Hey there, folks. It’s been a minute, and I thought I’d tell you why. (Don’t worry: It’s good news!)

I’m excited to let you know that I’ve been writing a book called “Your Plate & the Planet,” which is a practical guide to cooking and eating sus…

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In my last post I mentioned that the recipe for rhubarb-almond cake yielded a beautiful byproduct: rhubarb syrup. I’ve been putting mine to good use, particularly in a pair of vibrant seasonal cocktails and a refreshing non-alcoholic spritz.

If you don’t want to whip up the actual cake, you can still make the syrup as follows:

Rh…

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I don’t know about you, but I didn’t mind sweltering for a couple of days this week when temps briefly hit the 90s. Frankly, it took me that long just to thaw out from the very chilly Spring weather we’ve been experiencing. And while I’m now back in a wool sweater and the forecast is for a cool, damp Memorial Day weekend, I’ve decided to embrace the mom…

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I usually don’t fall for viral food trends, but when Instagram started feeding me video after video of people making a most-intriguing “no-water chicken soup,” I stopped scrolling and started paying attention.

I learned that the simple, satisfying dish orig…

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Welcome, and happy May! It’s always a celebration when my friend Adeena Sussman is back in the States from her adopted home of Tel Aviv—but when she’s here for the launch of a new cookbook, it feels like a national holiday.

There was such a palpable buzz of excitement the other night when she took the stage at the Streicker Cultural Center at Temple Ema…

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I was laid low last week after an old back injury flared up out of nowhere. For a few days the only comfortable position was horizontal, so I had no choice but to lie around under the influence of muscle relaxants, anti-inflammatories, and Epsom salts.

After a few days of self-imposed hibernation, napping, and Netflix, I was delighted when Dale turned u…

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When I began dreaming up today’s recipe, nighttime temps were still in the 30s and a sudden hail storm had just left a crunchy white blanket of icy orbs glistening on the ground. Soup seemed like a swell idea—especially one that involved the o…

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If Claudia Roden’s Orange and Almond Cake and Niloufer Ichaporia King’s Cardamom Cake had a baby—who inherited none of its parents’ cardamom or orange genes, but instead shined bright with lemon—it would look like this zingy, fragrant flourless dessert.

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So how is this baby related to its progenitors? Well, I borrowed Roden’s technique of boili…

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I ran around NYC last week having all kinds of fun: Finally saw Oh, Mary!—such a hoot!—and celebrated a dear friend’s birthday with not one but three culinary adventures (to be revisited in another newsletter). What I did…

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Beets, like the month of March, can lean winter or spring. Simmered in hot, vinegar-spiked borscht with shredded cabbage and tender chunks of beef they become the ultimate snow-storm fare. Blended smooth with sour cream and served chilled as cold borscht, they’re as refreshing as it gets on a steamy day.

Beet salads bridge the gap. Tossed with bracing w…

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I’m launching something new this week: a semi-regular roundup of items that recently struck my fancy. From elevated pantry staples to sustainable solutions; from out-of-the-way eateries to unusual culinary experie…

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This vibrant, cohesive little meal is so good I’m putting some form of it into weekly rotation. It looks like there are lots of elements, but it’s truly fast and easy—simple enough to make for yourself on a weeknight, but elevated and delicious enough for a special dinner. And it doesn’t get more nutritious than this.

It’s also adaptable. This time I us…

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Tuesday ushers in the year of the Horse—and not just any horse, but the bold, rowdy, once-in-60-years Fire Horse. So after shedding whatever no longer served us during the year of the snake, we’re on the precipice of a period of rapid transformation, intense energy, and, hopefully, groundbreaking progress.

Gotta love a zodiac sign so powerful that the bi…

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It was three below when I (quickly) took the dog out this morning, and the weather app tells me it’s 2° now. I’ve found myself capturing screenshots of my early-morning temperature readings, perhaps imagining that I won’t believe this later—that I may need to remind myself, in an …

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I’ve been watching the news out of Minneapolis with the same sense of anguish, anger, and incredulity that you may be feeling. I also watched with interest and empathy this week as so many folks in my community shared their struggles trying to balance political, professional, and personal responsibilities.

