Sweet, Savory, and Simple Some of my fondest memories come from simple moments: strolling along the Brooklyn waterfront as an unexpected fireworks show burst overhead; lingering over drinks in the window seat of a local café on a snowy afternoon; lolling in my beach chair in a shallow stretch along the shore as the…

A Savory Italian Favorite Like many alienated high school girls, I fancied myself a poet. Most of my work trafficked in despair. In my eagerness to explore my inner emo I cultivated disdain for any societal norms. That included the paths my parents took, especially my mom, who was a homemaker. …

Big Soup, Big Taste One of my friends lives alone, yet her fridge is stuffed to the gills. I have learned that this is not an indicator of how frequently she cooks. It is full because she doesn’t eat or cook with leftovers or plan her meals around ingredients she already has. Your fridge…

A Flavorful Combination for a Versatile Side Dish When I was growing up my family didn’t eat out much. There was no Grubhub, DoorDash, or Uber Eats. Food Network didn’t exist — and any reference to #FoodTok would have been a typo. You would have found very little diversity in my mostly white middle-class suburban New Jersey hometown…

Get Them While They’re Hot Plantains are a fruit that cooks like a veggie. They resemble bananas but aren’t like them, really, and they taste sort of like potatoes until they ripen, when they taste more like sweet potatoes. Depending on their ripeness, they come in green, yellow, or spotty/mostly brown. Come on, plantains. …

I am lucky enough to have friends with second/vacation homes, and am always delighted when they invite me to visit. It’s great to lounge in the sun by the water or hike the trails, hang out on the deck, check out the charming local shops, and count the stars at…

I had the simple combination of beans with rice for the first time at this funky little restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan called La Caridad 78. It sold Chinese-Cuban food, so the menu was split in half, with each part focused on one cuisine or the other. …

Peanut butter is something you spread on bread or bake into cookies or maybe brownies; you don’t cook with it. At least that’s what I used to think. But then I watched the Food & Wine Cooks video of Chef Pierre Thiam making Poulet Mafé (chicken in a peanut sauce)…

Simmered with Onions in a Sweet/Savory Sauce My friend is the child of Japanese immigrants, thus she grew up eating a lot of traditional Japanese cuisine. From time to time, she’ll talk about some of the meals her mother made, and I want to eat almost all of them. Take, for example, her sukiyaki. Her mom had…