Open View Gardens

It’s fascinating how drastically the concept of “Italian food” has changed in the United States. The other day I was talking with my boyfriend about Mario Batali’s Eataly in Manhattan, which I visited for the first time just two weeks before returning to Italy, saying he would be shocked to see such a tribute to […]

Note from Elizabeth: Today our guest writer is Megan Halpern, one of my sister’s closest friends and an enthusiastic foodie. A while back, Meg blogged about her experiences eating and cooking in Brooklyn, introducing herself as someone who “spends what little free time she has in the kitchen, where she is passionate about cooking, oblivious to […]

Note from Elizabeth: I’m lucky to have two parents who cook. I have as many memories of my father preparing meals while I was growing up as of my mother. Writing my senior thesis on the relationship between gender and food, I realized how truly rare such a division of labor is. Even though my […]

It’s been three weeks since I moved back to Bologna and already my body is complaining. From time to time, we’ve mentioned Dr. Alejandro Junger’s Clean Program (see our post on gardening for optimal health and our recipe for delicious gluten-, dairy- and sugar-free cookies) — a holistic detox program that has helped both Barbara […]

It’s only been a week and a half since I arrived in Bologna and already I miss the variety of ingredients I was able to find in the United States. How ironic to be surrounded by traditional, local ingredients yet search for products that are anything but common in Italy. Suddenly, the Italian staples I […]

When Ofelia Barrios came to visit a few weeks ago and showed us how to make chiles rellenos and tostadas, she brought her friend Yanira Arias from El Salvador with her. Even though Yanira says she doesn’t cook very often, she still wanted to contribute to Open View Gardens and share a traditional dish from […]

Ofelia Barrios is our second guest to share her stories and recipes in a video for Open View Gardens. Ofelia is a wonderful cook of Mexican food — during her time as a student at Middlebury College and her many subsequent visits to our home, she filled the house with ingredients she had brought from […]

I wait all year for Barbara’s tomatoes. I refuse to buy the imported, tasteless, watery tomatoes sold in the grocery store. Occasionally during the winter I buy canned San Marzano tomatoes to make sauce, but nothing compares to the sun-ripened tomatoes that come out of our garden. We grow three kinds of cherry tomatoes, ranging […]

When we wrote about strawberries in June, we promised you a video on making French-style jam. After a busy month of weeding, harvesting and planting fall crops for Barbara and making plans to move to Italy for me, we’re finally fulfilling our promise. Although strawberry season has come and gone (sort of–we’ve still been able […]

Airports are notorious not only for grumpy, impatient, even rude travelers but also for terrible food (which probably contributes to the bad moods — in our family we call this state “hangry”). The options are usually limited to greasy fast food or tasteless sandwiches, old fruit and limp lettuce leaves. As someone who travels often, […]