Years ago when I worked in Cambridge, I became friends with a woman from a big Italian-American family. She grew up on “the Coast”, as the area outside of Central Square in Cambridge was known in those days; her husband was born in Italy and came to the U.S. as a kid, where his family put down roots in East Boston. Fran and Emilio are great friends and fantastic cooks. (more…)

Everywhere we look, there are recipes. Do you ever feel just overwhelmed by all the choices? How are we supposed to decide which are good recipes? How should we read them? How do we evaluate them?

Experience is, of course, the best tool you have for perusing recipes, but here are some of Lori’s tips.

• Pictures of the dish or techniques used in creating the recipe are helpful.
• Read the entire recipe first – you may not have ingredients or equipment on hand to prepare it. Do you have enough time to prepare the recipe? The recipe requires a marinating time of 12 hours, for example, and you need to serve dinner tonight.
• See how the recipe is written. Are the directions clear?
• Are all the ingredients listed with the appropriate measurements?
• Do the instructions account for all the ingredients?
• Do the cooking times and temperatures seem appropriate?

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Unless you’ve been meditating in an alpine monastery or pouting under a rock, you are probably aware that there’s a little election coming up in two days that everyone’s been buzzing about. Hey, laugh about it, shout about it, you’re gonna have to choose.

People don’t usually associate food with elections, but it’s part of the whole political tradition in this country. In the days before restaurants were common, American candidates used to be fed by their constituents so they could get through the all the stumping. Nowadays, candidates eat to cultivate votes. I have some cute donkey and elephant cookie cutters and will usually whip up a batch of sugar cookies to eat while watching the returns (an equal number of each animal, if I’m feeling particularly bipartisan).

Then there’s Old Hartford Election Cake. This recipe pre-dates the American Revolution; its origins can be traced to the Connecticut elections of 1771. Because colonial housewives didn’t have chemical leavenings like baking powder, this a yeast risen cake similar to an Austrian Kugelhopf. It must have nutmeg (Connecticut is, after all, the Nutmeg State), preferably freshly grated, and a sugar glaze. It’s terrific with coffee or apple cider, which is probably what the colonists were drinking, if they weren’t drinking rum (and there’s a little of that in the recipe, too). (more…)