Our vacation this past summer (in January) included a detour over the frontier into San Martín de los Andes. What a delightful town! One of the things we loved about Argentina was the food, especially the fiambrerías, which are reminiscent of an Italian deli. The best one in San Martín (based on our short tour) sold [...]

A few days ago, I glanced at the overripe bananas sitting on the counter and knew they had to go. I was reaching out to toss them into the compost when it hit: a craving for banana pudding—something creamy and rich and flavored with those ripe bananas. I poured over my cookbooks and then turned [...]

One summer during college, I worked at the restaurant at Domaine Chandon in the Napa Valley—one of the top restaurants in the valley back then. I worked in reservations rather than in the kitchen, however, so it was really just an office job. Despite the lack of cooking experience, this was my first exposure to haute [...]

A few weeks ago, my son suggested that we make a pizza pie—as in a pie filled with pizza. It took me a while to get on board with the idea, but eventually we gave it a shot (we’ll try pretty much anything in the Flaherty kitchen). I insisted on using commercial pizza, since making [...]

It’s something of a running joke in our family that whenever I ask Ed what he wants for dinner, he responds vaguely, “A rice dish.” I find this response to be so open-ended as to be useless. It took me a remarkably long time to figure out that what he meant was a cajun rice [...]

It isn’t exactly soup season here in the southern hemisphere, where we are in the midst of a reasonably mild summer. It is, however, cauliflower season. I recently bought a beautiful (and quite large) cauliflower at the market, and all I could think of was soup. I toyed with several ideas before putting together this [...]

When I was in France in July, my friend Juan Carlos made an incredibly rich chocolate tart for dessert one night. It was very simple, with few ingredients, but it was the perfect showcase for the fine Belgian chocolate. It has since become a key dessert in my kitchen. Since chocolate, cream, and butter are [...]