Last Tuesday, Election Day, I spent the morning in front of Town Hall supporting my candidate and greeting friends and strangers as they came to vote. On this perfect summer day, the people I talked to were thinking more about food than about politics and the most popular topic was peaches.

I was intrigued when I heard Honey and Elizabeth talking about a peach and tomato salad that Honey had made for a dinner party. Luckily, they were willing to tell me about it and I made my version on Wednesday. Here’s how I did it: … read more

Although I couldn’t get blood oranges in the market, I used navel oranges to make a red onion and orange salad with cumin.

The salad, along with a bowl of hummus and a basket of toasted pita bread reminded me of a dinner I was served on a trip to Turkey. Here’s how I made it: … read more

The salad  made with a combination of red cabbage and mango brightened the table with the colors of India.

I served it with a roasted chicken from the market. Here’s how I did it: … read more

My Nana could grow flowers anywhere; she was a skilled seamstress and a modest carpenter. Her hands were never idle.

Nana gave me my first tools – a hammer, a saw, screwdrivers and a hand-crank drill. I drilled and hammered beside her at the workbench. Although she was an enthusiastic cook, she was not a good cook. For Nana, speed and efficiency in the kitchen were most important. Her version of a pancake dinner was literally ‘a pan cake’ – a twelve-inch disc, an inch thick that was cut in quarters to serve four. The pancake was always served with a salad and the salad was always the same, the only salad she ever made, a wedge of iceberg lettuce with a puddle of bright orange French dressing poured from a bottle.

I am like my Nana in many ways. I can fix almost anything. I still have my own toolbox and my hands are rarely idle, but for me, neither speed nor efficiency in the kitchen are nearly as important as flavor and beauty. Color is important but rather than resorting to bright orange, bottled salad dressing, I use fruit to add a splash of color to a salad. In the past few weeks I have been making savory salads that combine fruits and vegetables.

I love the combination of blue and yellow whether I am setting a table, painting a still life, decorating a room or making a salad. When a friend told me about a salad she had made that combined corn and blueberries I knew I had to try it. Here’s how I made it: … read more

Two summers ago, when I had more tomatoes than we could eat, I preserved jars of oven-roasted tomatoes for the pantry.

I used them as a base for pasta sauce and for grilled pizza during the gray days of the following winter.

Whether I added them to pasta sauce, used them to top pizza or on toasted bread for brushetta, I always began by pureeing the tomatoes with either a food processor or an immersion blender. The intense flavor of the roasted tomatoes satisfied my tomato desire until I emptied the last jar on Town Meeting Day.

Here how I did it: … read more

For many gardeners, Town Meeting is the reminder that it is time to plant tomato seeds. The tender seedlings must wait on windowsills to be transplanted until the threat of a late May frost has passed. And then, with a balance of sun and rain, a presence of pollinators and an absence of blight and hornworms, local tomatoes thrive and come to market at the end of July.

Last weekend, my friend Veronica gave us a basket of tomatoes from her garden, our first Vermont tomatoes of the season. After the tomato blight of last summer, local tomatoes are even more of a treat. An heirloom tomato, still warm from the sun, eaten out of hand with a pinch of salt is one of summer’s great pleasures. I used thin slices of white bread, a thick slather of mayo, two layers of tomatoes and lots of sea salt and freshly ground pepper to make a platter of tomato sandwiches. Longing for the flavor and scent of just picked tomatoes is a desire that never seems to fade.

When we lived in Singapore, our English neighbor, Philip, was on an endless quest for “a proper English tomato”. The tomatoes grown in Singapore were hard and pale orange with green patches. Although they looked like tomatoes, they didn’t have much flavor; the imported tomatoes, called airflown in Singapore, from more temperate regions were perfectly red, perfectly round and perfectly tasteless. Philip decided to grow tomatoes with seeds taken from a very expensive imported tomato. The seeds sprouted quickly and he soon had half a dozen seedlings. He tied each seedling to a stick and waited for tomatoes to appear. In three weeks, all of the seedlings had died but each of the sticks had rooted and was sprouting leaves. For the rest of his time at the university, he longed for tomatoes from England.

Fortunately, here in Vermont, during the late summer, I satisfy my tomato desire with trips to farm stands, markets and friends’ gardens. When Susan and Bob stopped by with tomatoes from their garden, I invited them to stay for dinner. I made fresh tomato sauce for pasta in the time it took for the water in the pasta pot to come to a boil. Here’s how I did it:

… read more