Check out our other 5 Best Cocktails

I had a dirty little secret in high school: I was a horse person.

In the burbs, this was standard. Perhaps even a status symbol. But in the city, being a rider was on the same social plane as being a drama nerd, which I happened to be too. Given these two factors, sometime around junior year, my friend Essie told me that it was a miracle that I was cool.

I am hard pressed to think of what possibly negated both horse and theater in my pedigree…

Thank you for participating in the spring Le Creuset giveaway! We chose a winner randomly from the list of commenters. And the winner is…Anna Rose! Here’s what Anna had to say:

Squash and zucchini-can’t get enough of either when they’re fresh! And, I can’t wait for summer tomatoes!

We can’t wait for the produce either, and we’ll have many a recipe on the way to satisfy those cravings!

From our kitchen, albeit small, to yours,

Cara and Phoebe, THE QUARTER-LIFE COOKS

Check out our full Cinco De Mayo Party Menu!

To my mind, Molly O’Neill is a genius. She’s the author of The New York Cookbook and One Big Table, and the former food columnist for the New York Times Magazine-not to mention a horde of other amazing food credits. Her books are more than cookbooks; they’re real research projects, ones that span years and cities and now a whole country. I can spend hours engrossed in the books, reading not just recipes but also whole stories, histories, almanacs.

Best of all, Molly O’Neill is writing a blurb…

Chances are we’ve got it all wrong, but for us Northerners, Derby Day means an afternoon of wearing spring clothes and drinking mint juleps. Oh, and betting on horses. In honor of the mint and the real arrival of springtime, I invented this tart. The filling sits in a shallow shortbread crust, more like a French pastry than a deep-dish Southern pie. It’s really made of white chocolate, mint, and cream, but it tastes like a mixture of marshmallow and heaven. To bring spring into the mix, I top it all off with some gently cooked blackberries, for which…

We’d tell you about our Easter traditions, only we have none. For more about what we celebrate in the springtime, check out these Matzoh Toasts, Mom’s Matzoh Ball Soup, last year’s seder post featuring brisket, kugel, and passover puffs, and our fabulous Matzoh Crunch Ice Cream.

On the other side of things, we turned to Adelaide, our awesome recipe tester for In the Small Kitchen, to create a full-blown small kitchen Easter menu for us-check it out here.

[Giveaway closed - 4/29/11]

April showers have kept us happily by the stove, cooking up all the great spring fruits and veggies that are beginning to show their faces at the farmer’s market. If your eye is not only on vegetables, but also on your waistline, there’s no better way to enjoy your produce than by steaming it.

We’re not lucky enough to own a fancy steamer, but we’re really excited for the chance to give this amazing Le Creuset Farm Fresh Steamer Set to one of you!

May is almost here, and with it,

Check out our other seafood dishes here.

A few years ago, my friend Alix turned me onto a Mark Bittman recipe for soft shell crab pasta. I’d never cooked with crabs, and found them inherently intimidating. But for Father’s Day that year, I tested out the recipe, and it was too simple and delicious for words.

Soft shell crab season is so short, it always seems to pass me by. Since that first foray in crab cooking, I had yet to try my hand again-that is, until last week, when I was determined to do…

For a full Passover feast, check out Baby’s First Seder Menu.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will tell you that my family does not reserve the eating of matzoh balls for Passover. They are on the menu at Thanksgiving and pretty much any other time we need a pick-me-up, some comfort food, or “penicillin.”

And, for even fuller disclosure: these matzoh balls are not from my mom’s recipe, even though my mom is the resident matzoh ball maker and the person I asked when I was looking for a…

When I lived in Paris, my most favorite breakfast treat was the pain aux amandes-an almond croissant filled and topped with almond cream and sliced almonds and baked. Similar to it was my favorite afternoon snack, bostock, a thick slice of brioche topped with-you guessed it-almond cream and sliced almonds, and baked.

My host “sister,” a stereotypically thin French woman if there ever was one, also loved pain aux amandes. Only of course while I could put away one and a half, she would just barely finish a third of one before grinning, “my, that was rich,” and rubbing…

Our Great Minds Eat Alike series mixes up the usual BGSK offerings with interviews and submissions by cooks and eaters whose mentality towards cooking and eating meshes with ours. Today we bring you a how-to all about food presentation from Rachel Manley, a London-based foodie, blogger, and supper club host.

Rachel’s day job is on the BBC Food website, which means she gets to talk about food all day and sometimes go to photoshoots. She also hosts supper club/pop-up restaurant in the summer (in London!) and seems to be making all of her friends’…