I buy both cinnamon sticks and ground cinnamon in small quantities. Cinnamon sticks can be ground in a small electric coffee mill reserved for spice grinding or pulverized in a mortar and pestle. It is a familiar flavor in breakfast breads, cookies and all things apple – sauce, pies and crumbles and it adds flavor to savory dishes as well. It is used in Middle Eastern recipes for chicken or lamb and is a component of Indian garam masala. Tomato slices sprinkled with cinnamon sugar are an Amish relish and in Sicily it is used to flavor octopus, gelato and pasta.

When my friend Veronica, the potter who made the pasta bowls we eat from, served me pasta with pine nuts and raisins she told me that a pinch of cinnamon was the crucial ingredient. It was the first meal we had in the pasta bowls she gave to us.  Here’s how I made it: … read more

Afternoons when I am hungry and wish that I had a personal chef, I make a Marjorie Morningstar lunch, named in honor of the protagonist in the Herman Wouk novel of the same name.

It all began when I was thirteen and an avid reader. I was home alone and hungry and didn’t want to stop reading to make lunch. I wanted it to appear with minimum effort and attention so I turned on the oven, scrubbed the biggest potato I could find, poked holes in it with a fork and put it in the oven. I enjoyed an uninterrupted hour of the melodrama of Marjorie’s quest for love and adventure and the details of her life on Central Park West in New York City while my potato baked in a kitchen, on a hilly street, in a suburb of Pittsburgh.

A weekly trip to the library and a baked potato lunch became my Saturday ritual. The first lunches were simply a baked potato topped with a lump of butter, a pinch of salt and lots of black pepper. It wasn’t long before I added an onion to the menu. I poked the root end of an unpeeled onion with a paring knife, nestled it into a cup made of aluminum foil to catch the juice, and roasted it along with the potato. Roasting made the onion soft and sweet and the onion made my lunch more interesting. The next improvement was influenced by the flavor combination of potato latkes and sour cream that I had enjoyed at a kosher deli. I imagined that Marjorie Morgenstern, aka Marjorie Morningstar, ate something similar in a New York deli.

Caviar came after sour cream. My mother worked in a large grocery store and when I had to wait for her, I wandered the aisles of the market looking for exotic new foods. I was amazed when I found a tiny jar of black lumpfish caviar that cost less than two dollars. It wasn’t sturgeon caviar from Russia but it was caviar that I could afford. Even Noel Airman, Marjorie’s grand passion, would be impressed by a baked potato topped with sour cream and a spoonful of caviar.

I haven’t thought about Marjorie Morningstar for years and discovered today that I can’t get a copy for my Kindle but I’ve have continued to create tasty and quick meals that begin by baking a potato. Here is my list of rule for making the perfect baked potato: … read more

Later in the week my friend Annie and I would share a mushroom soufflé for lunch, a holiday tradition we looked forward to. It may seem daunting, but a soufflé is just a white sauce enriched with egg yolks, flavored with sauteed mushrooms, lightened with egg whites, topped with cheese and baked.

It’s easier than putting tinsel on the Christmas tree! Here’s how I made it:

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I found a container of tomato sauce in the freezer and I had enough leeks left to make Charles favorite vegetarian pasta for dinner.

I made a second sauce with three small leeks, cream and rosemary. It transformed the leftover tomato sauce and linguini into an elegant dinner. Here’s how I did it:

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In the mid 1980’s, at the end of a two-month trip that took us, with our five year old son, through Asia and Russia, we stopped in Sweden on our way home.

We had been living in Singapore for two years, enjoying an incredible variety of Chinese, Indian, Malay and Indonesian food. Our first meal in Stockholm was gastronomic culture shock. There were endless varieties of meat, fish, cheese, vegetables, breads and berries artfully arranged on a breakfast buffet. I began by tasting a little bit of almost everything. When I tasted the thinly sliced, cured salmon I was expecting salty lox and was surprised by the fresh, slightly sweet, dill flavor and delighted by the sauce that accompanied it.

