Dinner with Kirsten

I’m always looking for a new way to jazz up a mostly-store-bought pasta meal. While shopping the Upper West Side gourmet markets this weekend (Fairway and Zabar’s), I picked up fresh spinach ravioli and a killer Lidia Bastianich brand marinara sauce. But is it really a meal without meat? On impulse, I bought some ground […]

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Working as a culinary intern at the Hotel Villa Real (in Madrid, Spain), one of my many tedious tasks was to clean mushrooms—boxes and boxes of beautiful exotic-looking mushrooms. I didn’t know what kind they were and I can’t tell you now. (My Spanish language skills are mediocre on a good day.) Four years […]

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I discovered, through the course of random conversation, that Geoff had never had a homemade cinnamon roll. This boggled my mind! When I was young, my Grandma Lois would alternate between making cinnamon rolls and kolaches almost every weekend.
Grandma Lois was not a recipe filer by nature. She owned hundreds of cookbooks full of dog-eared […]

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