One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.
I’ve been waiting weeks to share this milestone with you: My first birthday in the blogosphere. The real one-year anniversary for this blog flew by sometime in early September while the redesign was still in the works, so the party had to wait. So now it’s time [...]

Braciole, or roulade? Such different-sounding words for such similar spirals of meat and filling. The former, I’ve just learned, is merely an Italian American variety of the latter French creation. Because the ingredients I’ve chosen for this one’s filling are more typically Italian than French, though, I’ll go with naming it a braciole.

In this month’s Harper’s Magazine, Mark Schapiro explores the tremendous oversight of 62,000 chemicals in manufactured consumer goods that the U.S. has never tested for safety. His research finds in the blood of a 19-year-old Italian woman, “brominated flame retardants, which are potential liver, thyroid, and neurological toxins that are used to coat many electronics; [...]

a fuzz-free steamed fuzzy melon stuffed with turkey appetizer — works well with zucchini, too

A few months ago, I posted a recipe for a Thai-inspired stir-fry of shrimp ‘n okra and received among other comments, this one, from Matt:
“Where can I actually get thai basil? When I go to Chinatown, I usually don’t find anything [...]

This side is:
a) 100% vegetables
b) 100% hearty
c) oddly Christmasy-looking
d) all of the above
If you guessed “d,” then you hate these kinds of questions because you always know whoever’s posing it is trying to get you to say that. And I don’t blame you. But you’ve got to try these green beans to believe how true [...]

Ah, the smell of musty haystacks and wood smoke. The crisp bite of tree-ripened apples. The taste of sweet corn slicked with pure butter. There’s nothing like celebrating the end of a fruitful harvest like an all-evening barbecue at a sustainable farm with your local farmers. Oh wait, I’ve never been to one before. It’s [...]

As you can see, I’m drinking to the end of summer. Stirred (not shaken) up as a last-minute idea for the Salsa Takedown at Mo Pitkins, this salsa is my sloppy toast to another warm season of farm-fresh fruits and vegetables, many of which I feel much closer to in the wake of their departure [...]

excerpted from “My Empire of Dirt,” this week’s cover story in New York Magazine:
“Inspired by the coop design in Nick Park’s animated film Chicken Run, I was using the table saw to mill eight-inch plywood into strips to make footholds for the entrance ramp when the blade of the saw tagged my right pinkie, [...]

So many times after posting a recipe, I come up with a slightly weird sister of that night’s recipe for dinner the next night. It absorbs its leftovers, remaining scraps of ingredients from the original and whatever’s left over from something else. Last night’s tart? Onion, roast carrot, broccoli and tomato. As [...]

Damn. I knew I should have bought more tomatoes from that roadside produce stand in upstate New York. Having good tomatoes these days is something akin to having a house in the Hamptons, or the hottest new technology from Apple. Newer and better species keep cropping up, the heirlooms perhaps being the Amagansett abodes or [...]

grapes at Lamoreaux Landing vineyard, on the northeast side of the lake
Ah, vacation. A little respite from the heat, the smog, the whiny, cosmopolitan attitude that had been pressure-cooking in me all summer long. Though it was only two days in total and a whopping five hours drive from New York City, this weekend I [...]