This past weekend was the kind of weekend that makes New England famous. Warm, intense sun, cool breezes, and a sky so blue and clear it doesn't look quite real. The leaves are just beginning to turn and seeing one or two branches blazing with maroon and orange paints a pretty picture. One of my favorite fruit farms is open for picking, offering the last of the summer peaches and ten types of apples, so we pack into the car and drive north.

The fields surrounding the farm have all been hayed

August 31, 2007

The end of August/ beginning of September triggers a deep melancholy in me. It doesn't help that I'm sending one daughter back to college today and another back to high school in less than a week. The way I figure it, I spent 16 years segueing from the freedom of summer vacation to the discipline of back-to-school. And despite the fact that I haven't been a student for close to thirty years, I still anticipate the coming of fall and the back-to-school transition with

Several years ago a very close friend of mine became involved in raising money to build a river pool in the Hudson River in Beacon, New York. The most interesting part of the fund-raising drive was an organized swim across the Hudson - starting on the west bank in Newburgh, New York, and ending in Beacon, about a mile away on the east side of the river. She regaled me with stories of close to a hundred swimmers crossing the great river, tales of the Hudson's improved water quality, and the euphoric

This is the day I've been waiting for all year. It's July, and tonight we will eat a meal picked fresh from our garden.

The salad bowl will be filled with several types of lettuce, baby spinach, arugula, a handful of chopped herbs, and baby scallions weeded out from the onion patch. The larger spinach leaves will be saut`ed with garlic scapes (the part of spring garlic that crowns the top of the plant with exaggerated comma-like curls and bursts with a scalliony-garlic essence). The peas and

June 2007

When people list their favorite things about summer they tend to mention obvious indulgences like going to the beach, swimming in lakes and the ocean, gardening, eating freshly-grown fruit and vegetables, and relishing all those long, lazy days. But for me there is a more obscure joy, one I look forward to all year.

How do you define "art?" I often hear chefs, restaurateurs, and caterers referred to as "artists." Mostly I find this pretentious, but I also wonder if it's true. Do you have to be a painter, a dancer, or a sculptor to be called an "artist?" There's an art to creating really good food, but are chefs "artists?"

Have you ever met someone new and been so taken with them that you wondered how you lived your whole life up to that point without them? I know it sounds dramatic, but that's how I feel about ramps. I'd never encountered them (or more importantly tasted them) until a few years ago. It was as if my palette had never known such a pure, vivid, lively flavor. It's a flavor I now call the essence of spring.

Ramps have no subtlety. They don't whisper.

It's pouring rain. Is this the fourth or fifth day without sun, or maybe it's the sixth? In all honesty, I've stopped counting. But rain, I remind myself, means things will grow. The grass has turned an undeniable bright green, losing its pallid winter gray. The tiny, baby-size buds on the lilac bushes are beginning to pop and are a lovely pale green. The forsythia is here, its brilliant yellow flowers blazing like a proud banner that screams "You made it!" Spring is here. Don't lose hope." I want