Eating

I don't know about you, but I'm eating a lot of great apples these days. Usually I just pick one up and take a bite. But sometimes I want it to be more like a meal, a real dish. Yesterday, a maple syrup-baked apple with bacon did the trick. Great for breakfast, brunch or lunch.

You can learn to do this at any age, whether or not you have an Italian grandmother. Make a week's worth of this stuff and eat better for a week. Then do it again next week.

I'm baking a cheddar-stuffed apple. Like me, you probably think of baked apples as sweet things, maybe with cream poured all over it. But try this for lunch or brunch or breakfast some day. Spread it on a slice of whole wheat toast. Yum.

Until I had my first truly farm-fresh, just-dug potatoes last fall, I didn't realize how flavorful and creamy a potato could be. I mean straight. No cream, no milk, no butter, no mayonnaise. Just the potato. Until I made my own potato salad with them, I never had the perfect potato salad. This is it.

Better Cheaper: pay a little more per egg, eliminate the hospitalization costs. Here's a great dish I made with remarkably flavorful organic spinach from my CSA farm share and beautiful eggs from the Farmers Market.

My grater's a great thing - not just for cheese anymore. Here's a $5, 15-minute dinner for two that's beautiful, fresh, deeply flavorful and satisfying. That's 15 minutes to prepare it. You eat it very slowly. With deep appreciation.

Yesterday's CSA Farm Share included the first carrots of the season. Not to mention apples, pears and plums. So it must be time to make tsimmes, a root vegetable and fruit stew that's a traditional dish during the Jewish New Year.