On the Go (Blackberry Hazelnut Spinach Salad, Prosciutto Crisps)

As I write this article, Aaron is packing moving boxes around me; the Gourmet Gents are moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts! I'm excited to move to the city, but I'll miss some things about our old home, especially its square-foot gardens of salsa and salad vegetables and kitchen garden brimming with herbs and berries of all kinds. We love using fresh, local ingredients and the late summer offerings are especially rich, as most fruits, vegetables, and nuts are just coming in season. A blackberry, hazelnut, and spinach salad let me make use of one last harvest from the garden beds and smooth chèvre cheese, salty-sweet prosciutto crisps, and balsamic vinaigrette fortified with blackberry preserves and hazelnut oil help you schmaltz things up.

Schmaltzy

Jumbled Together (Russian Tea Cakes)

Russian Tea Cakes may be my very favorite variety of cookie. Also known as Italian wedding cakes, Mexican wedding cakes, Flexicans, polvorones, butterballs, and snowballs, you may know them best just as those buttery little spheres coated in powdered sugar, studded with finely ground nuts, and flavored with a variety of subtle seasonings. With their snowy white coats and elegant proportions, they make the perfect cookie to serve throughout the winter, arrayed on plates with doilies or tucked into gift bags. They're innocently sweet, utterly inoffensive, and melt on the tongue beautifully. Russian tea cakes, as the name suggests,  are the ideal pairing for strong tea served with lemon or cream and sugar. Less traditionally, but just as deliciously, I encourage the adoption of the "Russian coffee cake" and also offering coffee or cappuccino as accompaniment.

Cake: it's what's for dinner

Setting the Mood (Chocolate Raspberry Trifles)

Now that January is drawing to its close, the last big holiday of the winter approaches: Valentine's Day. I think a singular day of romance is rather silly, as if people need a reminder once a year to be good to their partners. There's also much to be made of the rampant commercialization of the practice and for those who happen to be single, it's simply annoying. It will most definitely always have one saving grace, though, and that's as an excuse for chocolate.

Best excuse, ever.

Friends with Salad (Spring Green Panzanella)

I love spring. If I had my way, I'd simply go into hibernation from November until May. I find the bleak, gray, snowiness simply unbearable. Consequently, I'm always innervated with a jolt of manic elation when the thaw comes, the days lengthen, and birds sing in the garden once again.

Garden fresh

My Modern Family (Plum-Berry Crumble)

Hello, ladies & gents!

Enthused by sheer culinary joie de vivre, and the fact that I had a ticking time bomb in the fruit drawer by way of a crate of blackberries, I bring another recipe tonight: plum-berry crumble. I had intended to save this treat for Wednesday. See: right now, every Wednesday night, my modern family gets together to watch Modern Family. I've already come to look forward to the event.

Sarah and her husband, Seth, keep their family farm around the hill and down a dirt road that slowly clambers up the mountain. At the moment there's a full herd of goats for the milking, a flock of laying hens, and three hives of busy, busy bees. They tap maple trees to render the syrup in the Spring and collect elderberries, blackberries, and raspberries in the Summer. We are very lucky.

We're also very unlucky in that Modern Family airs after our nephews' bedtime.

Weaponized cuteness