Vanilla Salt

Each Easter season, people flock to the grocery store and pick up marshmallow Peeps. Shauna Sever, author of Marshmallow Madness!: Dozens of Puffalicious Recipes, shows you how to make your own marshmallow chicks and other holiday shapes. Here's her marshmallow recipe to get you started.

Welcome to Open Kitchen, a series journeying inside the kitchens of renowned chefs and food personalities. In our inaugural episode, we visit legendary cookbook author Dorie Greenspan. Dorie welcomes us into her Connecticut home for a tour of her kitchen. During our visit, she shows us the process through which she creates bestselling cookbooks like "Everyday Dorie" and "Dorie's Cookies." Dorie also walks us through a selection of her favorite kitchen tools, including her adorable silicone spatulas and baking sheets. And after all that, she still has the time to make her delicious French vanilla sablé cookies.

At her NYC chocolate shop Stick With Me Sweets, Susanna Yoon (formerly of Per Se) makes edible miniature works of art. These colorful, marbleized, portable chocolate domes are packed with the flavors and textures of some of Susanna’s favorite desserts, which include a kalamansi meringue pie, and the vero, a silver blue bonbon that houses a mix of sea salt caramel and crunchy pecan bits. In the words of the chef, handcrafted chocolate is the sweetest way to tell somebody “stick with me”.

Homemade whipped cream is so easy, and so much better than the stuff in tubs and cans. Perfect proportions of heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla are whipped just until medium peaks form; easy to customize and ready to top any dessert or drink you can dream up. Get the recipe.

Most granola is a fancy twist on toasted oats—consider that when contemplating the exorbitant prices retailers charge for it. The thing is, granola is incredibly easy to make at home, and for a fraction of the cost. This recipe is a granola base to which you can add whatever dried fruit, nuts, or other tasty bits make you happy. Feel free to tweak this with other spices, a little less honey, more salt—it’s quite forgiving, and customizing your own blend is the fun of making your own. If you want to experiment even further, try using other rolled grains such as spelt or barley and wheat instead of oats. Read more.