Cream may not be the healthiest of foods. But pick the right one for the job and use it sparingly to add richness to foods both in the cooking and to finished desserts. There's no substitute.

When Zora Margolis cooks Mexican tamales, she makes the masa herself. That’s the spongy corn dough containing the stuffing. It may sound like no big deal. (She makes her own tortillas, too. And verduras escabeche - pickled vegetables. Everything at her Mexican feasts, in fact.) But you can’t get hold of the kind of fresh corn you need to make the masa anywhere in the greater Washington area. Huitzilopochtli knows, she tried.