This bread is one of my favorite things to serve as an appetizer with some wine, cheese and olives.  It's a pull-apart bread that is scented with cinnamon and cardamom and is slightly sweet, made with a little milk and sugar. It's really delicious.  I got the recipe several years ago out of one of my favorite all time books, "Love by the Glass" by Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher, the long time wine writers for the Wall Street Journal.  Their column, which ran for twelve years, was called "Tastings" and Brian and I religiously read it.  In addition to writing about wine, John and Dottie always snuck in little bits about their own life and children and if you were a long time reader, you got to feel like you knew them a little.  After I read their book, which is really a memoir of their life together, their love of wine and some favorite recipes, I really felt like I knew them.  I've read "Love by the Glass" three times over the last few years and it's more charming and funny every time I read it.  So we were stunned this past week when we read, at the bottom of their column, these words:

"This is our 579th—and last—"Tastings" column. The past 12 years—a full case!—have been a joy, not because of the wine but because we had an opportunity to meet so many of you, both in person and virtually. Thank you."

Huh?  We couldn't believe it.  No explanation, nothing.  I haven't been able to find any information on what happened or what they are going to do now.  Their Facebook page is just full of people expressing good wishes to them, but no word from them.  Hopefully, they will resurface on the web somewhere with their excellent writing.  Until then, I think I'll curl up with their book again and reread some of their fun stories.  This bread was their most requested recipe.

Baby, it's cold outside - the high for today is supposed to be 16 degrees! Here is a hearty soup to get you through the winter. This soup, along with a green salad and some nice bread, is a great dinner for a chilly night.  This soup is loaded with sausage, beans and ditalini pasta.  It's really a pretty traditional "Pasta e Fagioli" soup, but with sausage. I've made the soup with turkey sausage, but you can use any sausage you like.  

Merry Christmas!  I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. As I've written before, every year we give a little Christmas Eve party and I give out some kind of homemade goodie at the end of the evening.  This year I wanted to do the fun DIY thing of making your own vanilla extract.  I go through so much vanilla extract and the good stuff is so expensive.  I love the idea of making your own from good vanilla beans and then just adding vodka to it to keep it going - after all, that's all vanilla extract is, really - alcohol and vanilla beans.   All you do is pour unflavored vodka into a glass jar, cut a couple of vanilla beans in half and then split them and stick them into the bottle.  You need to let this steep for a couple of months until it is ready to use.  I started all these bottles in October, to give out at Christmas. So everyone got a bottle of vanilla extract and a little bag of caramels topped with Sicilian Sea Salt, which I made.

Well, the holidays are fast approaching - do you have your menus figured out yet? I have two boys coming home from college in the next week, both of whom have birthdays, and we give a big Christmas Eve party every year. It's a lot of food planning.  I've had cookbook reviews to do, I've been writing Christmas cards, baking a lot and buying and wrapping gifts.  But I did manage to finish this purple scarf I've been knitting for quite some time.  It's made out of Malabrigo (indigo 88) and it's super soft and very fun to wear.   Just had to show that in case we have any knitters out there.

In the beginning of the new cookbook, Seafood alla Siciliana, author Toni Lydecker quotes Goethe:  "To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything".   And you'll certainly feel this way after reading this beautiful book.  When the publisher contacted me and sent me a copy, I couldn't wait to read it - after all, this is where my mother was from.  This is not just a collection of recipes but an in depth look at Sicily itself - its history, its food, its wine, its culture.  

Do you ever look at chestnuts at this time of year and wonder what to do with them besides add them to stuffing?  When I was a kid we used to simply roast them over the fire and they were fun to eat.  A couple of years ago, Brian and I were at a dinner party and the hostess served a first course of this soup.  No one could guess what it was and it was absolutely delicious.  This soup is not a beautiful soup to look at, but I guarantee you will be amazed at how delicious it is. It would be a great first course at your Thanksgiving dinner. I topped the soup with croutons that I made using the method out of Thomas Keller's new book, Ad Hoc at Home. These are the croutons they make at the restaurant and they are intense - garlicky, oily, and crunchy, a perfect topping for the soup.

