Best in Show | 5 Favorite Recipes from 10 Seasons of “Weekends with Yankee”

On a chilly night last October, Yankee’s editorial staff gathered in the softly lit kitchen at Cranberry Meadow Farm, a luxe B&B on the site of the former 1797 Wilson Tavern in Peterborough, New Hampshire. We were doing something new: filming an episode of our public television show, Weekends with Yankee, together as a team. Some of us were comfortable in front of the camera; others had to be coaxed into view. I mixed up a batch of cranberry spritzes, and we toasted two milestones: the 90th anniversary of our magazine and the 10th anniversary of our show.

While they’re both thrilling achievements, the long run of Weekends is perhaps the more surprising one. At our first meeting with GBH producers Laurie Donnelly and Anne Adams back in 2014, we were TV newbies, more accustomed to thinking in terms of words rather than visuals. We knew we had the essentials for a great show: decades of experience covering New England, an award-winning production team, and this beautiful region we call home. We knew that public television stations around the country had expressed interest in airing it—not completely surprising, as nearly half of Yankee’s readers live outside New England. But we were thrilled when the show was picked up by every major media market in the United States. The love of New England truly does live well beyond our borders.

Over these past 10 years, I’ve had the opportunity to make scallop crudo on a fishing boat off of Martha’s Vineyard, simmer baked beans in the outdoor kitchen of a Maine homestead, harvest lobsters from Penobscot Bay, forage for wild mushrooms in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, and make a Parisian opera torte in the five-star kitchens of Rhode Island’s Ocean House. I’ve met fascinating, generous, inspired New Englanders, and it has been my greatest pleasure to introduce you to them.

To mark the anniversary, I went back through our archive of recipes from each season and chose five as representatives of all the wonderful food we’ve featured on Weekends with Yankee. The lineup kicks off with a recipe from the brand-new season, which begins airing in early April: tomato tartines (open-faced sandwiches) from Amanda Geisler, the executive chef at Groundswell Café in Tiverton, Rhode Island. We’d spent the day with Groundswell’s owner, David Fierabend—a landscape designer and lifestyle genius who has turned this tiny Farm Coast town into a destination—and ended with a feast cooked by Amanda and her team. It was an early fall harvest celebration, the perfect end to another magical shoot.

We hope you enjoy this new season of Weekends with Yankee as much as we’ve loved making it. Tune in as we hike, drive, boat, and eat our way through our beloved six states, from the Berkshires to coastal Maine to Cape Cod and the White Mountains. Then head to the kitchen with these time-tested recipes.

5 Favorite Recipes from 10 Seasons of “Weekends with Yankee”:

Groundswell Café’s Tomato Tartines (Season 10)

Sherry Pocknett’s Butternut-Cranberry Soup (Season 9)

Mama Chang’s Pork And Chive Dumplings (Season 4)

Erin French’s Graham Cracker Pie (Season 2)

Eventide Oyster’s Brown Butter Lobster Rolls (Season 1)

Amy Traverso

Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee and cohost of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with GBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.

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