Food

    Without a doubt, trying to make a truly delicious vegan dessert is a challenge. Trying to make a flaky, delicious vegan pie crust even more so.

    Some recipes for vegan desserts are better left ignored, or improved upon, or at least challenged. Ignored because some things just don’t taste very good with alterations. Improved upon because some recipes show promise but are sloppy. And some should be challenged because there really is no substitute for whipped cream or meringue or many other things, taste and texture-wise.

New at Harbor Grill

    Winter’s a ‘comin’, the days are darkening early, what to do? Girls nights! Gentlemen, you can turn straight to Jack Graves’s sports page or reread the police blotter, this column is not for you. It is for me and my girlfriends.

Nammo’s Estiatoria

136 Main Street

Southampton

287-5500

Dinner nightly, closed Mondays

    Long Island Restaurant Week begins on Sunday. For a week, through Nov. 10, participating restaurants will be offering $27.95 prix fixe menus. The special will be offered all night each night, except on Saturday, when it will be available only until 7 p.m. It will include a choice from at least three appetizers, three entrees, and three desserts.

    Among the local eateries that are participating are Almond in Bridgehampton, Noah’s in Greenport, the 1770 House and the Living Room in East Hampton, and the Bell and Anchor in Sag Harbor.

    After 23 years at the helm of Cafe Max, Max Weintraub has turned over the wheel to Sami Krasniqi, who began his restaurant career at the iconic eatery as a dishwasher two weeks after it opened. But not much, if anything, has changed. Mr. Weintraub is still involved from afar and has inked a deal with Mr. Krasniqi in which the two share in profits.

Highway Diner and Bar

    The Highway Diner and Bar in Wainscott, a year-round, locally-owned bar and restaurant, is gearing up for the fall and winter season with a new cocktail menu, which includes a spiced pumpkin vodka martini, and lower prices on wines by the glass.

    This is the saga of an attempt to get an interview to publicize a cookbook for the benefit of an author who approached The East Hampton Star for said story in the first place.

Paella Dinner

    A cooking class centered on making a paella dinner, to be offered by Bridgehampton’s Loaves and Fishes Cookshop at the Bridgehampton Inn on Saturday, will include instructions for making both seafood and chicken and sausage paella. For dessert, a milk chocolate flan with a pistachio sable sauce will be prepared. The class takes place from 6 to 9 p.m. and costs $165.

The Merliance

    I love Halloween. I love being scared, love haunted houses, love costumes, and love candy corn. But nowadays it seems like zombies and vampires are so popular that we are inundated with the undead, bloodsucking creatures all year round. Turn on the TV to watch something blandly amusing and ads for “The Walking Dead” or “American Horror Story” will scare the bejesus out of you. Change the channel and there’s Ted Cruz. Eeeek!

1770 House Tavern

143 Main Street

East Hampton

324-1770

Dinner nightly

    Reservations are being taken for a Nov. 1 wine dinner called France Uncorked, featuring French wines and five courses at the Living Room restaurant in East Hampton, at c/o the Maidstone inn.

Farm Fresh Produce

    I know very little about food and wine pairing but am an eager student. I appreciate meals moistened with wine chosen by a friend in the know. But I also agree with Richard Olney’s philosophy that “it is a mistake to freeze such a variable and seductive landscape with rigid rules.”

    The Lucy’s Whey cheese shop has shut its doors on North Main Street in East Hampton, where it was based for six years, but plans to relocate in East Hampton by late spring. In New York City, where there is a Lucy’s Whey shop at the Chelsea Market, another cheese store, with a cafe, will be opening in a few weeks on the Upper East Side, at Lexington Avenue near 93rd Street.

Fall Changes

   With the exception of Swedish meatballs and gravadlax, most Americans, no matter how culinarily sophisticated, have a limited knowledge of Swedish food.

   A lot of our ignorance is due to a concept of humility that informs the Swedish temperament called janteelagen, according to Andrew Reice, an American who lives in Sweden and mounted Swedish Culininary Summer, a marketing campaign to introduce South Forkers to both Swedish cuisine and culture this summer. “It’s hard to promote yourself when you’re not supposed to brag,” he said.

Here Comes Oktoberfest

    The annual Oktoberfest at Rowdy Hall in East Hampton begins on Saturday with a 3 to 5 p.m. celebration featuring a re-creation of a German beer garden, with outdoor picnic tables and communal dining tables in the dining room. There will be Bavarian music outdoors from 3 to 5, and a live broadcast by WEHM radio, along with German bar snacks such as knockwurst, brat­wurst, and bockwurst. Oktoberfest beer specials will be served in a commemorative pilsner glass for $8, with refills for $4, and an Oktoberfest beer tasting flight will be offered for $10.

