Floral poppy seeds perfume tart fresh blueberries in the filling for borůvkový koláč, a traditional Czech dessert. The seeds must be ground to release their flavor; buy them pre-ground from Kalustyan’s, or grind whole seeds as finely as possible using a spice grinder, blender, meat grinder, or mortar and pestle. Poppy seeds turn rancid quickly, so buy them from a source with reliable turnover, then store whatever’s left in the freezer. When lining the pan with dough in step 1, it may be helpful to use the bottom of a water glass to press it into an even layer.

Featured in “Flower Power,” by Gabriella Gershenson. 

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“Beautiful, just beautiful. Oh, yay.” The buttermilk pancakes, in perfect disks interrupted only by the plumpest blueberries, are on the grill. And Mary Rusch couldn’t be more gleeful.

The proprietor, head cook and personality behind Mary’s Hash House, in a bright strip mall in west Las Vegas, is 17 years into serving up her favorite meals. But she still gets a kick out of the blueberry pancakes, a food tradition she has long shared with her three sisters. There are also four brothers, eight siblings in total from an old-fashioned Ohio family.

“They thought I’d lost my marbles,” no-nonsense Rusch says of her move to Sin City 30 years ago. “But who can beat having sunshine 365 days a year?”

The weather might have lured her out west, but now she has a labor of love that couldn’t survive without her. Rusch arrives every morning, except Friday, her day off, at 4:30 am to get her homemade cinnamon rolls in the oven and sauces going on the stove. She eats almost every meal at her own establishment, and her husband, a retired cop, comes in around mealtimes.

And who can blame him? Waffles, eggs, toast – and hash (naturally) to write home about, crispy potatoes with roast beef, garlic chicken or salty ham. Or all three. Rusch is also quite famous for her 20 flavors of homemade jelly, served on a big tray, looking like a colorful display of Jell-o shots. Her specialties: jalapeno and a sticky passion fruit.

Rusch, who mans her kitchen in black denim shorts and a Mary’s T-shirt, hasn’t been to the Strip (about four miles away) in five years. She considers all of her customers friends. (A common order: “just my usual.”)

“People,” she says, “like to stay in their neighborhood.”

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Until the age of seven, I thought my father was a movie star. He left the house every day wearing a tuxedo and whistling Yves Montand. He returned every night with pockets full of money. Edmond Louis Le Draoulec was a waiter. Not the kind who keeps a screenplay in his sock drawer, but a career waiter—right down to his collection of satin cummerbunds.

My father lived to seduce diners with his expertise and tableside charm. He felt that every meal was special, and had little patience for those who didn’t see waitering as an art. This set the course for my life as a food writer. I turned down the job of restaurant critic at the New York Daily News twice because I didn’t want to tell people not to go to a restaurant. When I finally accepted in 2001, I imagined my parents as the diners I would write to, people who cherished every meal and every dime.

From the early 1960s through the late 1990s, my father worked in some of Los Angeles’s most celebrated dining rooms: Scandia, The Saloon, The Ambassador Hotel. Each morning before school, he would regale my sister and me with tales from his shift: “The chef was so angry, he flung a bread roll at Mario!” “The hostess is giving Jean-Louis all the best tables, c’est louche.” “The paparazzi were out in full force last night.” While he spoke, my mother would brush his tuxedo jacket, which smelled of shrimp scampi, cigarettes, and cologne. First, she’d scatter the contents of the pockets on the table: champagne corks, breath mints, the occasional escargot shell (for his girls), and, of course, cash. My father would interrupt his narrative to tell her about the canard a l’orange or Dover sole he’d brought home for our lunches.

In 1941, Edmond and his parents fled occupied Brittany and hid on the tiny island of Porquerolles, in Provence, and food was scarce. He likes to tell the story of the day he stumbled upon a barrel of lard that had washed ashore, presumably from a sunken warship. It may as well have been a pot of gold, he says, because they could use it to fry potatoes. I’ve wondered if his career had to do with silencing that growling stomach.

Living with his parents in Nice, at 16, my father took a summer job as garçon de cafe at a beachside terrace. Instead of going back to school, he signed up for fine-dining training at a hotel in Evian, France. He never looked back. In 1960, he crossed the Atlantic to work at the swank Beaver Club in Montreal. There, he met my mother, Lucette, also fresh off the boat from France. She, too, had known hunger. He took her out for a steak dinner but he was so smitten, he couldn’t eat. Lucette directed her fork at his T-bone: “May I?” They were married six months later.