I went back to the buffet for a second helping and knew that I would order it at every meal until we left Stockholm. A friendly Swede at the buffet table explained that what I had fallen in love with was called gravlax. She explained that the word gravlax is a combination of two Scandinavian words – grav meaning grave and lax meaning salmon – and was in fact a description of how fishermen in the Middle Ages prepared salmon by salting it and burying it in the sand, above the high tide line, to ferment. Fortunately the salmon on the buffet had been cured with salt, sugar and fresh dill in a refrigerator rather than fermented in sand. It was a lovely shade of orange, thinly sliced, served with buttered brown bread and a sweet mustard, dill sauce called hovastarsas. Months later, after we had recovered from our trip half way around the world, I remembered my salmon binge in Stockholm and decided to try to make gravlax. It was a remarkably simple process and I make it frequently.

Salmon and trout are in the same family with the distinction that salmon migrate and trout don’t. Salmon come from both the Atlantic and Pacific and may be either wild or farmed. Varieties of salmon include: Chinook, Coho, pink, sockeye, steelhead and chum. Gravlax can be made with any variety of salmon, and I choose the variety based on guidance I get from Alex, the guy behind the fish counter at my market.

The last time I made it was for a dinner party to welcome our friend, Kay, back from her recent trip to Sweden. Following Alex’s recommendation, I chose a one-pound fillet of steel head.

I prepared it three days before the party so that it would have time to cure. Here’s how I did it:

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When I was twenty-four, I met Julian. She was an enthusiastic artist from Holland who bragged about all things Dutch.

I was intrigued, I had never been to Europe, I was living on my own, in my first apartment, hoping to become a sophisticated cook able to make elegant food. She talked about and promised Dutch Soup at every opportunity.

When she finally invited me to dinner, I was shocked. Rather than being served Dutch Soup, she served meatloaf – Meatloaf! She called it DUTCH MEATLOAF – but it was meatloaf. It was tasty and filled with lots of vegetables and unexpected spice but it wasn’t the international delicacy I was hoping for. She shared her recipe and promised that one day she would make Dutch Soup for me.

Julian was a creative and energetic artist and cook. Her pantry was her palette and each meatloaf was an original. It might be an all beef meatloaf, or it might include sausage, ground veal, pork or chicken. Day old bread, crushed crackers or rolled oats might be substituted for breadcrumbs. Once she added grated raw potatoes instead of carrots to the mix and occasionally she slathered the meatloaf with that classic Dutch condiment, Heinz catsup.

I realized that, at least to Julian, everything that was labeled Heinz was Dutch when months after the meatloaf party she relented and invited a group of friends to dinner for Dutch Soup. When we arrived, she opened a couple of bottles of wine, not Dutch, and set out some cheese, Dutch, and crackers, origin unknown, and disappeared into her kitchen. She insisted on privacy in the kitchen while she cooked. In about fifteen minutes, we were called to the table and she proudly served the Dutch soup. It was thick, brownish-greenish-red and had lumps. It was steamy hot and tasted terrible. I had managed to swallow a few spoonfuls and politely asked if she would share the recipe. She was pleased, delighted to be asked and generously explained how to make this Dutch classic.

I will share her recipe with you but only if you promise not to invite me to dinner when you make it or tell anyone where you got the recipe. Here’s how she made it: Into a large pot, it need not be a Dutch oven, dump one can of Heinz Tomato soup, one can of Heinz Split Pea soup, one can of milk, half a can of water, half a can of dry sherry, two cans of cocktail sausages and one large can of vegetables, peas, corn or tomatoes will do. Heat until steaming, serve and try to figure out why she called it Dutch Soup. I never have – figured out its name or made it.

I used Julian’s recipe last Saturday as the centerpiece of a cozy, traditional American supper for two. Here’s how I did it:

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