Walnuts

These cookies go by about half a dozen names, the most common among them being Mexican wedding cookies and Russian tea cakes. But they’re also sometimes called polvorones, butterballs, snowballs, and meltaways. So many cultures have some version of them, which makes sense because it’s a formula that works. The basic formula is some kind …

Here’s a quick public service announcement: you should be toasting your nuts. (That is, tree nuts, ahem.) Most recipes that call for nuts start with raw nuts that need to be toasted before going into baked goods or scattering over a salad. Why? Because raw nuts taste bland and vaguely bitter and have a kinda …

When it comes to weeknight dinners that clock in under half an hour and still manage to taste like something real—a little bit cheffy, even—it’s tough to beat this ricotta pasta. It’s a sort of cousin to cacio e pepe, in that in its soul it is a cheesy, creamy tangle of long noodles flecked …

Plums are farmers markets’ harbingers of fall. They come in with the peaches and the berries and go out with the apples and the pears. When plums show up, summer heads out. This raspberry plum crisp is a sort of summer’s last hurrah. It’s comfort baking at it’s simplest and best, like a light sweater …

As we get closer to our closing date on our condo and our subsequent move, I find myself returning again and again to my reliable quick meal repertoire. I have begun to pack up the kitchen. Some of it is easy to set aside for a while. The waffle maker, the cookie cutters, the cake …

Another banana bread? Yeah, I know. I just wrote about the double chocolate one last week. But this one is different. It’s more of a breakfast bread. It eschews chocolate in favor of whole grain oat flour and toasted walnuts and a more restrained use of butter and sugar. It fits a classic banana nut …