(Image from USA Pear media library) Its FINALLY starting to cool off to a seasonal fall temperature around here, helping me feel a bit more in-season. The tree colors peaked this weekend, yesterday was psychedelic with the riotous oranges, yellows, and reds of the sugar maples around here. Other than pumpkins and gourds and squashes...

(Banana tart with soybean praline base, enrobed with banana chocolate sauce) Nuts, especially peanuts and walnuts, are lethal for my oldest child. They are also delicious, found in many of the desserts that make life worth living, and are almost impossible to simulate. I do not like peanut butter, don’t miss it, but I have always felt...

Because this is my own little nano-bully pulpit, I have to relate something I overheard at the grocery store the other day. I have been trying to come to terms with what was said and how I have been reacting to it, over time. This post is part of that process. Your comments...

(Apple Dumpling with vanilla ice cream and cheddar cheese) Here in central Massachusetts, we have an abundance of apple orchards. When tourists come to this region in the summer, they expect to do a few very specific things – buy antiques, pick apples, visit 18th century New England at Old Sturbridge Village, and enjoy a rural...

I am posting a few stragglers that have come out of my recent experiments to wrap them up. Tomorrow I will be going to the Photoshop World show in Boston so I will be a bit out of the loop. I hope to be able to snag some software that I need to get back to...

Getting beauty from this shoot was harder than I expected. Things I learned or reinforced: I over estimated the translucence of oranges I found radishes to be really opaque but with lovely leaves kiwi have a LOT of potential that I have not tapped yet Alcohol, 409, and copious amounts of paper towels are your friends when dealing with plate...

A couple of days ago, I did the “on black” shoot where some pears saw the light. Those pears were also part of our breakfast yesterday. I found some delightful Bob’s Red Mill buttermilk pancake mix I wanted to try out and it made some amazing pancakes. I sliced one Korean pear and two of the...

The wisdom of natural processes fascinates me endlessly. The Fibonacci numbers that seem to sprinkle their way across cauliflower florets and seashells and flower petals is a constant reminder that the universe has decided on a few rules. Its all a daily symphony of balance, void, entropy, chaos, and re-balance. Each fruit, flower, vegetable, animal, all of that...

I have been meaning to do this shoot for some time but never got around to it until today. My objective was to examine the inner beauty of natural things like fruits and vegetables. In this case, it was a grapefruit, carrots, green beans and radishes. This is just a first “draft,” if you will. Some kinks...

(I wrote the following article for the Paper Palate blog, in the Well Fed Network) I recently had an opportunity to review the cookbook Preserving Memories: Growing Up in My Mother’s Kitchen by Judy Glattstein. As you might imagine from the title, this is a book about the making of jams, jellies, marmalades, and other preserved...