Last May, I made a perfect Mother’s Day brunch even though I had forgotten that it was Mother’s Day. I had found strawberries and local yogurt at the market and decided to make a sweet Yorkshire pudding for Sunday breakfast for our friends Annie and Andre who were spending the weekend with us.

Andre and Charles had shared an office and architectural practice in Washington, DC, and Annie and I were pregnant at the same time. We talked late into the night about Annie’s current theatrical role, Andre’s newest project, Charles writing, my blog and shared the latest news about our children. Bleary eyed, we agreed to continue our conversation at breakfast.

We began with cups of tea and coffee and considered how we would spend the day. Breakfast was a cooperative affair – Annie set the table, Andre worked a Sudoku puzzle, Charles cleaned the strawberries and cooked the sausages, and I made the sweet Yorkshire pudding.

It was easier than making a traditional breakfast of eggs and bacon, pancakes, or omelets, and more festive than bagels and cream cheese. The batter, a combination of eggs, milk, and flour, is similar to a crepe batter and not temperamental. It will wait patiently until everyone is awake, showered, coffee’d and ready to eat, to be put into the oven to bake. Half an hour later – breakfast is served!

Here’s how I made it: … read more

With Julia’s method, I was able to sauté mushrooms to add to omelets, soups, pastas, pizzas and more.

I made a mushroom soufflé for lunch to thank a friend who took care of my mail while I was away. We chatted about my adventures in Italy and her experiences with late winter in Vermont while the soufflé baked. A soufflé sounds complicated but it is just a seasoned white sauce lightened with egg whites that is baked. Here’s how I made it: … read more

The first mushroom I knew about was the red one with white spots that killed the king of the elephants in The Story of Babar.

Then, there were those stories that included frogs, toads, toadstools, kissing and princes, yuck! When my father’s friends gave us wild mushrooms, their promises that none were poisonous did not encourage me to try the black, slimy concoction they became. Mushrooms, no thank you!

The turning point in my relationship with mushrooms came when I saw Julia Child cook them. Her method was simple and the lightly browned mushrooms could be served at any meal. After all the ricotta pastries I had enjoyed in Sicily, I wanted to make a low fat, high flavor, savory breakfast in my Vermont kitchen. Sautéed mushrooms served with whole-wheat toast and a pot of tea would be perfect. Here’s how I did it: … read more

Do you still have snow? Is the sap running? Have you seen mergansers on the river?

These familiar questions are heard at the post office, the Creamery, the market, and at community dinners in the early spring.

It was a bright morning last April, when I saw pink sprouts pushing up through the cold earth. Within a week, there were pink stems topped with dark green leaves. Rhubarb! It would be the first harvest from my garden. Along with the phoebes that nest in the rafters of the barn, it’s rhubarb that announces the arrival of spring in Vermont.

A lilac bush, a clump of rhubarb and a stonewall may be all that remains of a homestead abandoned a hundred years earlier. The dark green leaves, full of oxalic acid, are poisonous but the bright pink or drab green stems are loaded with flavor. It doesn’t need much attention, an occasion scoop of well-rotted manure and cutting back the flowering stalks when they appear will keep the harvest coming until early summer.

Technically rhubarb is a vegetable, but I think of it as a fruit that can be roasted and topped with a dollop of yogurt, baked in a pie or simmered with dried fruit to make chutney.

A week after the sprouts had appeared, it was impossible for me to wait any longer. There wasn’t enough rhubarb to make a pie, but there were enough stems for a ‘dessert for one’. That bowl of sweet-tart, roasted rhubarb satisfied my rhubarb cravings. Here’s how I did it:

Roasted Rhubarb

I put four stalks of rhubarb, cut in one-inch pieces in a bowl along with two tablespoons of sugar. While it rested in the sugar for half an hour, I weeded the rhubarb patch. When I’d finished weeding, I poured the rhubarb and the juice that had formed into a buttered ceramic baking dish. After roasting at 175-degrees C /350-F degrees for half an hour it was tender and surrounded with sweet pink syrup. I poured in a generous splash of heavy cream, added a sprinkle of freshly grated nutmeg and returned it to the oven for ten more minutes. It was edible proof that spring had come.

I like to eat it still hot from the oven, with an antique silver spoon that was my grandmother’s, but no one has complained when I have served it chilled as dessert or topped with granola for breakfast. Rhubarb from the garden with cream from a Vermont dairy and local maple syrup is eating local at its best.

Click here to get label.

A piece of pie is often breakfast in New England. A slice of custardy rhubarb pie served with a steamy cup of coffee does the trick. It was my friend Kathy who generously served me my first piece of this pie. Here’s how I made it when I was able to harvest enough rhubarb: … read more

This post, focusing on Blood Oranges, is the first in a series of Ingredient Posts. I welcome your thoughts on ingredients that you are curious about, love or hate, use frequently or have never tried.

The fields outside of Siracusa are filled with citrus groves. The distinctive dark green, round trees that grow in orderly rows were visible when my plane circled Mt. Etna. Some of trees are so full of uniformly yellow fruit that it is possible to identify them as lemon trees from the air. Although Arabs are creditedwith bringing lemons and bitter oranges to Sicily sweet oranges were brought to Sicily in the15th century by Portuguese crusaders.

I have been taking full advantage of the possibilities that fresh lemons and oranges in the market offer.

Today, I am celebrating the blood oranges that fill the market.

I eat a blood orange before my morning cappuccino, I drink blood orange juice at lunch.

Insalata Fantasia di Arance is what I order if I want a salad of blood orange segments simply dressed with olive oil, salt and pepper at dinner. It may be topped with onion, anchovy or olives but however it comes, it is delicious.

Freshly squeezed, pink, blood orange juice, with or without a splash of vodka, is toast worthy. Salute!

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