I woke up yesterday feeling amazing. I often wake up feeling great, but not usually after a big night of entertaining. Normally an afternoon of preparation and a night of rich foods and heavy reds can leave me feeling achy, foggy, leaden the morning after. (Not that the price of a memorable meal isn’t occasionally worth it.)

Guest post by David Anderson…we just call him Dad. Women are free to make this dish of course, but I commend the potato rosti to you men. It is simple; less a recipe, more a project. Men get projects. To feed four people, take two large baking potatoes and wash them. Sometimes I use the

I can’t decide whether I’m proud or embarrassed that we so infrequently frequent restaurants. It’s not that we’re saving money by eating in.  Every time I open my bulging fridge or admire my racks of wine, I am reminded of just how many times we could have gone out for dinner for the cost of

“Microwave Magic” was the title of the wood-grain folder where I found Mom and Dad’s peanut brittle recipe–in a collection of recipes by the home economist for West Florida Gas (why the gas company created an electric microwave cookbook is probably a reminder of what a phenom the microwave oven was in the 70s). I

Here’s a Deep South shocker: the Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day originated with the Jews. (I guess the salt pork floating atop the pot threw me off.) Wikipedia says Jews have been eating black-eyed peas for good luck at Rosh Hashana since 500 CE, and Sephardic and Israeli Jews still

I’m not the first to observe that Meryl Streep and Steve Martin would have needed more than a couple of hours—commercial dough roller or not— to make those exquisitely flakey buttery croissants in It’s Complicated. They made it look like so much fun! I suppose anything you do on a happy first date is fun.

Until last week I had only made real gumbo—dark roux and all—once in my life. It was the late 80’s and I was the test cook at Cook’s Magazine. I remember staying late one night trying to figure out how to microwave the much-needed roux to its chocolate brown state. I got it to work, but roux

As a young cook, among the very first books I purchased were Nathalie Dupree’s—New Southern Cooking, Matters of Taste. She gets full credit for Batter Fruit Cobbler in my first book, The Perfect Recipe. (She’s right, “It’s the best peach dessert there is.”) I finally met Nathalie in 2002 when she hosted me on her

Thanks to random.org, we’ve chosen 3 winners–Bonnie, Pat, and Nancy–all who’ve been notified and are just a few days away from receiving a beautiful holiday wreath. My Dad just turned 86 this past Sunday. He and Mom live in a quiet friendly neighborhood on Deer Point Lake in Panama City, FL, nearly 1300 miles from

I hear it all the time. “I’m afraid to cook for you.” I finally met someone who wasn’t. Matuce.  Her real name’s Violet, but when her husband died many years ago and she came to live with daughter and son-in-law Babs and George, her young grandson called her Mom-Two. It came out Matuce and it

Lately we’ve been having people over during the week. I love it. You start earlier, end earlier, and expectations are lower. After all, it’s just weeknight supper. We hosted one of these dinners just last Monday, which of course is a meatless day for us. What to serve? Pasta and pizza are easy vegetarian crowd

Since we filmed the first Three Many Cooks video during a Nor’easter I was half expecting another disaster the day Diane Chu and Todd Porter filmed our second one. Instead, their red-eye landed at Kennedy on a clear, sunny late September morning. It was warm with an almost undetectable chill in the air. After a

Between Three Many Cooks, book projects, and my USA Weekend column, I rarely get to cook on a whim. Last week was different. I get a call from my friend Ray Ryan who’s caught a fourteen-pound striped bass off Montauk, Long Island. Did I want any? Is Ina Garten the Barefoot Contessa? Early Monday morning

I was in Dallas for a teaching gig and staying at the Mansion on Turtle Creek (a luxury hotel I was enjoying courtesy of Central Markets Cooking Schools), when a friend from Chicago days came by for a visit. It was 4:00. We wandered into the hotel bar to see if we could get a