We recently ran a tour of Kenny Lao’s kitchen in the East Village. Kenny, who owns Rickshaw Dumpling Bar in New York, cooks a mean dumpling and I felt like I was in great hands for my tutorial.We worked together to write up a recipe — as Kenny says, dumplings are not an exact science — with the hope that you might give it a whirl. Wouldn’t tonight would be a good night for dumplings?

This week, Maxwell and I are doing our annual (well, second annual) end-of-summer community project: we’re hosting nine actors who are creating a play of Shakespeare’s songs and sonnets for the community. It’s a beautiful, free event under the end-of-summer night sky.My role? Cast chef.At the last minute, I learned one actor doesn’t eat meat, one doesn’t do gluten, and one avoids dairy.

There’s nothing terribly original about pouring beer over ice cream; if nothing else, root beer keeps us reminded of that tradition. I’ve been lazy with my beer and ice cream pairings — who isn’t? — and so it wasn’t until recently when a guest brought over a bottle of super-sweet Framboise Lambic, a raspberry beer of sorts, that I gave some serious thought to pouring boozy brews over ice cream.

Last week I went to a press lunch showcasing a collection of snazzy Staub cookware that Williams-Sonoma will start carrying this summer. The chefs prepared the meal almost exclusively in giant Staub slow-cookers (or cocottes, as they call them) and grill pans. That was cool, but what really caught my eye was this phallic vertical roaster awkwardly perched in the corner of the kitchen, and naturally I started thinking about chickens.

I think of dessert as a curtsy to the meal; a nod of thanks; the “peace be with you” of the church that is dinner.We’re honoring that final course of the meal with a site-wide, week-long celebration of dessert at TheKitchn.com.One new dessert book that stands out is Ready for Dessert (Ten Speed Press) by David Lebovitz, who is in fact a dessert genius.

I think of dessert as a curtsy to the meal; a nod of thanks; the “peace be with you” of the church that is dinner.We’re honoring that final course of the meal with a site-wide, week-long celebration of dessert at TheKitchn.com.Earlier I spoke of David Lebovitz’s Ready for Dessert. Another new dessert book that stands out is Seasonal Fruit Desserts (Broadway Books) by Deborah Madison, who I consider to be one of a few grand dames of the farm-driven cooking movement.

This is one of my favorite cakes from my book. It reminds me of ballerina in a giant white tutu — completely over the top.When I was developing the recipe, the idea was to create a big white confection that wasn’t overly sweet and capitalized on the flavor and texture of freshly shaved coconut. Using the pre-shredded stuff in the plastic bag gives an inferior result. If packaged coconut is your only choice, be sure to avoid the sweetened variety.

Two days and counting until Valentine’s Day. For me, cooking for someone is love and love is cooking for someone and my love certainly isn’t limited to one day a year. But I’m no grinch either. February 14th is a sweet little opportunity to make something extra lovely and so this year my Valentine gets this fancy-pants nutty chocolate tart.

Seafood stock is one of those things I just can’t deal with in a can; fresh is so far superior. If you happen to have some shrimp, crab or lobster shells, the process is actually pretty easy. A fish stock using whole fish heads can be a bit messier, so I’m going to recommend you go the shellfish route. This stock is a great base for soups and stews and for cooking risotto. Cook it down as a base for pasta sauces and sauces to top other seafood dishes.

This week, to be quite honest, has been more about making a Flower Princess costume for our three year old than about cooking. We have ordered takeout both nights, my fingers have multiple stab wounds from the sewing needles, and there are wisps of pink and yellow tulle netting all over the place. Even in the face of such adversity, one night we managed to make dessert.

Paging through Lidia Bastianich’s new book, Lidia Cooks from the Heart of Italy: A Feast of 175 Regional Recipes (Knopf), it’s obvious that the notion of a locavore is not a trend but rather a given in Italy and it has been for generations. In all of her books, Lidia gives readers a sense of this very local approach to cooking, but in this, her sixth cookbook, the message is clear.

