Now I have made my newsletter available to everyone for free!  Check in below as I'll regularly be adding back issues. Anyone with a love for food and a passion for cooking will enjoy the Practical Palate.  You'll find delicious recipes, cooking tips, essays and cookbook reviews.  Make sure you tell your foodie friends about us too. 

Issue 1

Welcome to the Premiere issue of the Practical Palate.  This is a cooking newsletter written for you, whether you are a novice cook or a more experienced gourmet.  My first and most important goal is to have fun with you, while sharing recipes and tips, and to never see cooking as drudgery.  My recipes and techniques....

Click here to read more!

Click here to PRINT a copy of the Practical Palate!

Issue 2

My mother loved to cook, and she was very good at it. She had an office job and not much time for cooking, so at holidays  she would get up early and spend all day in the kitchen. She made what became our family’s traditional meal-- a roast beef or stuffed turkey, scalloped potatoes, sweet potato casserole, savory noodle kugel, a large salad, broccoli or asparagus with hollandaise sauce, lemon meringue and pecan pies, and little cookies called Russian tea cakes.  She made the same....

Click here to read more!

Click here to PRINT a copy of the Practical Palate!

Issue 3

My home is filled with cookbooks.  New, old, well-used and pristine-- it’s what’s inside that counts. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but apparently lots of other people are collecting too. Go into any bookstore, and the number of cookbooks on the shelves is staggering. These books can be visually stunning, with photographs that knock your....

Click here to read more!

Click here to PRINT a copy of the Practical Palate!

Issue 4

I’m reading a mystery called A Certain Justice, by John T. Lescroart. He writes, “People should try for excellence... not perfection, because perfection... was impossible, whereas excellence was occasionally attainable.” I like that.

Click here to read more!

Click here to PRINT a copy of the Practical Palate

Issue 5

We have become afraid of food. We used to worry about calories, but now it’s fat grams. We worry about too much caffeine, salt and sugar in our food. When my husband reaches for the salt his mother automatically says,

Click here to read more!

Click here to PRINT a copy of the Practical Palate

Issue 6

When I was growing up, food was served and we ate. If any family member had turned a nose up at what was served, my parents would have been appalled at the rudeness. Apparently this basic rule of manners no longer applies.

Click here to read more!

Click here to PRINT a copy of the Practical Palate

Issue 7

I am always cooking, so thank goodness I love to cook.  Some people look at it like moving a pile of rocks, then moving it back again, but not ,me. I look at it as having the opportunity to be creative, and even artistic...

Click here to read more!

Click here to PRINT a copy of the Practical Palate

Issue 9

“People don’t eat the way they used to,” according to Elfisio Cullati, chef at the Rittenhouse Club for thirty years, …“The culinary art is dying out in America.” I am reading these lines from a newspaper clipping pasted in  the recipe scrapbook made by a relative who died more than forty years ago...