In his mid-forties my father remarried a young woman he had met at a literary party in New York. I was off at art school when they met, and barely paid attention, except for a phone call I got from him telling me the news. He said, “I've fallen in love.”

Did you know the artichoke is a thistle? If you look up the history of this strange vegetable, you'll get all kinds of great facts. There was a mobster in New York in the 1920's who sabotaged the artichoke market by buying all of them that entered the city, and then selling them for a 60% percent mark-up. Mayor La Guardia banned the sale of artichokes in there, but the ban only lasted a few weeks because he happened to love them.

I really can't count the number of trips I took to New York to help care for my aging father. The last 7 or 8 years of his life I watched him slowly diminish. The man I went out to museums, and movies, and out for escargot at a funny little place on 9th avenue....my lively New York dad, got frail and slow.

When you're a chubby kid, it seems you can never ditch that image...ever. 40 years later you look in the mirror and you see a chubby adult when in reality you're normal sized, even a bit thin! By the time I reached my 20's I was svelte and streamlined. The scale told me, my friends told me, but the mirror told a different story.

I recently picked up my grandparents’ copy of “The Fannie Merritt Farmer Boston Cooking School Cookbook” from 1953 and brought it into my office to check on a recipe when the smell of the book smacked me in the face. It was all at once spicy, moldy, ancient, and 100% nostalgic—like hot cider or a summer bungalow in New Hampshire.

I remember countless holidays with hollandaise. Hollandaise goes with everything. EVERYTHING. It will make small children eat asparagus. My grandfather knew this. He was a wise man. A wise man who made great sauce.

Beets are rich, nourishing, and dying to stain your favorite white sweater. I recommend wearing black. My mother always made beets and I thought they were just a plate of murder that I was supposed to eat before leaving the table. I’d have been happy to sit there all night. Eventually, she would relinquish command of my dining room chair position and allow me to go hungry and fall asleep on the floor in front of the television.

 When I was growing up in the Bronx in the 50's they called it 'red sauce'. If you were Italian it was 'gravy'. In our house we rarely saw it since we were Irish and though our meals were healthy and fine every night at dinner our plates consisted of 3 colors, green, white, and brown. Peas/rice/meatloaf, or broccoli/potatoes/pot roast....which is probably the reason why I became a gourmet cook as I grew up and left that borough for a larger world, a larger culinary experience for sure. For me the tri-color menu plan left me sad and yearning. I needed more.