The Yellow House

Wild berries are pretty incredible. Most berries are resource-intensive to farm commercially, so we’re used to an expensive product from the supermarket that’s only kind of okay, taste-wise. Then, all of a sudden, nature says, “Here they are: they’re free, they taste more interesting, you didn’t have to work for them, and they are available in great quantity, for one week only. Go!” It’s a little overwhelming and makes you want to drop everything and eat some berries. This may be why yesterday evening, I found Ben in the backyard ostensibly working (he had a wheelbarrow with him, after all), when he was actually taking handfuls of wineberries to the face.

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It’s that time of year again: bleak January, where I end up with my hands on some citrus and start feeling poetic about its life-giving brightness amidst the snow and the stupid ice that makes me slip and nearly fall on the way to the car every morning. (Truly, this happens every year (the citrus thing, not the slipping and almost falling): 2011. 2012. 2013. 2014.).

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I am bad at breakfast. While it may be easy to assume that I, of the let’s-cook-dinner-every-single-night! ilk, eat a decent breakfast every morning, that would be incorrect. (Especially if by “incorrect”, you mean “resoundingly, totally not true”.) There are a lot of factors that culminate in me messing up breakfast, but the main one is this: I take a train into the city at an hour that makes most people cringe, and I’m just not that hungry when it is kind of-sort of STILL NIGHTTIME.

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When I was growing up, my mother ordered big boxes of citrus from Florida as Christmas presents to family members. This strikes me as a really ’80s or early ’90s food thing to do, sort of in the same category as raspberry vinaigrette or a big tri-color pasta salad. In any case, now that she’s no longer with us, my stepfather dutifully carries on the tradition. He sent me a big box of honeybells in January. I love citrus in winter, but we couldn’t keep up with 25 pounds of it. So I made marmalade.

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How quickly are you going to tune out knowing that this post is about how to fry an egg? There is more than one way to skin a cat, the saying goes, but I don’t think there are infinite ways to do it. Which is why I’m suspicious whenever some celebrity chef takes one of the simplest types of cooking and “reveals” it as a special technique (I always think of this Rachel Ray recipe—be sure to delve into the comments). So when I was listening to The Splendid Table a few weeks ago and heard New Orleans chef John Besh gush over how he thinks every cook should know how to make this particular creamy, perfect sunny-side up egg, I rolled my eyes and almost turned it off. » Click to read more