Celebrity Mound

THE BREAKFAST SHOW – MONDAY FEBRUARY 11, 2008

Martha kicks off Romance Week with today’s Breakfast Show, full of recipes that your sweetheart — and our pajama-clad audience — will love. First, New Orleans restaurateurs Ti Adelaide Martin and Lally Brennan (Commander’s Palace) prepare brandy milk punch and brandy alexander, two indulgent cocktails perfect for a special breakfast. Then, Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, cochefs of the star-studded Manhattan eatery Balthazar, return to show you how to make brioche French toast, the ultimate breakfast in bed for Valentine’s Day. Plus, chef Josh Eden of New York City restaurant Shorty’s 32 reveals his recipe for classic eggs benedict. And, chef Neil Kleinberg of the Clinton Street Baking Company teaches you his signature recipe for perfect buttermilk biscuits. Don’t miss this fun hour full of delicious ways to rise and shine.

The Christmas season brought Martha Stewart one fond memory of her stay in a West Virginia prison.

On the Christmas Day episode of her television show, Stewart showed off ornate clay forms of the baby Jesus, Joseph, Mary, three camels and others she sculpted at a pottery class at the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, W.Va.

“Even though every inmate was only allowed to do one a month, and I was only there for five months, I begged because I said I was an expert potter – ceramicist actually – and could I please make the entire nativity scene,” she said.

Her creations were all fired and glazed at the prison. She completed the effect with tiny artificial palm trees imported from Germany by a New Jersey distributor.

Stewart was imprisoned in 2005 for lying about her sale of ImClone stock.

Martha Stewart

Paula Zahn

Martha Kostyra, whose daughter Martha Stewart credits her with teaching her many domestic tricks and techniques, has died at a hospital near her home in Weston. She was 93.

Stewart announced her mother’s death Saturday on her blog, and Weston selectman Glenn Major confirmed the death.

Kostyra, a retired teacher whose family long ago nicknamed her “Big Martha,” died Friday at Norwalk Hospital of undisclosed causes, according to a notice published Saturday in local newspapers.

Kostyra and her husband, the late Edward Kostyra, raised the future domestic doyenne and her five siblings in Nutley, N.J., where, Stewart said, she learned many tricks of what later turned into her trade.

In an appearance together in December 2003 on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Kostyra described herself as “very proud” of her daughter’s accomplishments.

“And you know, the first thing people say to me when they meet me for the first time, they’ll say, ‘Did you teach her everything she knows?’ Well, I’ll take the credit, certainly,” Kostyra said in the interview.

Until recently, Martha Stewart lived in a Colonial-era estate in Westport, not far from her mother’s Weston home. Stewart put the estate on the market and now lives primarily in Katonah, N.Y., about 20 miles away.

Some of Stewart’s siblings still live near Kostyra’s Weston home, including a sister who lives in town and was often spotted on errands with the matriarch.

“We all knew who she was, but she was low-key and nobody made a big deal out of it,” Major, the selectman, said Saturday. “There are a lot of well-known people who live here, so nobody thinks anything of it to see them around.”