Unless you’re living your life better than me (probably!), I bet it’s been way too long since you last had a baked potato for dinner — or, as they’re more charmingly called across the pond, “jacket potato.” And it’s a crime because they’re so cozy and uncomplicated to make, we could fix this right now.

Read more »

I didn’t mean to get so carried away making focaccia over the last few months, but don’t I always say that? As if I forget how easily I get consumed with a very specific idea for what a recipe should be and cannot let it go, even when it’s past time to move on. As if it was someone else who made blueberry muffins 25 times one summer until she found what she was looking for. Thus, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised but I still am: I’ve made an obscene amount of focaccia this spring and summer trying to find the recipe I’ll want to use forever. Here are five things I learned along the way:

Read more »

Eighteen years is long enough for a website to go without a potato leek soup recipe, don’t you think? I’ve always been a bit torn about it — it’s thick, pale, and can be a little sleepy. And yet if there is any time of year that’s going to bring out my cravings for filling and uncomplicated soup, if there’s any time of year when my nostalgia kicks in for the thick, hearty vegetable porridges I had in Ireland with brown bread and ale, if there’s any time of year when I’d happily act and eat like a slumbering bear in a childhood fairytale, it’s January. January is biting cold and generally irredeemable unless your only commitments are to comfort and coziness. I’ll do my best to keep us covered.

Read more »

I realize, after 18 years as a part of it, that the rules of the food internet in the week before the American cooking superbowl we call Thanksgiving dictate that everything should relate back to turkey, stuffing, or pie. But friends, we have that abundantly covered in the archives, and the newsletter. So let me tell you what I’ve been making a lot lately to feed myself what I crave, and that is sheet pans of mixed vegetables roasted until almost charred, finished with a balsamic vinaigrette, and studded with heavenly, salty, crispy pillows of halloumi.

Read more »

It’s humbling that way every September, without fail, knocks me on my rump. One week, you’re breezy and unscheduled, reading books on a beach and tearing lobster apart with your bare hands (indeed, we were in Maine) and the next you’re realizing a certain fetid backpack was never emptied on the last day of school in June, scrambling for after-school care, and despite the fact that I work every week of the year, somehow there’s a lot more to do. If dinner can’t be made in one pan in which everything cooks at once, I haven’t been making it. And yet I’ve made this chicken dish four times in the last month; it’s clearly time to shout about it across the internet.

Read more »