Savor the ethereal perfectness of a just-baked madeleine. The slightly warm madeleines with a crispy exterior and a cake-like interior bursting with the bright flavors of fresh lemon.

The beauty of this dough is its versatility; you can shape it into small balls and cook like gnocchi, or roll it out into pasta sheets and make ravioli, cannelloni, or strands of pasta. If you don’t have ramp greens substitute more baby spinach. I like to serve the pasta alongside roasted chickens and stews as much as eaten by itself simply tossed in butter, salt, and grated parmesan.

One of my favorite Provençale dipping sauces is called Anchoïade. It is an anchovy sauce that marries perfectly with raw and lightly cooked vegetables, smeared on tartines and served with a classic lentil salad, or drizzled over roasted red peppers stuffed with creamy goat cheese and basil.

This might start as a bad joke, but I promise it isn’t. I was making ‘Nun’s Farts’ yesterday, the more colorful name for feather-light deep-fried beignets, and was struck by how diverse the dough actually was. It got me thinking about the differences between how a chef and a home cook approach cooking. Chefs learn to multi-task many different preparations (mise en place) in order to be ready for service on any given day. Home cooks, while they may multi-task to get through their busy days, generally make one dish to feed their entire family. Most home cooks I have watched tend to make each dish from start to finish.

When I originally wrote about chicken stock prior to Covid-19 changing our world, I described how many people were rediscovering the advantages of healthy home cooking. That more people were eating whole, unprocessed foods and shopping at their local farmers' market. Now that Covid-19 has changed the food landscape, we are heading towards a more depression-era strategy of being thrifty and frugal with our food supply.