I need to take a sweet potato dish to a Thanksgiving party, but I don’t want to take my mother’s super-sweet syrupy sweet potatoes. Do you have a suggestion? Yes! Sweet potatoes are already sweet, so why do we add more sugar? How about this creamy gratin: Sweet Potato-Corn Gratin 2 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled […]

A longtime customer called to say, “It’s green tomato season and I can’t find your gratin of green tomato recipe. I love that dish and I really want to make it. Where is it?” Green tomatoes are not the first tomatoes of the season, but the last. The tomato plants have pooped out and the […]

Do we eat like this every night? I hope not. Tonight the kitchen gods fought me. We lit the charcoal … and thirty minutes later realized that the fire did not catch. I defrosted a wonderful dish … and discovered that freezing had destroyed the texture and made it inedible. In desparation to put some […]

A weed is a plant out of place and some weeds are edible, such as dandelion greens. Last night, we tried purslane as suggested in the August issue of Sauce Magazine. Purslane is everywhere, so eating it seemed like an efficient way to weed control. Although I’ve seen purslane raw in salads, we deep-fried the […]

Artichokes are now available in the markets at $1 apiece, so it is time to indulge in a totally delicious vegetable. As much as I love artichokes, what does one drink with them? Like the African fruit synsepalum dulcificum (though not as strong a reaction), artichokes leaves a lingering buzz in the mouth that makes […]

More rain and now we have had twice the amount of rain as in a typical year. What does all this rain mean? Nothing has been planted this spring in our field of mud. The spring flowers look lush and marvelous, but the steady rain washes out the nectar in the flowers. The flowers need […]

The Belgians have invented some great foods: waffles, miniature cabbages, beer that tastes like champagne, and Belgian endive. Fully grown, endive is a curly, dark green, bitter leaf. But, over a century ago, a Belgian farmer mixed up his endive and asparagus and instead covered his endive crop with dirt to prevent photosynthesis in order […]

green beans

salvaging a family favorite

potato gaufrettes