Hospitality comes naturally to the Lebanese Dutch creative strategist Carmen Atiyah de Baets. While her professional background is in fashion, she has an instinct for organizing generous, family-style gatherings that she honed during trips to Beirut with her Lebanese mother. “Lebanon is a place of contrasts,” says Atiyah de Baets, who was raised in the…
By Ellie Pithers When the French interior designer Camille Vergnes throws a dinner party in Paris, she opts for unfussy white table linens and white plates. This allows her Art Deco-style set of serving spoons, salad servers and carving knives, all with almond green shagreen handles, to take center stage. “I use [the serving set]…
Good morning. There may be no better summer sandwich than a tomato one, on white bread smeared wall-to-wall with mayonnaise and sprinkled lightly with flaky salt and a little cracked black pepper. I thought it unimprovable. But as he so often does when he’s cooking, Eric Kim recently came up with a few tweaks that…
Health officials in Washington State said on Friday that three people had died and two had been hospitalized in the Puget Sound area after contracting food-borne listeria infections in what appeared to be an outbreak. Testing indicated that all five patients, three men and two women, became ill between Feb. 27 and June 30 and…
I know what many of you are going to say when I suggest making baguettes at home: “Why?” I hear you. Really. If you happen to live near a top-notch bread bakery, or if you just don’t enjoy time in the kitchen, it may not be worth the effort. But I know many others —…
The first bite I took was the naan — blistered and lightly brushed with softened ghee. It was airy, doughy, crispy all at once. I dragged a piece through a bowl of saag shrimp, took a bite and was stunned. It hit all the notes I’d always wanted from a vegetable-forward dish, a perfect interplay…
Good morning. Back-to-school advertising has started to show up in my feeds, and it’s depressing. Summers lasted forever when I was a child. Now they hurtle past, express trains bound for shorter days and hard shoes. I don’t need to be reminded of that. I want to grill and grill and grill some more, eat…
The Swiss are proud of their cheese, and most of the cheese they eat are local varieties like Gruyère, Emmental and other hard cheeses from milk from happy cows that are famous all over the world. The Swiss also eat a lot of cheese: more than 50 pounds per person per year, versus about 40…
Ask any millennials born in July about their birthday and they’ll recount a childhood colored by anxieties about the day: no classroom cupcakes, no gift-wrapped locker and an ever-present fear that no one will come to your party because everyone is at sleep-away camp or the beach or their grandma’s house. As Cancer season comes…
BCN Ambre Vermut “Mut” Terra Alta, 18 percent, $39 BCN “Mut,” from Catalonia in northeastern Spain, is made with garnacha blanca, or white grenache, macerated with a wide variety of herbs and spices. Some you can detect in this lovely, slightly sweet yet bitter and savory vermouth: clove, cinnamon, fennel, some sort of citrus. This…