Recipes & cooking Ideas, Tips & Guides

Last year around holiday gifting time, my serious cookbook-collecting friend Ali and I talked about our all-time favorites of the genre. And this time we’re focusing on the latest harvest, cookbooks that caught our attention among the many published this fall–12 of which we’re each giving away a copy of (as in 24 chances to win) in the spirit of the season. More on that at the bottom of the page.Ali is author 2017’s “Bread Toast Crumbs,” a book I love to give as a gift, by the way.We’re including recipes to some of the dishes Ali has cooked from the books that caught our a

My semi-failed batch of peaches went wrong for a couple of reasons, besides skipping the sugar entirely. How to freeze peaches:what I did wrong when freezing peaches:I let the peach fruit get overripe before putting it into suspended animation. If you’re freezing fresh (uncooked) fruit, you want it to be ripe but still firm—not already so soft as to be on a downhill slide.  Fruit that drips down your chin when you bite into may be a sensuous summer pleasure, but it’s too far gone for putting up. More treacherous, tho

It also takes some experimentation, since our modern homes tend to lack just the perfect place. (Oh, to have a root cellar!) But knowing the basics helps us do the best job we can–and also to grow crops we are capable of storing, or only to grow enough for a shorter period in storage. How to stash homegrown garden vegetables (and which ones, including winter squash, to cure first in a warmer spot for best results):temperature and humidityMANY VEGETABLES prefer to be stored surprisingly cold, at 32 to 38 degrees F.  Notable exceptions: sweet potatoes (55-60 degrees), and pumpkins and winter squash (50-55, after a week or two curing even warmer).Many also like it humid (root vegetables and potatoes, for instance—like 90 percent or thereabouts), b

I love clafoutis (kla-foo-tee), a humble French concoction that’s like a Huffy-Puffy or Dutch Baby or German pancake–whatever you call it, that’s my favorite Christmas-morning food. But the clafoutis is sweeter and has fruit inside. If you have 3 cups of fruit and some kitchen basics like milk and eggs and flour, you can make this dessert very last-minute, even just as you sit down to eat the main course, another selling factor. Easy, yet quite impressive.Though clafoutis is traditionally made with cherries, as it was in the recipe Martha shared in her must-have 1995 cookbook, “The Martha Stewart Cookbook: Collected Recipes for Every Day” (affiliate link), I’ve come to regard her batter as the universal solvent for all things fruit.With it, I have since made clafoutis from peaches, plums, pears, various berries, cherries, and mixes of fresh fruit and dried (such as by adding a handful of dried cranberries or cherries to pears

How to spice it up in our home cooking? Alexandra Stafford of the Alexandra’s Kitchen website, alexandracooks.com, author of the “Bread, Toast, Crumbs” cookbook, is helping me get a little confidence about using spices to create some favorite take-out flavors at home. Together she and I have been digging for inspiration into the latest crop of cookbooks, which would also make great gifts to others who might need a flavor nudge.Read along as you listen to the December 2, 2019 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).And we’ll have a double book giveaway: Over on Ali’s website, ent

Ronna Welsh, a former restaurant cook who operates the New York cooking school called Purple Kale Kitchenworks, has been teaching chefs and home cooks for more than 20 years. Her new book’s full title is “The Nimble Cook: New Strategies for Great Meals that Make the Most of Your Ingredients,” and in it we learn to look for what she calls “starting points” that the ingredients we have on hand can offer, and to start to see the many potential incarnations of each one. You’ll never take a head of celery for granted again, or be so inclined to let partial bunches of fresh herbs languish under everything else in the “crisper” bin till they’re anything but crisp.Read along as you listen to the July 29, 2019 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).Plus: Enter to win the cookbook in the comments box at the very bottom of the page, and also get Ronna’

