Best Ever Chill-Out Soups of Spring

By Jeanette Carlson - The warm days of Spring are here proclaiming fresh local fruits and vegetables of the season. It’s time to visit those farm stands and farmers’ markets and gather up ingredients for the first course of your next dinner party – cold soup. Beautiful colors, delicate flavors, creamy or silky texture and garnishes that can become the signature of your table, cold soups can make you next meal memorable....

Restaurants and Home Cooks Embrace Egg-centric Dis...

By Chef Judi Gallagher - Eggs are having a renaissance. Sure, they’re used in everything from cake batter to carbonara, and they always will be, but these days you’ll find egg-centric dishes on just about every restaurant menu and in the pages of every food magazine. It’s become almost common to see salads or sliders topped with a quail egg. Take deviled eggs, for example. What used to be the home hostess’s...

Regional Celebrity Chefs Excel at Cookbooks

By Marsha Fottler - One of the best things about travel lately for culinary adventurers is the plethora of wonderful regional cookbooks written by local celebrity chefs. Collecting one in each city that you visit is a sure way to maintain a connection with the cuisine of that area. You cook from the book and recall good times. A regional cookbook is a memory keeper and a practical guide to expanding your repertoire in your...

Gone Fishing

By Chef Judi Gallagher - It’s no secret that we all need to start thinking more about our food—from its source to how much we eat of whatever is on our plate. It’s scary how many foods these days are pumped full of hormones and preservatives and sugar—in fact, Mark Bittman just published a great op-ed in The New York Times about sugar and how toxic it is to our bodies...

Creating a Version of a Restaurant Meal at Home

By Peter Brockway - Mrs. Brockway and I were perusing the menu in a local restaurant when we came upon an offering for Lamb Sliders.  Since we had already ordered something else, we didn’t get a chance to try the on this occasion, but it gave us the idea to try fabricating something of a similar nature on our own. We don’t know how they did it at the restaurant, but we decided to try coming up with our version of lamb...

A Springtime Dessert From Normandy

By Sharon Pritchard - After the longest winter and the latest snow fall in Normandy for many years, it was nice to see our local market in full swing with some sunshine last week. French markets are renowned for the variety of local produce and our small market in Vire is no exception. Markets are an integral part of life in France and local producers of everything edible, from a live rabbit to home-baked bread, can be found...