By Paige Orloff I've loved potpie since I was a little girl and my mother used to serve me the frozen ones as special lunch treats. (The fact that she'd do odd dances to entertain me while I endured their epic heating time in those pre-microwave days…

Read and watch the governor's annual address. Read text and highlights of every governor's State of the State. Thank you. Thank you, thank you very much and Happy New Year to all of you. First let’s start by giving Pat a big round of applause for…

Breaking news from the Northeast: It's hot this week! But even if you and your garden aren't sweltering through this early summer heat wave, drought conditions across the country are defining (and limiting) this year’s growing season. Southwestern…

This week, blogland gave us updates on Maria Shriver, Meg Tilly and Alice Walker, while cheering a heroic Afghan-American woman saving lives overseas and challenging women to make stopping sexual harassment a career strategy. Remember 1980s movie…

How fitting that Edie van Breems blows out her birthday candles on December 13, celebrated as Saint Lucia's Day in Sweden. The holiday, which honors a fourth-century saint who fed the hungry, kicks off the Christmas season in that country. And van…

Interior designer Edie van Breems welcomes the spirit of Christmas past, celebrating the season and her Scandinavian heritage with time-honored decorations, food, and traditions.

Three years ago, if you had told me I'd celebrate a friend's birthday by getting together to toss hay bales, I'd have laughed in your face. Back then, I saw myself as a committed city girl. I liked nature fine, as long as it stayed outside where I…

Well, maybe not. But the pavlova—an airy meringue concoction invented either in New Zealand or Australia, sometime between 1926 and 1935, as a tribute to the ballerina Anna Pavlova who toured both countries several times during that period (believe…

One of the most frequent—and most confounding—requests I've received since writing for Rural Intelligence is to serve up a plan for an entire week's worth of dinners. I am not, however, a Monday-meatloaf, Tuesday-turkey kind of cook. Even if I wanted…

Late winter and early spring means birthday season for my family: beginning on Valentine's Day with my husband, our little clan's birthdays then follow in succession through the end of March (save my son, whose outlier August birthday is the source…

Though the cold is lifting, neither true spring weather nor the new harvest will arrive for a bit, so to make it through these next few muddy and cold weeks, why not give a dinner party? The shtick in my house (i.e., my husband's shtick) is that I…

When the weather turns, as it has this week, from merely cold to utterly brutal, I retreat, as much as possible, to the kitchen. The numbing weather presents cooks with a fork in the road: either make rib-sticking, hearty comfort food (nothing wrong…

Since starting my adventures in food here at Rural Intelligence, I've received a few requests from readers. Some I've tried to address, some I'm still working on, and one, until now, had me stumped: recipes designed for a slow cooker. I am,…

I know some people who are perfectly confident in most areas of their lives—and perfectly capable in the kitchen—who become paralyzed at the idea of throwing a dinner party. The thing I've learned is that dinner parties aren't necessarily any more…

I suspect that non-cooks wonder what in the world to give those of us who are culinarily-obsessed. Cookbook? New gadget? Basket of delicacies? These are all good ideas—but how do you take them from "good" to "impossibly clever"? For me, simpler is…

It all started with the last tomato from my garden. A few weeks before Thanksgiving, right before that spell of bitter cold, I was (belatedly) cleaning up the so-called potager behind my back porch. This was my only stab at a garden this year, and…

Early last summer, picking up my weekly farm share from Hawthorne Valley Farm's CSA, I was amused to see an entry for "Governor's Mansion" on the pick-up list. I was naturally curious and eventually discovered that Noah Sheetz, the executive chef for…

When you hear Michael Albin of Hudson Wine Merchants expound on wine, his alter egos—writer, musician, former English professor—are all in evidence. His descriptions of his various offerings, their strengths and potential pitfalls, are impassioned…

Part I is not when I discuss the Pilgrims, or the native Americans, or the various inaccuracies we've all been taught about the first Thanksgiving. It's not that I don't care about the origins of my favorite holiday; rather, there's too much else…

The have French have a term, "jolie-laide." Translated directly, it means "pretty-ugly," but it refers to a woman whose beauty is unconventional, not obviously pretty, but who nonetheless possesses an indefinable allure. One might argue the same for…