Zucchini flowers are perfect for stuffing. In the following recipe, the flowers are filled with cheese before frying. The result is a creamy, flavorful filling and a super-crisp crust. For years, my go-to deep-frying batter has been made of roughly equal parts beer and flour. But I wanted the batter for this dish to be […]

HARRISBURG, Pa. Days before Craig Snell’s stroke, he and his wife, Kerry, grilled outside in the kind of warm winter weather that hints at the promise of summer. Their two children wore shorts and played with snow piles at their Boiling Springs home, and Kerry looked forward to camping and going out on a boat […]

All last week, a link to an article, shared and reshared by friends, kept passing through my Facebook feed. It originated from a site called “Power of Positivity,” and the article’s title was “4 Behaviors That Push People Away.” As with most things on Facebook, and in life for that matter, once I had seen […]

By now my gardens are well established and most plants are doing well. But there are tasks, both in the vegetable garden and in the flower beds, that need my attention. Weeding is key in both areas, and recent rains make doing it easier as the soil has softened up. If you have very dry […]

LITTLE COMPTON, R.I. Cooking a channeled whelk is not for the squeamish. But sliced and sprinkled over a bed of linguine, it’s a chewy delicacy in old-fashioned Italian eateries along the East Coast. The sea snails known by Italian-Americans as scungilli used to be such a niche market that fishermen ignored them when they turned […]

I made a mistake. Despite almost 16 years as a mother to all boys, boys whom I know absorb my comments and actions, I had a moment of weakness and forgot. I opened my mouth, and bad, hurtful words came out. But, well, my husband was about to put on swim trunks that he wore […]

As a gardener, I find that inertia is my enemy. I plant things and then just let them remain (whether I like them or not) — even if they take up a lot of space. I removed two such plants this summer. First, I cut down a cherry tree that produced blah-tasting fruit and not […]

It’s amazing how the weather dictates what we want to eat, isn’t it? Even if you’re not consciously trying to cook with the seasons, you want braises and stews when it’s cool out, and food that is lighter and brighter when it’s warm. This decidedly warm-weather salmon is bathed in an olive-oil-and-herb mixture and cooked […]

We give lots of thought to decorating rooms but often overlook the staircase, despite the fact that in many homes it’s the first thing people see when they walk in the door. Staircase areas can be “a great spot to introduce your personal style,” says Brian Patrick Flynn, who designed HGTV’s “Dream Home 2016,” the […]

The first time I brought him, he was seated on my hip, hanging onto my shoulder as I ushered his brothers, Ford and Owen, into the school. From that perch, and while he chewed on his fist, he watched me use my one free hand to smooth flyaway hairs and help with backpacks. We took […]