. The pastries look so decadent and tantalizingly come-hither that most patrons don’t even bother parsing the […]
This dish, born of a cold winter’s morning and a mostly empty cupboard, is a family favorite: creamy breakfast polenta with maple syrup and cinnamon. I grew up eating polenta. My grandparents were from country towns outside of Genoa and our family ate pots of humble cornmeal mush long before it was a fashionable staple […]
New Hampshire
The Perfect General Store
One of the many pleasures of working at Yankee is that our offices are just a short drive from one of New England’s great general stores. Like the best of its kind, the Harrisville General Store is part market, part eatery, part gallery, and part social hub. Incidentally, there were people all around me as […]
Breakfast & Brunch
Maple-Cinnamon Polenta | The Breakfast of Champions
In the ongoing effort to keep my three-year-old son fed, I’ve come up with endless variations on macaroni and cheese and thirty different broccoli preparations. But this dish, born of a cold winter’s morning, a hungry boy, and a mostly empty cupboard, is my favorite: creamy breakfast polenta with maple syrup and cinnamon. I grew […]
When it comes to cooking, I always find it a little hard to feel inspired this time of year. The holiday baking is done, the feasts are feasted, and I’ve been overindulging my appetite. So I want something light, but also bright. A tonic for the short days, long nights, and cold temperatures. This is […]
Hand-made gifts are fantastic, but who has time, right? Well, this week I took to the airways to demonstrate a way to make a delicious handmade gift while you sleep! It’s my homemade apple butter, made overnight in a slow cooker. Here’s a video of me demonstrating the recipe on New England Cable News. Cooking […]
Desserts
Christmas Cookies | Pecan Puffs
My all-time favorite Christmas cookie is a recipe that my Aunt Madeline called Pecan Puffs and some people know as Pecan Balls or Meltaways. These simple nutty shortbread rounds, rolled in powdered sugar, look like delicate snowballs and taste like heaven. Here is a perfect example of how a few simple ingredients in the right […]
Main Dishes
Savory Pies | The Ultimate Comfort Food
These savory pies are homey, but hardly humble. We think they’re the ultimate winter comfort food.
A few weeks ago, I found myself with an apple emergency. I was on my way to work, thinking about the talk and apple tasting I was scheduled to give at the Dublin town library that evening and realized that the bag of heirloom apples that I had set out the night before was still […]
Magazine
In Praise of Kabocha Squash
I first tasted Kabocha Squash about six years ago, when I lived in California. It’s practically a fall and winter staple food there, and in the test kitchens at Sunset magazine, where I worked at the time, we came up with all manner of ways to stew, roast, and steam it. Kabocha is a winter […]