Edmond and Lucette bought an old Chevrolet and followed Route 66 until they reached Santa Monica, California. They found an apartment the day they arrived, after which my father went out for a smoke. He poked his head inside a restaurant called The San Francisco and was hired on the spot. Finding a job was never a problem. The network of French expat waiters was thick. Keeping one was another story. One chef fired him for refusing to deliver a New York strip he deemed overcooked. He was dismissed from another restaurant for trying to unionize, and yet another for passing the bartender pilfered steaks.

Yet there were places where he stayed put, and despite the odd hours, my father was a family man. During the Scandia years, we would go camping at Leo Carrillo State Park, near Malibu. He couldn’t take time off, so he would swim with us by day, slip into his tux, and drive to work in the afternoon. The first thing I’d see the next morning was his uniform hanging from the branch of a sycamore.

My father developed close relationships with many of his regulars, who showed their appreciation by slipping him cash. While he felt no guilt swiping a lobster from the walk-in, my father was fanatical about sharing tips with the other waiters. Some tips were priceless. When my mother was diagnosed with cancer at 63, one of my father’s customers, a doctor, got her the best surgeon.

By the time I became a critic, my father’s health had declined and he wasn’t able to travel much. Still, I felt him there with me, night after night, condemning a mere fish soup that dared call itself bouillabaisse, or praising the bartender who had bothered to float a lemon zest in my Kir. On his last visit to New York, he joined me on a review of Thomas Keller’s Per Se. The service was flawless. I wanted so badly to tell our waiter that he was in the presence of a pro. But by then, long retired, my father was ready to be fawned over. That was gift enough.

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Each spring as a child in Ohio, I would take walks with my grandfather through the woods near his home in search of morel mushrooms. These delectable fungi briefly poke their honeycombed heads out of the ground for a few weeks to spread their spores, usually in early spring, and then return to the earth until the following year. Morels don’t take well to cultivation, so the limited time to enjoy the wild treasures charged the activity with the urgency of an Easter egg hunt.

Like most serious morel pickers, my grandfather never disclosed his secret spot to other foragers. But as his initiate, I knew that they thrived in moist areas, near logs or dying trees, once the weather turned warm. We’d fill our paper bags with black morels, Morchella elata, which possess a robust, earthy flavor, as well as yellow ones, Morchella esculenta, which are larger, with a gentler woodsy taste.

Though we waited patiently for the morels to appear, once we had them, we ate them quickly. Our preparation was simple: We’d wash the mushrooms thoroughly, soak them in saltwater for half an hour, halve them, dredge them in flour, fry them in butter, and season them with salt and pepper. (Morels must be eaten cooked; eating them raw can cause an upset stomach.) The meaty, bite-size fritters were addictive. Morels are also wonderful in soups, and impart deep, savory flavor to sauces for everything from pasta to roast chicken.

When I moved away from Ohio, I lost touch with these springtime delicacies. That is, until I discovered Earthy Delights. This purveyor of specialty foods based in DeWitt, Michigan, sells morels gathered by foragers in California, Oregon, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana, and can deliver them within three to four days of picking. Buying morels doesn’t replicate the time I spent with my grandfather, but I always think of him when I eat them. Morels cost $29 to $49 per pound. To order, call 800/367-4709 or visit earthy.com.

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All poppy seeds are harvested from seedpods, like the ones pictured at right. There’s the floral-tasting blue-black European variety (Papaver somniferum), the sweeter brown Turkish type (Papaver somniferum nigrum), and small, mild white poppy seeds (Papaver somniferum album), which are common in Asian cooking. (Because of their high oil content, whole poppy seeds should be stored in the freezer to preserve their freshness.) In many Indian dishes, white poppy seeds are pounded into spice pastes for curries; they also add nutty depth to desserts and sweet beverages.

In Japan, white poppy seeds are often a component of the seasoning mix called shichimi togarashi, which includes sansho pepper, sesame seeds, and other spices. In Eastern Europe, cooks use grinders designed to crush the seeds and release their flavorful oils, an important step in making the sweet paste featured in so many of the region’s pastries. These sweet fillings are sold in cans and they can be made with ground poppy seeds. There’s also poppy seed oil, which makes for a nutty-tasting vinaigrette.

