The Mom 100

Most tomato salsas are made with uncooked tomatoes, and delicious just the way they are, but roasting some of them concentrates the sugars and flavors.

Summer, summer, summer.  The word is fat and round and breezy and rolls around nicely on the tongue.  And we want our food to be breezy, too. If you have basil and tomatoes growing in your garden, make this.  If you have a farmers’ market near you, make this.  If you have leftover pesto hanging around, even store-bought, you can still make this. You’ll cook the pasta and make the pesto in the time it takes to roast the little tomatoes.  You can see that I used yellow tomatoes in many of these pics..  No reason; it’s what I had.  …

If there is one thing, one single thing, that I think you can do to make a gathering feel more special, it’s to offer up a signature drink. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it doesn’t have to be alcoholic, simply make one beverage just for the occasion, and present it to your guests in addition to the usual assortment of soft drinks, beer, and wine. It just says, hey there, I put some extra thought into this occasion—thanks for coming over. This is a good idea all year long (hot ginger apple cider toddies for the winter? Yes, please), but …

When two of my nieces were young they, like many kids, didn’t like fish. Or so they thought. Little did they know that the tender pink filets they had been happily inhaling at the table were in fact salmon, and not (as my brother-in-law had them believing) a delicacy called Barbie Chicken. Oh, please save any comments about girls and pink and deceiving kids into eating things; I know—I’ve run through all of those in my mind, and what I am left with is admiration for a man who used his wits to get his kids to fall in love …