• Blog
  • About
  • Recipes
  • Tips & Tools
  • International LOVE
  • Love Notes
  • Shop
  • Powered by MSI Media Group

Engaging stories of love, joy, comfort and friendship with proven scrumptious, healthy recipes, we celebrate LOVE as the secret ingredient for wonderful food!

LongHouse Food Revival promises to be pretty amazing!

August 30, 2013 by Mary Frances 24 Comments

I’m so absolutely excited to have been invited to attend the LongHouse Food Revival 2013, a gathering of 100 visionary thinkers and influential decision makers in food, which will take place next weekend, Sept. 7 and 8, at a historic diary farm in Upstate New York.

Every year, LongHouse Food Revival chooses a subject to explore and presents its discoveries in documentary film, radio, broadcast, spoken word, live cooking, interviews and visionary art. This year their focus is on the Saffron Diaspora — looking at the original Spice Trail and exploring the various religions and cultures that arrived to the United States on a wave of exotic spices, ingredients and dishes. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could promote tolerance with all of this.

And you all know about my love affair with spices!

On Saturday evening, chefs from across the country will come together to cook us a “live fire” feast from the Saffron Diaspora. I’ll be sure to share as much of that as I can with you in photos later. As they describe it, this year’s feast will be “a world tour of flatbreads, spiced ice cream, saffron martinis and music from Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road.” Doesn’t that martini sound amazing? And it must be a beautiful color – I’m so ready!

This year’s speakers include Los Angeles Times’s food critic Jonathan Gold, blogger Elissa Altman, author Naomi Duguid, NPR’s Kathy Gunst, Food Network’s Katherine Alford, NYU Food Studies Director Krishnendu Ray, cookbook author Molly O’Neill and many more. I’ll be going as a guest of The Daily Meal, this blog’s affiliate.

Another part I’m looking forward to is first annual Food Flea they’ve planned for Sunday, a marketplace of “ideas and innovation for individuals, media outlets, publishers, organizations, brands, start-ups, farmers and producers.”  I’m sure I’ll be meeting a very special bunch of food people there.

If you’d like tickets to next weekend’s festivities you can go to the event website and purchase access to one day only, or the whole weekend.

It’s going to be a special event and I would love to meet you there!

OMG – the whole goat! Chef Magnus Duruji (aka The Nigerian BBQ King) in a trial run for the live fire feast. Doesn’t he look happy! Photo courtesy of Cook N Scribble, producers of LongHouse Food Revival.

OMG – the whole goat! Chef Magnus Duruji (aka The Nigerian BBQ King) in a trial run for the live fire feast. Doesn’t he look happy! Photo courtesy of Cook N Scribble, producers of LongHouse Food Revival.

Filed Under: Travel Tagged With: cooking, food, food conferences, roasting a goat, Spice Trail, The Daily Meal

LOVE’s Guest Post on Orgasmic Chef

March 26, 2013 by Mary Frances 12 Comments

We are excited to say that our LOVE blog has made a guest posting appearance on the most delicious Orgasmic Chef blog, down in Australia! We’re conquering the globe!

Her blog is a great source for “orgasmic” recipes – you’re reading that right – so go check it out (and say hello to Maureen for us while you’re there! Thank you, Maureen!).

Here is our post down under. Hint: Silky Chocolate Cake is the topic.

Filed Under: Travel Tagged With: chef, chocolate cake, cooking, food, friends, guest blogging, kitchen, orgasmic

It could always be worse

February 19, 2013 by Mary Frances 12 Comments

HA! This post (which Mark Bittman recently shared) is full of the grossest, funniest cooking projects gone awry. Most of them were doomed before they started, clearly! I was laughing so hard I cried. Take a look at these and remember, it could always be worse!!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelysanders/people-worse-at-cooking-than-you-food-fails

this pizza_buzzfeed

Photo courtesy Buzzfeed via malsfoodporn.blogspot.com

To clarify, this is not my mess! I’ve made messes, but not quite like this. Credit noted above.

Filed Under: Dinner Tagged With: cooking, disaster, Mark Bittman, mess, quotes

How do you say good-bye?

August 1, 2012 by Mary Frances 2 Comments

Her name is Harriet and I met her at our Unitarian Church in Summit, NJ. She became my piano teacher and really, my second mother. Think of a mother you could choose, and who chose you. Very different. She taught me how to play piano at a very late age, but sometimes our piano lessons involved nothing more about the piano than sitting close to one another in front of it. She would point out life lessons I was learning, listen to my troubles or my triumphs, and give me courage and encouragement to keep on doing what I was doing. At the time we met, our boys were seven and ten. She knew intimately our life, our help, our trials and tribulations. We went through her husband’s passing early on. Her first husband invented Play Dough, her second husband invented the Air Cast. She never lacked money, drove a stick shift 700 series BMW in those days and had two grand pianos, back to back in her living room. She raised seven kids, four of her own and three of her second husband’s.

When you choose someone to be in your life as a second parent, it is so very different. She saw me for what I am – not for what my mother wanted me to be (to stay in St. Louis nearby and have lunch and go shopping with her on Saturdays. Yuck.)