It’s a soup you can make and enjoy now, or freeze, depending on how many willing yellow onions you can get your hands on, and on whether you can resist eating it all right away. With my first bowlful, I didn’t even manage to wait long enough to melt the cheese on top of the recommended toast. It just smelled too inviting as-is (or was), and then, suddenly, gone.If you haven’t met David Lebovitz, the story, in brief: In 1999, he left Chez Panisse and a career in the restaurant business. He moved from San Francisco to Paris—where he jokingly says Belgian endive is so inexpensive as to be the French version of “trash” lettuce, and reports there are more than 1,260 bakeries. Packing up little more than his best skillet, cookbooks and trusty laptop, David turned to writing, and his 2011 memoir, “The Sweet Life in Paris” (Amazon affiliate link), became a “New York Times” bestseller.His website has likewise been a giant hit (and has an e-newsletter I enjoy); he is lately (as of 2021ish) moving more over to delivering his latest writing via a Substack newsletter.No wonder he is so perennially popular. Besides having a way with food, he is a delicious storyteller, too, always layering in the essential ingr

I called my friend Alexandra Stafford, author of “Bread Toast Crumbs” and creator of the indispensablefood website Alexandra’s Kitchen, for ideas, and she had as many as I have zucchini at the moment. Uh-oh.If haven’t followed Ali on Instagram, where her how-to videos and stories are like a short course in better cooking, don’t delay any longer. She joined me on the radio show and podcast to talk about summer’s best flavors, with recipes for squash, corn a

I called Lukas to talk about dependable, versatile ingredients and how to use them, about how to cook better no matter what ingredients we have on hand, and also how to make vegetables last.Lukas Volger is the author of three previous cookbooks, and the co-founder and editorial director of“Jarry” magazine, an award-winning biannual publication that explores where food and queer culture intersect.Plus: Lukas has shared a recipe for his Cheesy Cabbage and White Bean Soup right here, farther down the page, and we’ll also h

Another day that year, my friend Katrina filled the back of her car with my apples, heading home to cook them up, and many neighbors have been the recipients of boxes of apples, apples and more apples, too. It’s applesauce time, and here’s how that goes:Bountiful rains put regional 2013 apple crops—including fruit on my handful of ancient trees that I do not spray (that’s a 40-foot-wide one out back, above)—at bumper levels. The 2015 season didn’t feature much rain, but the apples were crazy-plentiful, after a 2014 when I had almost none. In 2016, almost a total bust, after a non-winter and a very dry whole year. Neighbors with old trees had none, either; I bought sev

THESE PICKLES were a hand-me-down recipe from Dan’s mother. And they couldn’t be simpler. Those are from a batch I made many years ago (photo by Kit Latham).the recipe:Wash jars: Run gallon or half-gallon canning jars through the dishwasher or otherwise wash thoroughly.Prepare your brine: To each quart of water that has been boiled and brought to room temperature, add ¾ cup of distilled white vinegar and 4 Tablespoons Kosher salt (Dan would say “heaping tablespoons”). See the link in the box at the bottom of this story on brands of salt and their relative saltiness. Estimate how many quarts to mak

ingredients:olive oil for sautéing 1 large head of garlic, whole cloves peeled 3 chopped quarts of plum tomatoes fresh basil, chiffonaded (as much or little as you like) generous handful of fresh parsley, chopped (salt and pepper to taste, if desired) steps: Sauté all the peeled whole cloves from one head of garlic slowly in olive oil till they are really soft and almost caramelized. I leave the cover on the pan, and use low heat so they don’t get crispy (later, the cloves will sort of melt into the sauce).To the soft garlic, add a mixing bowl full of choppe

Some of that can be moderated by growing different varieties with different days to maturity or with smaller succession sowings of each crop. But no matter how much planning, it’s not a predictable assembly line—and neither is what you’ll get each week if you subscribe to a farm share or CSA. Like: hello, radishes every week, plus more kale than I can keep up with.So what to do with whatever produce comes your way? Cookbook author and food writer Alexandra Stafford offered some tactical advice and also prepared

Ali Stafford, author of the essential cookbook “Bread Toast Crumbs” and creator of the website alexandracooks.com, is here to highlight some of the recent cookbook titles that she’s finding irresistible. They range from topics like cooking more vegetable-centric meals, to creative use of grains, and yes, even more ideas for delicious cookies.Plus: Giveaways! I’m giving away two of the cookbooks we discussed, and Ali is giving away a membership in the semester of my Virtual Garden Club that begins January 13, 2022. Enter to win by commenting in the box at the bottom of the page…and then click over to her lace and do the same to double your chances.Read along as you listen to the January 10, 2022 edition of my public-radio show and podcast usi