With a little help from your freezer, leftover steel-cut oatmeal makes a nutritious, fast and surprisingly delicious weekday morning breakfast.

Soon after I graduated from pastry school, I got a job at the wonderful 11th Avenue Inn on Capitol Hill in Seattle. This oatmeal was my star contribution to the breakfast lineup, and it’s still my favorite thing to make for breakfast, whether entertaining guests or cooking for myself.

Crystallized ginger gives this steel-cut oatmeal the glitz to be the star of any breakfast table, while the spices and creamy texture keep it grounded in the world of comfort food.

This yogurt is wonderful over fruit–mangoes, yes, but just about any other fruit as well–and particularly good over steel-cut oatmeal.

Here is a stripped-down recipe for the cherries based on the more detailed instructions and observations in these entries: Chocolate-Covered Cherries, Part One and Part Two.

A great meringue for frosting and filling cakes and cupcakes, among many other uses.

New favorite omelet: saute whole basil and baby spinach leaves in butter or olive oil before adding the eggs. Fill with cottage cheese, top with marinara sauce. I’m calling it the “Lasagna Omelet” because my mom always made lasagna with cottage cheese when I was a kid, and this brings back all [...]

Coastal Kitchen, a Seattle restaurant that changes half its menu every few months to celebrate a different world cuisine, is now offering the hilarious “language tapes” they play in their bathrooms for free on their website, either as MP3 downloads or audio streams. I’m listening to the one for Greece now, which is fortunate [...]

Taste bud torture: the smell of brownies permeating the house for at least an hour before they’re fully baked and ready to cut.