See the article Flower Power »

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I love this photo—this weird, blurry snapshot of the Las Vegas Strip taken with my Blackberry. The vantage point is the balcony of the room at the Cosmopolitan where our editor-in-chief, James Oseland, had set up camp for a month. (By then we were calling it “saveur West.”) He was in Las Vegas filming the latest edition of Top Chef Masters; executive food editor Todd Coleman, kitchen director Kellie Evans, and I had flown out to join him for a week. When I snapped this picture, we’d just come off a day of non-stop reporting and shooting. That particular brand of giddy exhaustion that can set in after 48 hours in Vegas had hit all of us, hard. And then Jim invited us out on the balcony. He said, “Look. Just look at that.” It was like the scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out of her black-and-white world into a Technicolor dream. I was instantly revived, and hungry for more.

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A trove of vintage menus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, showcases the aspirations and appetites of a city that has been feeding fantasies for seven decades. A cow-girl poses in front of the iconic windmill of El Rancho Vegas (top left), the Strip’s first casino hotel, on a circa 1943 menu. Though it harkened back to Vegas’s cow-town past, El Rancho was forward-thinking: Its “buckaroo buffets” set the stage for all-you-can-eat spreads to come, and its Round-Up Room pioneered Vegas dinner theater. By 1955, the Cold War was encroaching, and the nuclear arms and space race had become part of the city’s idea of fun. Hotels threw viewing parties for atom bomb detonations at the Nevada Test Site, located 65 miles from the Strip, while the menu for the Venus Room (top right) in the New Frontier Hotel evoked the dream of interplanetary travel. Bacchanal (bottom right) at Caesars Palace, erected in 1966, cloaked Swinging Sixties hedonism in Roman garb. The belly dancer, camels, and casbah on the cover of a 1981 menu from the Sahara Hotel’s Caravan Room (bottom left) belie the coffee-shop offerings within: “home style chili goodies” and—a true sign of the times—dishes from the Scarsdale Diet.

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First, we stopped into the Stardust Casino—decrepit, dirty-rugged, and nearing demolition—and dropped a thousand nickles in the slots. Then we dashed across the Strip to the Peppermill Lounge. With an interior so dimly lit, you feel like you’re hiding in plain site, the Peppermill is a place made for couples—and for couples who aren’t really couples. The latter is the kind of couple we were. She was 30. I was 42. We had met at a party in New York City; we had known each other a couple of weeks. She was destined, a gal from Indiana, for marriage to a nice young man. I was an older woman with a decidedly different future. But, for this one Vegas lark, cobbled together from a limited expense account and my father’s frequent flyer miles, she was just my type. Amid the chrome and the pink and blue neon lights, while a few old men sat on swivel seats and hit the buttons on the electronic poker machines built into the bar, we squeezed in between all the other pairs drinking and necking on the curved couches arranged around an open gas flame that blazed at the center of an electric blue fountain in the middle of the room. We sunk into the crimson pillows, and thigh to thigh, with sweet, bowl-shaped cocktails cupped in our hands, we fell in love for a weekend.

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It looks like a block of peanut butter, but gjetost is cheese, even if it is brown and sweet. Meaning “goat cheese” in Norwegian, gjetost (pronounced YAY-toast) is made by caramelizing whey left over after removing the curds from goat’s milk. Whey, which has been a part of the Norwegian diet since the Viking Age, is boiled until thickened, and then placed into molds to harden. Pure goat’s whey cheese has a salty, burnt sugar taste. The most popular whey cheese in Norway, however, named Gudbrandsdalsost for the Gudbrands Valley, where it originated, has only 10 percent goat’s whey; the rest is cow’s whey, milk, and cream. The brand available in the U.S., called Ski Queen Gjetost, has a mild caramel flavor. In Scandinavia, it’s added to sauces for reindeer and other game, and it’s great, too, for fondue. Like Norwegians, though, I enjoy it best sliced and simply served on crispbread.

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A thyme-infused butter enhances the flavor of this skillet-seared steak, inspired by one at Prime Steakhouse, at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Pair it with homemade Black Pepper-Horseradish Zabaglione or Miso-Mustard Butter sauce. This recipe first appeared in our April 2012 issue along with Max Jacobson’s story Dining Like a Rhinestone Cowboy.

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