To market, to market!
Shopping at the farmers' market isn't like shopping anywhere else. You have a sense of what will be there, but you can't be sure that what you want will still be available. Or you might make an impulse purchase. You…
Shelf Life With Susie
The Mohinga Quiz
This morning, my son asked me an interesting question. "When you think of Vietnamese food, what do you think of?" We both like Vietnamese food, so it seemed like it would be easy to reel off a list. "Pho." "Bun."…
Kids in the Kitchen!
Every once in a while I like to catch up with what's going on with kids' cookbooks. I've looked at cookbooks for little kids (both story-based and picture-based) and cookbooks meant for teens. And, of course, family…
Summer make-ahead food
So I've discovered a new favorite summer breakfast! I found it in The Family Cooks, which is the latest adorably packaged, make-your-family-eat-better idea book. It's "Fresh, Fruity Summer Porridge" - basically a kind…
Impulse buys!
Just the other day I was reminiscing with friends about what it felt like to shop for The Perfect Thing - that feeling of exhilaration and delight! the thrill of the hunt! It was reminiscing because as I've gotten…
Wanderers
Eat. Travel. Write a cookbook. It's not a common formula in these tight-belted days, but every once in a while some intrepid spirit pulls it off. Some come by it through mixed heritage, like Tessa Kiros of Falling…
Fancy franks
"Eat your Coney Island," says Ryan O'Neal to then-10-year-old Tatum O'Neal in the bittersweet 1973 comedy Paper Moon, itself set during the Great Depression. Coney Island? I thought. What's he talking about? That's a…
One True Recipe . . . or a Rainbow Mosaic?
Sometimes people ask me, "What's your favorite food?" which is ridiculously hard to answer, of course, as any EYB member knows. If we didn't love all kinds of food, we wouldn't have all kinds of cookbooks, and if we…
Food writers and their books
This week, Ruth Reichl's Delicious! arrived in the mail - her first novel, though far from her first book. I've been getting press releases for at least six months, so it wasn't a surprise. But with the Beard book…
Cookbooks as teachers
Do you remember what it was like when you first learned to cook? And you had to learn everything for the first time, whether it was jointing a chicken or roasting a pepper? Now, you probably aren't even aware of just…
Spring resolutions...and the books to go with them
I finally got into the garden this weekend - anybody else? It wasn't much of a start, but I put in arugula and spinach, favas and peas. It's the start of the growing season, when there's nary a weed or a pest (except…
Let's Talk Lunch
As I write this, I'm thinking about lunch, one of the three highlights of my day. Dinner is recipe testing, breakfast is usually the same thing every day, but lunch is.....a mystery. Sometimes (often) it's leftovers…