I love this cake because you can have it after dinner as a dessert or you can have it in the morning with coffee and it's great either way.  The traditional way to make this cake is very simple which is just mixing up the batter and pouring it into your pan.  But thanks to Andrew Carmellini of Locanda Verde in New York City, I use a different method.  He's a master at taking classic dishes and giving them a new twist and that is what he did with this cake.  In his terrific book, Urban Italian, he makes the usual batter but then he whips up a meringue and folds that into the batter. It makes for a wonderfully light cake.  He also adds lemon zest and juice to the cake, making it even more special.   He likes to slice this cake and makes an ice cream sandwich out of it, with chocolate ice cream!  Now there's an idea.  

I've been asked by Mel to guest post over at Bouchon for Two while she is traveling around Europe, so hop on over there for the entire post and recipe for this delicious and simple traditional Tuscan soup.   

Pappa di Pomodoro was originally a way to use up stale bread – in the Tuscan kitchen, nothing goes to waste.  When I was growing up, it was also a way to use slightly overripe tomatoes – the ones you’re thinking maybe wouldn’t be so great to slice into a sandwich.  So this Is a very practical dish.  “Pappa” means mush, but don’t let that fool you – it’s delicious.  Now you can find this “peasant” dish in upscale restaurants in Florence.  People love this kind of comfort food. 

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

Being part of a group like The Daring Bakers certainly makes you stretch. The monthly challenges make you bake things you never would have otherwise.  That's certainly true of this month's challenge.  Although French macarons are wildly popular right now and are so pretty, I probably never would have put them on my "to do" list.  Beside, they are famous for being difficult to master and unpredictable.  And they sure did not disappoint.   

Macarons are little almond cookies that are made with egg whites and have a filling that you sandwich between two of the cookies.  If you want to see what the perfect macaron looks like, the famous Beverly Hills bake shop, Paulette's Macarons, is the place to go.  They make perfect macarons in a rainbow of colors, incredible flavors and snazzy packaging.  And they ship.  

What a beautiful fall weekend it's been.  My oldest son came home from college to watch Northwestern play Michigan State here. Of course, I've been cooking all of his favorites - ribs, stuffed potatoes, chocolate molten cakes with meringue - and got the fun last minute job this morning of cooking breakfast for him and four of his buddies.  I miss all those boys.  It's a little sad having two of my three boys away at school. . .  

I usually make this delicious cake/bread in a couple of 9x5 loaf pans.  It's a great breakfast/brunch bread. But I was supposed to bring dessert to an evening get together with some of my friends and I had some great blueberries from a local farm and way too many lemons in my fridge, so I immediately thought of this cake.  When you make it in the loaf pans, the slices are very pretty, really showing off the blueberries.  But I wanted to try something different, so I made it in my little individual bundt cakes pan.  They came out cute, but I think I still like it best just in the loaf pans.

Can you stand another tomato recipe?  I've been cooking a lot with tomatoes lately, but hey - everyone's got an excess of tomatoes right now.  Some friends dropped off some of their tomato excess the other night to us (thanks, Brian and Diane!) and that was fine with me.  What was I going to do with that many tomatoes?  I was going to make my own tomato paste.  

This is my new favorite dish.  It has to be, because I've made it every single week since I saw the recipe.

It's a luscious dish of pasta topped with tomatoes which are roasted with bread crumbs and stuffed with slivers of garlic.  Fresh herbs and crispy bits of pancetta top it off.  The flavors are perfect together.  To eat the dish, you just crush your tomato on top of your pasta and it makes this incredible sauce.  

Last year at this time, when plums were in season, I posted a recipe for Chez Panisse's Plum Tart that people still e-mail me about. This year, for plum season, I wanted to share a recipe for an incredibly easy dessert that you can enjoy the next morning with your coffee. It's like a plum cake that takes only a few minutes to assemble and then bake. Since it only uses egg whites, I save my egg yolks and the next day I either make fresh pasta with them or some kind of delicious chocolate dessert that requires egg yolks.

Homemade tomato soup is good, but roasted tomato soup is even better. With the abundance of tomatoes right now in the markets, this makes great use of all those tomatoes and may be the best tomato soup you will ever have.

This method calls for roasting the tomatoes, along with some whole garlic, before making the soup. Roasting the tomatoes concentrates their flavor and adds a depth to the soup that you would not have otherwise.

I used beautiful San Marzano tomatoes for this soup because a vendor at my farmer's market had them. Use whatever nice, ripe tomatoes you have. Any Roma or plum tomato is a good choice.