Since falling in love with Jamie Oliver’s Chicken in Milk recipe, I’ve wanted to try another take on the concept and simmer a whole chicken in coconut milk. How decadent! Yesterday afternoon I had my chance when the weather in New York turned chilly and a friend with a two-week-old baby called hungry.It was fantastic. Imagine a succulent chicken bathed in a thick, sweet sauce with herbal citrus notes, alongside gorgeous little pink potatoes.

To celebrate our daughter turning three, we had a feast with friends and family. She requested lobster, corn and beans and so lobster, corn and beans it was. More on that fiasco another time. What I want to tell you about today is the cakes.We’ve introduced her to very little sugar in her short little life so far, and in that spirit I developed a very low sugar vegetable-based cake for her second birthday called a Harvest Cake. It was such a hit we decided to do it again this year.

It pays to leave cookbooks lying about when my mother comes to town. This week she surprised us with two great mid-week home-cooked meals. All I had to do was take the picture.Last night’s spread was from Nate Appleman and Shelley Lindgren’s A16: Food & Wine (Ten Speed Press), a book from the acclaimed A16 restaurant in San Francisco that, despite it having come out a year ago, I hadn’t yet explored.

When I was little, my dad and I spent Sunday mornings on the Santa Monica beach. Before heading home we’d sometime hike up to the pier and buy a newspaper cone of freshly made potato chips from a little stand there and share them on the ride home. They were warm, and slightly soft in the middle, just out of the fryer.

When we were in Italy in June, we stayed at a friend’s house that, as luck would have it, was down the road from a fantastically fertile wild cherry tree. Each morning we’d hike up to it and fill our hats. One morning we even used the rental car as a ladder in order to reach some more choice branches.So of course, I had to make cherry pie.

Tuesday night some old friends who live upstate came for dinner, and surprised us with an armful of Morel mushrooms and a sack full of ramps. I’d planned a simple roasted chicken and vegetable dinner, but when I saw the gift I’d been brought, I clicked into cook-by-instinct mode, the kind of cooking we are about to start espousing in the second half of our online Kitchen Cure (today is the last day to sign up and catch up.)I had to practice what I’m about to preach.

My mom grew up in the 40s and 50s camping in Yosemite where she dined on my grandfather’s version of a sardine sandwich: a Ritz cracker with a slice of cheddar, a lump of sardine packed in mustard, and a bit of dill pickle on top.Sixty years later, there aren’t many fish left that we can eat without feeling like we’re destroying the environment or poisoning ourselves with mercury, but the sardine is still a great choice.

It’s Easter egg time at our house. Last year we brought you the story of Huevos Haminados, a Passover tradition of dying eggs with onion skins. This year, I decided to try it with both yellow and red onions, on white and brown eggs. The result was a gentle palate of reds and browns.My favorites were the chocolaty brown eggs that came from dying brown eggs with red skins.This is a great, natural way to make subtly beautiful Easter (or Passover) eggs.

Corn and sunflower sprouts jumped out as a perfect accompaniment for the Mexican themed Goat Taco dinner party I had going that night.

Last week, when Meat/Un-Meat month was covering lamb, pork and goat, I gave a quick Goat Meat 101 but getting a recipe up was a different matter. It took the better part of the week and weekend to find it, cook it, and serve it, let alone write about it. So here, a bit belated, is my goat taco post. I bought my 8-pound goat leg from Ottomanelli’s in the West Village. Frank, the butcher, cut the leg, bone-in, into 2-3″ chunks.

Maxwell was lucky to be part of a kale chip making project a few nights ago — very un-meat, eh? — when he was visiting an apartment being photographed for his upcoming book. He came home, barely put his briefcase down, and started rummaging through the fridge asking “do we have any Kale? I want to make chips!” Pic: ChowMama“Sure, you know Dana posted a Kale Chip recipe in November.

I’m still in LA, and Maxwell finally joined me a few nights ago. I took him straight from the airport to dinner at Mozza, a Nancy Silverton/Mario Batali/Joseph Bastianich production in Hollywood that I’ve been wanting to try. We sat at the bar and nibbled on this knock-out salad: a concoction of crispy crimson endive, whisper thin fennel and slabs of Parmesan cheese tossed with a dressing made from dates and anchovies.