Asian pear cobbler. My recipe said to mix the pear with brown sugar, which is fair enough, and then to throw a huge amount of rolled oats, flour, butter, and sugar over the layer of fruit. My question is whether the best philosophy of cobbler is to make a caramelized cereal with bits of fruit…

Grilled eggplant. I pulled the recipe from my old-school James Beard cookbook, which says it’s a classic American favorite. Whether or not that’s true, the preparation is nearly effortless. Simply cut the eggplant in half and wrap it in foil along with any other vegetables you’d like: I used tomatoes, garlic, and jalapeños. It will…

There was a fog over the Blue Ridge and as it sometimes happens, the hilltops vanished and we couldn’t see most of the forest. It had been raining all weekend and a few days before that it had been relentlessly humid, which to me (but what do I know) does not seem like ideal conditions…

We drove to Charlottesville for a weekend away with friends and went to St Maarten Cafe, where Viet used to go as an undergraduate. They had a menu of tropical martinis featuring a lot of mint and food coloring. Viet remembered a much darker room, which is true for a lot of my recollections of…

The Joy of Cooking recipe for Italian meatballs calls for a lot of parmesan cheese; half a cup for a pound of meat, to be exact, and an equivalent amount of parsley, so the meatball itself tastes like biting into a plate of spaghetti. The meatballs also contain tomato paste, garlic, onions, bread crumbs, an…

I made a plate of pa amb tomaquet, the Catalan tomato bread that’s like a more subtle variation on bruschetta, or a more flavorful version of smørebrød. Lightly toast slices of bread for about ten minutes, then rub in the juices of half a tomato, which will give the bread a sour taste. Add olive…

I got back home and found out the brandywine tomatoes in my garden were no longer ripening, with a few green ones still left on the vine. I was exhausted, both from work and from the inability to sleep after watching the debate the night before, but I still had tomatoes from a farmers market,…

We organized a reception for a work event that featured a sheet cake with our logo piped into it, and there was also a spread of sausages with olives and summer vegetables. After work, we went to a big neighborhood sports bar where they played Radiohead from the speakers, and I ordered a pork bánh…