She had a huge home in Summit overlooking NYC, one in Vermont and one in Nantucket. We spent time in all of them – she was so generous. When I told her I was thinking of moving back to the city, she understood ALL that that entailed. In the middle of our move, she came over and insisted that all of our furniture for the yet to be found country house, would not go to storage at Westy’s but would go to her house until we found a place. She kept it for a year and still has a few items, five and a half years later.

She taught me to never throw away a roast duck carcass but to make duck soup (yummy), the benefits of hanging your wash out to dry (her favorite thing to do) and pointed out when I was doing things right by my kids and when I needed to do something different (not pointing out something wrong, as my own mother might do). There was a time when we were in our little temporary apartment, before moving in to NYC, that she was over for dinner every Sunday night. Such fun we had in this little dinky kitchen. She had her chair, watching me cook, and all was well. She loved my food. She once said that she would bet that my boys would always live close to us, partly because of my cooking. I sure hope she’s right.

A mutual friend once remarked that Harriet could party like a high schooler, and she could. She loved Grey Goose on the rocks, several small drinks throughout the evening, and never liked wine. She was a true party girl and full of life wisdom.

We just saw each other in early May, partied like old times, cooked her a big dinner, spent the night, and she was fine. She was 82. In late June she was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer, Waldenström Macroglobulinemia, plus leukemia. This was zapping her strength and also affecting her cognitive abilities due to her blood thickening. Her natural children moved her up to a hospice house in Vermont. I had been in touch by phone and we planned to go up there this Sunday. I learned yesterday evening that she passed on Monday morning. I am so very sad. As soon as I heard, I could do nothing but go to the piano and try to play through tears. I’m so very disappointed we did not get to see her one last time.

stairway-to-heaven-cropped

Yesterday morning, while walking to catch a bus on upper Fifth Avenue, I saw this brownstone stoop. I thought it looked like a stairway to heaven for Harriet. I did not know then that she was gone.

 

 

Filed Under: Events Tagged With: cooking, country houses, entertaining, Harriet, love, luekemia, parents who chose you, parents you chose, Sunday night dinners, Waldenström Macroglobulinemia

Frozen pancetta

October 19, 2011 by Mary Frances Leave a Comment

Some years ago, my butcher in the city, Bob, of Espisito’s Pork Store gave me the greatest tip. As he noticed, I like pancetta, so one time he mentioned that I could keep several slices in the freezer at all times, take them out one at a time and they will thaw very quickly to use. As you may have figured out by now, I adore pancetta. Just a little bit gives huge flavor to any dish. (although I am not a fan of the latest craze of bacon on desserts – yuk!) For instance, the Broccoli Rabe recipe outlined earlier is usually made with pork sausage, with the fat left in the dish. So making it with chicken sausage is so much healthier and just a touch of pancetta give the big rich pork flavor that the chicken sausage cannot impart on its own.

So always have some on hand in your freezer!

Filed Under: Meat Tagged With: chicken sausage, cooking, Dinner, frozen, pancetta, pork

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter

Join 32k+ followers!


Never miss out on a recipe!

Subscribe to receive new posts via email:

Mary Frances

Mary Frances

Spread love through cooking.

Summer Favorites

Easy Cheesy Sautéed Squash The Best Potato Salad Super Quick Chicken and Summer Vegetables Stir-fry Chimichurri-ed Wilted Endives with Walnuts Chilled Curried Zucchini Soup with Apple Garnish Best Strawberry and Rhubarb Crisp to make now!

Categories

  • Appetizers
  • Breakfast
  • Brunch
  • Cocktails
  • Contest
  • Cookies
  • Cookware and tools
  • Desserts
  • Dinner
  • Events
  • First Course
  • Fish
  • Food Responsibility
  • Guest Post
  • Lunch
  • Meat
  • Pasta
  • Poultry
  • Products for sale
  • Salads
  • Sauces
  • Sides
  • Soups
  • Tea time
  • Travel
  • Vegetables

Pages

Blog
About
Recipes
Tips and Tools
International Love
Love Notes
Shop
Mary's secret ingredients

Blogs We Love

  • 1840 Farm
  • A Pug in the Kitchen
  • Cottage Grove House
  • Food, Photography & France
  • Food52
  • From the Bartolini Kitchens
  • Go Bake Yourself
  • Hotly Spiced
  • Jovina Cooks Italian
  • Lavender and Lime
  • Orgasmic Chef
  • Smitten Kitchen
  • Sophie's Foodie Files
  • Steven’s Wine and Food Pairings
  • That Skinny Chick Can Bake
  • The Pioneer Woman
  • The Squishy Monster
  • Tips on Food and Drinks
  • Yummy Chunklet
  • LOVE - the secret ingredient


  • GET IN TOUCH
  • E mary@lovethesecretingredient.com

· All Rights Reserved ·© 2016 Love- the secret ingredient. All rights reserved. Disclaimer | Privacy Policy Disclosure Policy Terms & Conditions