Homemade Peanut Butter Cups are Wickedly Good

By Katie Barreira

As a child, it was difficult to imagine anything more awesome than holding up adults for candy while in disguise. But I was lucky enough to have a pair of fairy god neighbors who sweetened the Halloween jackpot. More hair raising than the Pinsky’s haunted garage, more engrossing than Mrs. Feldman’s eyeball punch, the enchanted Victorian at 14 Ferncroft Road promised a special and, to my parents dismay, sizeable confection meant just for me.

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A Spa Day for Your Wok

By Katie Barreira

This week in the test kitchen, we were working on recipes that required a wok. Even in professional kitchens, less frequented equipment have a way of hiding best when you need it most. A fly on the wall that day would have heard,

“Do we have a wok?”
“Yeah, I know I’ve used it before, but I haven’t seen it recently.”
“Do you remember packing it? Maybe it got lost in the move.”
“How do you lose a wok?!”

Once unearthed and inspected for quality assurance we concluded that our carbon steel wok had received no love. But that was about to change. A bit of research in our cookbook library uncovered an excellent wok priming primer by Chinese cookbook author and wok connoisseur, Grace Young. Armed with good counsel and some steel wool, we undertook a transformation on par with Michael Caine’s makeover of Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality. Our wok has never looked, or cooked, better.

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A Fall Outing in the Country, with Doughnuts

By Katie Barreira

I’m really a sucker for fall. This weekend, I visited the Barnstable County Fair on Cape Cod, which promised harvest provisions, crafts, and prized barnyard beasts. The cattle (all three of them) were lowing, I purchased a fine tea cozy and opted out of fall foliage face paint only when faced with a restless line of age-appropriate customers.

So it wasn’t exactly the autumnal fete I had hoped for. But there was one culinary highlight that made the trip exceptionally worthwhile.

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Coffee Talk: Brewing the Perfect Cup

By Katie Barreira

In my mother’s kitchen hangs a framed print of an iconic Saturday Evening Post illustration. It depicts a schoolgirl (think young June Cleaver) at the knee of her grandmother, learning to fulfill the first duty (okay, maybe second) of every aspiring housewife: making coffee. While the exhibition of this oppressive advertisement in our liberated kitchen is tongue in cheek, its point (minus that whole cult of domesticity nonsense) is well taken; everyone should know how to make a good cup of joe.

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Sweet Bitters- Campari: A Love Story

By Katie Barreira

Picture it, Italy, 1860. Gaspare Campari comes home from a long day in the fields, feeling downright haggard. Good thing his wife has spent the afternoon steeping her secret recipe of herbs, spices and citrus peel.

Just a glug of the health tonic, sends the worn Gaspare straight to bed and in the morning he awakes, refreshed and fortified by the medicinal brew. Over the milk pails Gaspare extols the virtues of the Campari family restorative and the rest is history…Ok, so everything past Gaspare Campari is my fanciful and entirely concocted, version of Campari’s mysterious inception, but you get the idea!

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