A Whimsical Chocolate Shop for the North Fork

Ursula Sala-Illa, who prefers to be known as Ursula XVII, has just opened her own chocolate shop, Atelier Disset, on the North Fork of Long Island. The pastry chef’s complicated nomenclature has to do with her Catalonian roots. In the Catalan language “disset” means 17 (pronounce it and if you know French, you’ll also understand).…

Flour Sack Towels With Flowery Appeal

The soft cotton that once went into making flour sacks is what the photographer Pauline Stevens has selected for her vibrant collection of kitchen towels decorated with her food-focused photographs. Each is also printed with a literary quotation or a recipe for a dish, a drink or a sauce, most well-suited for Mother’s Day giving.…

Vegetables Get the Ripert Treatment

Eric Ripert’s new collection of vegetable recipes is maybe one of the least seemingly chef-driven cookbooks. And it holds true to its title, “Vegetable Simple.” What a delightful approach, especially with summer on the horizon. Some recipes require as few as two ingredients (tomatoes or cucumbers with salt), and most have a short list, with…

New Week! New Recipes!

Good morning. It’s a new week filled with new recipes and the joy of discovering older ones, and if I generally meet Mondays with a kind of empty sorrow — the weekend gone and still no newsroom into which to travel, another day at home at the same desk in the same empty room —…