HB&B Blog — Claire Bullen

In my early days of learning about wine, Pinot Noir intrigued me from the start. There was its fickleness, its delicacy: thin-skinned Pinot is sublime in good years, but can be easily destroyed by early frosts, hail or other inclement conditions. For many winemakers, it's a heart-breaker. And it happens to make the kind of wine I like most of all: relatively light-bodied, glittering, vibrant with red fruit characteristics, silkily tannic. Pinot Noir is often described as having cherry and floral notes, though it is perhaps most distinguished by its forest floor character. I love “forest floor because it sounds,...

Remember beaches? The faraway ones, I mean. The ones that took a train and an airport bus and an ungodly early budget flight to reach? Remember the hassle of it all? The too-full carry-on bags and the boarding passes that wouldn’t scan properly and the obligatory Prêt breakfasts? Remember finally arriving, dropping off your suitcases, heading out of your Airbnb or hotel and feeling the sun of somewhere else on your shoulders? Sure, it was the same sun as the one you had back home, but it never felt like it. I recall reading a tweet early in lockdown that...

  Early September is always a period of in-between, a time of shift and recalibration. The body has stored up memories of all those years of back-to-school returns. An autumnal coolness can already be detected in the night breezes, though summer isn’t technically over until the equinox. What to make of this time? As temperatures begin to drop, it’s tempting to start cooking (and drinking) like it’s already October, like there are already wood fires burning and piles of leaves on the ground. But this year – a year when summer has slipped by without much fanfare or celebration –...

I discovered Jerrelle Guy's recipe for strawberry spoon cake, published in NYT Cooking, several months back – just in time to bring it along to a friend's backyard pizza party when lockdown restrictions lifted. It's not an exaggeration to say that it has single-handedly changed the course of my summer. Everything about this cake encapsulates the dog days of August: it's consummately lazy, comes together in 20 minutes and requires ingredients you most likely already have in your kitchen. This is a cake you could plausibly whip up on a whim if it's late in the evening and you decide...

We've entered the time of year when turning on the oven feels like death; when the heat makes any kitchen project that takes more than 30 minutes unbearable. Right now, a juicy wedge of watermelon could very well count as dinner, with or without the accompanying feta and mint. For those lucky enough to have gardens, they're likely spilling over with gluts of late-summer vegetables. That bounty is both a blessing and a curse. If you find yourself with an excess of tomatoes this year, and have made all the caprese salads and soups and pasta sauces you can stand,...