    I have now had my little camp at Lazy Point for five years. Five years, long enough for the clams in my secret clam bed to mature and become sustenance. Long enough for me to learn what I need and don’t need to make time spent out there worthwhile, restorative, contemplative.

    With Labor Day now past, restaurants have begun to adjust their hours for the quieter season. In East Hampton Village, the Blue Parrot is now open Thursday for dinner starting at 5 p.m., and on Friday and Saturday for lunch and dinner beginning at noon. There are daily happy hour specials.

    Smokin’ Wolf, the barbecue takeout spot on Pantigo Road in East Hampton, has new hours as well. It is open Sunday to Thursday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

   W­hy pickle, can, and preserve? The best reason is because of where we live. The bounty of fruits and vegetables available to us makes the effort worthwhile. It is also satisfying and economical. And the little jars of what you have made make swell gifts.

    Fall brings new options for foodies. Rowdy Hall in East Hampton will offer a weekly dinner and movie special beginning on Sunday. With the purchase of the nightly special entree, patrons will get a ticket to the East Hampton Cinema with their dinners for a combined price of $20.

    The special is available Sunday through Thursday. Featured entrees, for which a vegetarian dish may be substituted, include meatloaf on Sunday, burgers on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and moules frites on Thursday.

Football Season Fare

   In her native Uruguay, Luisa Masliah, who is called Luchi, earned a degree in clinical psychology. But her first business, started with friends right after college, was a gourmet takeout shop called Gula Gula.

    In its literal translation to English, the Spanish term “means more like gluttony,” she explained during a recent interview in East Hampton, but also refers to eating with enjoyment, or “comer con gusto.”

    The summer vacation season may be ending, but local restaurateurs continue to bring specials to the table.

    At The Bell & Anchor in Noyac, customers may choose either a two-course or three-course prix fixe, for $30 or $35. Both are offered all night from Sunday through Thursday, and on Friday and Saturday from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.

    Among the choices are such appetizers as chowder, served with salad, and brandade, served with potatoes and garlic.

Pan-Seared Swordfsh With Black Olives and Cherry Tomatoes

    This recipe is just a guideline, feel free to play with it.

Serves four.

1 lb. thick-sliced swordfish, belly is good

1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved

1/2 cup pitted and chopped kalamata olives

1/2 cup each chopped fresh basil and parsley

1 lemon, 1/2 cut into thin rings and seeded, the other half for squeezing juice at end of cooking

2 Tbsp. olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

    Swordfish are found around the world in tropical, temperate, and sometimes cold waters of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. North Atlantic swordfish annually migrate thousands of miles along the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada. They are one of the fastest and largest predators in the ocean, capable of swimming up to 50 miles per hour, thanks to their beautifully streamlined bodies.

   So, you’ve always wanted to make your fortune replicating Aunt Sally’s rhubarb shortcake. But the board of health might not okay your kitchen, given the dogs that sleep in the corners and the cats that trespass on counters. Due to the farm-to-table movement and the culinary artisans it has bred, a clutch of kitchens have sprouted up in East Hampton Town to provide a springboard for food entrepreneurs.

   Don’t bother asking the chef Tom Colicchio to name a dish that’s a standard crowd pleaser at home. As he has often said, his last meal would be his mother’s gravy — which, for an Italian from New Jersey, is tomatoes, meatballs, and braciole over macaroni, otherwise known as pasta. But when it comes to dinner with his wife and kids, Mr. Colicchio rarely makes the same thing twice. “There’s nothing favorite. It changes from time to time. I don’t like to repeat myself.”

   The highlight of Quail Hill’s At the Common Table on Saturday, the 10th such benefit for the community-supported farm overseen by the Peconic Land Trust, was dinner served in the orchard at a long table for 165, set beautifully with flowers, candles, and Mason jars of pickles — dilly beans, cucumber spears, garlic scapes — preserved from the Amagansett farm’s bounty.

Pie Making

    Farm stand shoppers enjoying luscious late-summer fruits and interested in learning about making pies with them will have an opportunity next Thursday, when Leslie Dumont, a onetime pie-crust purveyor, offers a class in her Amagansett kitchen. Ms. Dumont’s Proud to be Flaky Pie School will present a 6 to 9:30 p.m. session on summer fruit pie and autumn apple tart. Participants, limited to four, will master piecrust, she promises, and create a double-crust lattice fruit pie as well as a rustic fruit tart.

    Tickets are on sale for Harvest East End, a celebration of 40 years of winemaking on Long Island’s East End, to be held at the McCall Vineyard and Ranch in Cutchogue on Aug. 24. The event will include a tasting from 7 to 9:30 p.m. of regional winemakers’ current releases and barrel samples of wines yet to be released, along with foods from local farmers, fishermen, and other food artisans, prepared by a team of local chefs.