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This week’s Berkshire Eagle column featured a mango cake – really a mango banana-cake – that was modeled on a banana bread-type batter, but with mango plus one banana because it was too ripe and I needed to use it! It’s a big hit with our granddaughter, and, of course, she matters most of all!

I know it’s early – and I hope the recent frosts didn’t cause too much damage – but just about every other day I am checking to see if any pick-your-own strawberry farms have opened yet! Last year’s bumper crop inspired the salad I wrote about this past week in the Berkshire Eagle, and I am looking forward to enjoying it again this year, along with other berry good treats!

And again tonight we enjoyed ramps! I love adding them to pasta carbonara – coincidentally, the New York Times Cooking front page recipe today was artichoke carbonara! I wrote about ramp carbonara previously, and you can use the search feature to find other things I’ve made with ramps.

This past week I wanted to highlight this seasonal treat, so for my Berkshire Eagle column, I simplified my scallion pancake recipe to use store-bought pizza dough, with ramps (when in season) in place of scallions.

As much as I love it when Hank grills fish – or anything for that matter – because of both the flavor imparted by the grill and the easy clean-up, there are times cooking inside is the way to go. Thicker cuts of fish do well in the oven, so I modified a favorite sauce into more of a topping for a roasting a piece of swordfish, and this became a recent Berkshire Eagle column. This method will surely garner compliments for your fish!

I made this recipe again today! After making it umpteen times, I realized it would be worth writing up for a Berkshire Eagle column. I love how this template of sorts makes leftovers just a bit more special, and with minimal effort! We have more leftovers in the fridge from a dinner out last night, some red chile braised pork, and I’m already imagining how good it’ll be when I put that in another tortilla for lunch tomorrow!

I’ve spent the entire weekend cooking and freezing food for Passover. But this recipe, though it can’t be made ahead, is super easy, and is everyone’s favorite, so I wrote about it for last week’s Berkshire Eagle column. We make it with regular (i.e., not kosher-for-Passover) noodles other times of year, and it’s such a hit that Wilson has often made it for holiday celebrations with his Camp Eisner friends!

Regardless of the origin of this pseudo-eponymous dish, all through the writing of this column and its appearance in the Berkshire Eagle, every time Hank and I saw the photo, we wanted to get up and make it again right away!

I use wine quite often in cooking, as well as other alcoholic beverages, but this recipe for “Drunken Pasta” takes that practice to the max!

It is quite fitting that this column appeared online on Valentine’s Day – although the print version came out the day after. It gives me so much pleasure to make favorites for my family and friends, so much so that some items have garnered new names such as “Tarte Robert,” “Rachel’s Za’atar Chicken,” or “Gâteau Richard,” or sometimes it’s just “Daniel’s favorite pasta.”

When I was in college, a dining hall favorite was chicken cutlets. Now it was nothing like what I see in college dining halls today – the ingredients and menus have changed – and those cutlets were likely acquired from a food service company, arriving frozen packed tight in boxes. But we loved them, especially because there were so many ways to eat them: on a sandwich, cut up on top of a salad, and more.

The dining halls are far in the past for us, but we make chicken cutlets at home, and most often enjoy them in the beloved Italian-American dish, chicken parm. But once you get set up to make the cutlets, it’s worth making more than one batch to serve several different ways over a few days.

The event that inspired this recipe – a soup and grilled cheese bar for lunch – was so much fun! Everyone loved making their various sandwiches and tasting all the soups! A couple weeks later, a friend was in bed with covid, and I brought her some of the leftover fowl play soup I had frozen, so I guess the moral is always to have homemade soup in the freezer.

This hardly feels like a recipe, but it is an easy topping for pretty much any vegetable. For this past week’s Berkshire Eagle column I made it with zucchini, but I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t benefit from the lemony crunch of this topping!

I do make breadcrumbs from the ends of loaves of bread and keep them in the freezer so I can grab a handful whenever I need, and if you are so inclined this recipe would be a great way to use up such scraps. But it’s also wonderful with store-bought breadcrumbs!

Since school vacation began Friday at 11:15 a.m. (not like I was counting the minutes or anything!), I have been cooking a lot, especially things I don’t usually have the time or the energy to cook. Truth be told, I sometimes do make something a bit more involved or interesting, even, occasionally, on a school night. And then there are the days when I’m trying to fit dinner in between a faculty meeting and an evening Zoom meeting.

On days such as that, an easy go-to is what I wrote about for last week’s Berkshire Eagle column. You can even have all the ingredients as staples. As mentioned below, you can freeze heavy cream, and that would allow you to have this as a last-minute supper on a busy evening.

As I wrote in the column below, and as I have mentioned in previous columns as well, sometimes I figure out what to make based on what items in the larder need to be used. This recipe turned out so wonderfully I wanted to share it, but I didn’t think it was anything close to an actual Thai recipe, even though I used Thai curry paste.

Do you still have turkey leftovers? Are you tired of your 4th or 5th Thanksgiving meal yet? Over the years I have made all sorts of recipes, using leftover turkey in place of the ubiquitous chicken, from cuisines across the globe. They’re not so authentic, as the original recipes usually start with raw, not cooked, chicken, but still I’ve found it’s a great way to add flavor to your leftover repertoire!

The easiest way, however, is to use leftover turkey in a curried turkey salad, as I suggested in my Berkshire Eagle column this past week, which ran the day before Thanksgiving. Honestly, this is a favorite for leftover chicken throughout the year, and it always makes for what I call a “happy lunch day” at work!

Thanksgiving hasn’t even happened yet, and I’m already planning for next year! We’ve been at an event this weekend, and in the course of conversations, I’ve invited some friends to join us for dessert this year, and others to join us next year! We are so blessed, and truly thankful, for the “framily” that enriched our lives.

Meanwhile, I have a shelf of the freezer already piled high with baked goods for this week, to be frosted, iced, or topped for Thursday, and I’ve ordered a variety pack of containers to send everyone home with leftovers.

Sometimes something as simple as a baked potato makes me happy, and I love the smell as it cooks. And other times it’s fun to take something simple and jazz it up a bit.

This past week in the Berkshire Eagle I did just that with twice-baked potatoes. The link is here, or scroll down, but also know that this is one of those recipes you can make your own! If you don’t eat meat, omit the bacon. Add caramelized onions or roasted veggies! You’re only limited by your imagination!