I love edible flowers. They bring such color and whimsy to the table. I love them sprinkled on a good salad, and this year I even used honeysuckle to make a cordial. I usually plant a few marigolds for tossing with salads, and stick a few nasturtium seeds in the edge of the garden. This [...]

It is such a little bit of magic when something truly easy is also masterfully elegant.  And that is the case with this simple pasta dish.  So few ingredients, only a little fiddling around and you end up with bubbling deliciousness.  Maybe because the ingredients are just a little out of the norm or because [...]

I have stumbled across this recipe in many community cookbooks over the years, and after seeing it so many times, I just had to try it to see if it’s for real.  It’s so easy, I had a suspicion it was too good to be true.  But, lo and behold, it works. I have seen [...]

Pound cake was one of my first baking exercises.  For many years I had a basic cream cheese pound cake recipe that I made often, sometimes with added flavors.  For most of this time, I honestly did not know that the name pound cake comes from the original ingredients – a pound of each. As [...]

One lazy evening, on a desperate-for-dinner freezer scrounge, I came across a half used log of frozen herbed butter – a beurre composée if you will.  I like to make these with the summer glut of herbs and roll them into waxed paper wrapped logs.  This butter has myriad uses, but I mostly use it [...]

In restaurants throughout New Orleans, you’ll find Barbecue Shrimp on the menu; some restaurants are famous for their version.  It is not barbecue in the sense of the thick, red, sticky sauce you normally think of, and certainly not barbecue like we revere here in Memphis.  No, it’s a buttery, peppery batch of slap-your-mama goodness, [...]