Caprese Salad

Melon Caprese Salad, originally uploaded by shannon_turlington.
A classic insalata caprese hardly needs a recipe. Just layer tomato slices, fresh mozzarella slices and basil leaves, and drizzle with olive oil and vinegar. For me, this simple Italian salad is one of the best ways to enjoy the goodness of summer.
But what about when the tomatoes aren’t [...]

Complicated Recipes: Gnocchi

For me, “simply cooking” is the process of producing great meals from good ingredients with a minimum of fussy preparation or time-consuming steps. My goal is to get a good meal on the table day after day, while heartily enjoying both the act of cooking and eating what I have produced.
As a result, I usually [...]

Quick and Easy but Elegant Party Food

Yes, the party season is winding down, but here’s a dilemma that can come up at any time: What do you do if you want to be social and have people over, but you don’t want to spend a lot of time cooking beforehand? I know that as I have gotten more and more pregnant, [...]

My Husband Cooks Too: Cheesy Pasta Bake

My husband does cook, although not nearly as often as I do. He is a very different cook than I am. He maintains a small repertoire of dishes that he makes over and over again, improving each time, and I have hardly ever seen him consult a recipe. Rather, he cooks solely by memory and [...]

Garden Destruction and Pesto Making

It hurt, but we tore out the garden this weekend. It has been a strange growing season. Up until Tuesday of this week, we were still experiencing temperatures in the 90s and humidity that felt more like July. Despite being in “exceptional” drought for the last two months, the tomatoes must have thought we were [...]

What’s in Season? Tomatoes

There is nothing quite like the taste of a vine-ripened tomato picked out of your own garden. Supermarket tomatoes in any season are pale, watery imitations of what real tomato-y goodness can be, and therefore not worth buying, in my book. (Fortunately, canned tomatoes will get us through the winter.) Fresh-picked tomatoes are the essence [...]

Tomato & Bread Salad

Tomato and Bread Salad is a resourceful way to turn day-old bread and an abundance of summer tomatoes into something delicious. This is actually one of my favorite salads, one I could eat every day for lunch during the height of tomato season.

Although bread salad, called panzanella in Italy, is most often associated with Italian [...]

How to Make Sorbet

A couple of weekends ago, my husband brought home a gigantic watermelon. “They were selling them by the side of the road,” he said. “I tasted it and it was so sweet I had to buy one.”
How were the two of us going to eat a whole watermelon before it went off? I had the [...]

Bruschetta

Bruschetta (pronounced “broo-sketta” ) and its relation, crostini, is one of my favorite snacks, especially now that summer is here and there is such a plethora of likely toppings. When most people think of bruschetta, they think of the classic starter of toasted bread served with a topping of chopped tomato and basil. Actually, bruschetta [...]

Serious Comfort Food

Let’s say you’ve had a week like mine. A week where you stayed late at the office nearly every night and still didn’t feel like you got on top of all the work clamoring to be done. A week where you received 3 new project assignments, all of which need to be done by the [...]