Mississippi baker and James Beard Award–winning cookbook author Martha Foose has a knack for letting simple flavors shine. Her recipe for a traditional almond cake is a showstopper of a dessert—the kind that leaves friends and family clamoring to know the secret. But you don’t need to be a Paris-trained pastry chef like Foose to pull it off. An almond cake is the rare dessert that’s almost impossible to mess up.

Long before black tea and cane sugar came to the Americas, Southern natives were sipping muscadine juice. Its woodsy funk still makes regular old grape juice taste one-dimensional and boring. And now, you don’t need vines in your backyard to keep the refrigerator stocked

Whether you’re walking down an urban sidewalk or working in the garden, chances are there’s chickweed nearby. Why should you care? Because it's delicious. Not only does chickweed add crunchy texture to salads, but it also has a bright, vegetal flavor not unlike that of raw green peas.

1. If you’re in the D.C. area, keep an eye on Jeremiah Langhorne. On Saturday morning, the former chef de cuisine at Charleston restaurant McCrady’s joined Baltimore chef and restaurateur Spike Gjerde to cook a standing-room-only brunch in the leafy courtyard outside vintage cookbook shop the Heirloom Collection. The highlights included bourbon-brined and smoked oysters topped with crème fraiche, wrapped in buckwheat crepes, and garnished with spoonfuls of perch caviar; rye chilaquiles topped with crowder peas, diced rutabaga, and spicy espelette salsa; and sour-milk donuts slathered with sweet blood orange jam. And although the setting was low-key, the bites were among the best of the weekend, and Langhorne confirmed that he is still on track to open his Washington, D.C., restaurant by the end of the year.