Archive | cooking notes

Spirit as a Party Planner

I have a beautiful story of miracles that I’ve been wanting to share for months. And it’s the subject of this months,  A Note From the Chef; notes I’ve been writing since 1995  though I haven’t written one since October 2014. But hey, writing these days is taking me in other directions. But when inspiration […]

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The Real Reason We Need to Eat

For some of us, being in the kitchen preparing a meal is a joyful and creative act; a meditative practice even. For others just the thought of shopping, cooking and then being left with a messy kitchen, is nothing short of a nightmare. I get it. Being a chef doesn’t exclude me from the demands […]

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Has Fear Infiltrated Our Food?

A Note from the Chef   Have you noticed that lately, when it comes to food, we’ve become more and more fragmented? There’s a diet for almost every lifestyle – and that could be a good thing if by “diet” we’re simply referring to the way we eat  –  and we tend to wear our […]

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3 Steps to a Fuss-Free Feast

A Note from the Chef As the end of April draws near and Spring has finally sprung here in the Northeast – both in fact and in feeling – we open up to a season of celebration. We come out of winter’s hibernation and prepare for a rebirth of aliveness sprouting all around us. This […]

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Don’t Send Me Flowers

As much as I love receiving flowers, mushy cards and going out to dinner, it’s far more meaningful to me when those things are unexpected. Surprise me and you’ll always tug at my heart. There’s lots of ways to say “I love you” but few say it better than a home cooked meal. It doesn’t […]

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Out on a Limb

A Note from the Chef I know that everyone has had the experience of being out on a limb…way outside their comfort zone. As a chef, my day to day skills are very low tech. In fact when it comes to cooking, the more low tech, the better…at least in most cases. Pasta tastes better […]

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The Secret Ingredient

A Note From the Chef As a chef I work with ingredients all the time. Sometimes a combination is simply genius, and others…not so much. But there’s one essential ingredient that goes into everything I make. It has no taste, smell, or weight. And no, it’s not LOVE (technically) though love is a part of […]

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A Time of the Season

A Note from the Chef I wrote this post several years ago for another season, but I think it bares repeating – especially now, when for much of the world, the harvest is in and we enter a time of celebration, of giving thanks for our bounty (big or small) and of deep refection as […]

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If I Lived 100 Years Ago…

  A Note from the Chef There’s a quote by Anatole France, the prolific French writer of the 19th and 20th century that I haven’t been able to find since I first quoted him in the mid 1980’s. I was working in fashion then and in this quote, France referred to fashion in surprisingly profound […]

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