Season

I’ve been on something of a pea kick. I’ve been zizzing them with mint and olive oil and slathering them on toast, I’ve been tossing them with spring onions and spring garlic and bits of smoked mozzarella and piling them on thinly stretched dough for a seasonal take on pizza, but I haven’t stopped there …

Last week was the first week for peas at the market. It’s a time I look forward to every year, and it never seems to come soon enough. There’s something special about really fresh peas. When I was growing up in Michigan, even though I wasn’t much of a vegetable eater as a kid, I …

When one of your best friends from college has spent most of her life in the intervening years in various countries halfway around the globe, the bad part is that you hardly ever get to see her. The silver lining (other than the part where she pretty much gets to live her dream) is that when …

I tend to think of rhubarb as a fruit, even though, botanically, it’s a vegetable. I make the traditional crisps and crumbles and jams and pies with it. I usually toss it with sugar and cook it until it slumps into a puddle of its own juices (like in this rhubarb crumble or these strawberry …

When it comes to springtime foraged vegetables, ramps (also known as wild leeks), have gotten the bulk of the chef and food world attention. I like ramps as much as the next tedious food geek droning on about the pungent wonders of spring’s first local seasonal edible green thing, but there’s some concern that the …

For a number of years in my late twenties and early thirties, Dan and I and a group of friends took turns hosting fortnightly dinner parties where we cooked a meal and played board games and enjoyed each other’s company. (We also passed around an infamous set of poorly made, tangled chimes that had originally …