Small-businesses, including lots of local resta…

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This soup is so simple, I didn’t think it was going to be a hit with anyone but me. But when I made it for the family as a “hundred-year” hurricane approached, everyone was mad for it. (Read “Hurricane’s Make Me Hungry” here.)

The soup gets so much flavor from the Parmesan rind, I really encourage you to use one. Never throw them out—just stow them in th…

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Sandy unleashes her fury.

That’s what I heard on TV, in a teaser for the 11 o’clock news, as Mark and I watched the Detroit Tigers play the San Francisco Giants in Game Three of the World Series on October 27, 2012.

My mother’s name was Sandy. And hurricanes were always a big thing for our family, since we had that vulnerable little stucco cottage on an ever-eroding spit of seashore.

One of my clearest early-childhood memories is of waking up at the beach one morning and coming downstairs to witness my father on the other side of the window wearing a pair of faded blue swim trunks, hammering planks over the glass as the wind whipped around him.

I always had a bit of extreme-weather anxiety, which got worse for a time when Rex was a baby. By my mid 40s, though, that had subsided, and I tended to hope for a storm that would be dramatic enough to keep the kids home from school—board games, anyone?—and uneventful enough to cause at most minimal damage.

There must be a primitive instinct in times of stress or danger to add an extra layer of fat for protection against a potentially less abundant future. It had to be primitive instinct that compelled me, as the storm gained strength over the Atlantic, to lay in a food supply for the four of us that included three pounds of stew meat and a veritable ton of sauerkraut, smoked pork chops, and sausages for choucroute garnie. That night, not yet in full-blown bunker mode, we’d had big bowls of Italian chickpea soup with cabbage, which I served with hearty chunks of toasted bread.

But back to Sandy.

“Do you think she’s still that pissed?” I texted my sister while watching the weather report between innings.

“No shit!” Karen wrote back.

After our mother died two years earlier, my sister and I had done our best, selling Mom’s apartment through a respected friend of the family and her Connecticut cottage to the next-door neighbor who clearly had the most love for the place and its charming-if-eroding waterfront surroundings. Still, we wondered and worried about whether she would have approved.

Mom had not been ready to go. She was mad. When Hurricane Irene struck after she died, soon after we’d sold the beach house, it sent a tall tree crashing down onto the house’s roof. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Now as “Perfect-Storm Sandy,” as the meteorologists were calling it, approached the coast from both east and west, and the full moon threatened to swell tides to their highest point in history, I wanted to imagine that our Sandy was looking down thinking, “Good job, girls.” But honestly, given our mother’s—shall-we-say—opinionated tendencies, there was no way to be sure.

What I did know was that if she’d still been around, she would have wanted nothing more than to hunker down in her house, fierce and fearless as always, taunting Karen and me for not being there with her while slurping glasses of prosecco and a bowl of something fortifying, like my Italian chickpea soup.

On that late October night in 2012, watching baseball with Mark while the kids slept upstairs and Hurricane Sandy set a path for Atlantic City, I still liked to think that nothing really bad could happen, as long as I’d laid in a supply of the good stuff.

Get the recipe here.

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Start at the beginning with the Life, Death & Dinner Prologue.

You know that scene in Season 2 of the Bear where Sydney makes an omelet for stressed-out, pregnant Sugar? I know I’m not the only one who, the next time I hit the market, grabbed a box of Boursin, a bag of Ruffles, and a bunch of chives so I could make …

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Tomato soup is the coziest soup.

Now before you scroll down to the comments to register your dissent, hear me out: Every soup has its own relevancy. Chicken soup is deeply curative and nostalgic. Add matzo balls and it feels ancestral; even ceremonial. Beef-barley is soul-satisfyingly hearty. Ramen is gr…

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