Easter was especially joyful this year. After a hard winter and a month of raw rainy days, Sunday morning was storybook warm and sunny. For the first time in months I wore a short-sleeved shirt on my run—one of many happy moments throughout the day. Our Easter meal was another. Each year this traditional feast

To me the best lemon bar must consist of a tender, buttery crust and a soft, intensely lemony filling. One other thing…it must be simple to make. In this week’s USA Weekend video, we demonstrate our perfect recipe for these irresistible sweet treats. With Easter, Mother’s Day, picnics and parties coming up, keep this recipe

A scant two weeks of serious touring in Israel and Palestine, we have a free day. How to spend it? Some of us head for the desert. We arrive early morning just in time to climb a sand dune and watch the sun slowly rise above the thick, low clouds on the eastern horizon. We

I’m in Israel for two weeks. At first I considered myself a tourist. Turns out I’m a pilgrim. Until now I thought pilgrimages were Bucket List top ten for the superstitious hyper-religious. It’s way too early to say how this trip will impact my life, but having spent a week here now, I know one

I’m not sure what prompted me to run a recipe for pastitsio, the Greek baked pasta dish, in our USA Weekend column a couple of months ago. Maybe I was looking for an alternative to lasagna. Maybe I was drawn to the dish’s warm spices, but since then I’ve gotten scores of e-mails from readers

It’s curious that I grew up in the South and went to college in South Carolina but never visited Charleston until a few years ago when our family spent one short touristy day there book-ending our visit with breakfast at Hominy Grill (we still have the tee-shirt and good memories to prove it) and dinner

There’s no mistaking Southern cuisine for Italian, but there’s a pretty big point where they intersect. I didn’t taste polenta until I was a full-fledged adult but ate grits nearly every morning of my childhood and sometimes for supper too. I never heard of prosciutto or pancetta growing up, but country ham and bacon were

In this week’s USA Weekend column, we’ve figured out how go to work on St. Patrick’s Day and still come home and have a party. In fact, even if we had the day off to make corned beef and cabbage, we’d still opt for this fun meal

My father-in-law Jerry turned 92 last week, and all seven of the siblings and many of the spouses gathered to celebrate. At this point in his life, he lives with daughter Kathy and her husband, Charlie in Knoxville, TN. Because there were eight us joining her already bustling house for the weekend, we told Kathy

Years ago, cheese was just one of the many courses I served up at long luxurious dinner parties. Now I seem to have less time for long evenings of fine food and drink, or maybe I’m trying to eat a little simpler these days. In any case, I’m not  likely to sandwich a rich cheese

My husband David has always been a wine lover. Never much of a beer drinker. We do  keep a little beer in the garage in case guests ask for it, but not long ago we had to throw the stuff out. It was so old it had gone bad. Then along came Andy, our English

In today’s video I show Maggy and Sharon my technique for making great lo mein. It’s a formula really, so feel free to substitute other firm vegetables like carrots, asparagus, snow or sugar snap peas for the broccoli and other tender vegetables like peppers, zucchini, or bean sprouts, for the mushrooms. Chicken, beef, pork, shrimp,

As of January 2011, we Three Many Cooks are the weekly food columnists for USA Weekend magazine, a Sunday insert in some 20 million newspapers across the country. We didn’t make a splashy deal about it when it happened, but now that we’re all settled, we wanted you to know about it too. Our being

After the holidays, when everyone packed up and went back home to Connecticut, I stayed behind. I needed focused time to finish my next book, so I exiled myself to our house here in Pennsylvania. It would be just me, the kitchen and my laptop. No more distractions. No land line here. No cable. No