First it was omega-3s, then it was antioxidants; now, the food rage is probiotics. (Mind you, these have all been mainstay elements of whole, unprocessed foods for millennia, long before food scientists and genetic engineers and corporate interests got involved in our food chain. Thankfully, we’re now “discovering” that traditional cuisines contain plenty of foods [...]
I love eggs, especially the eggs with the bright orange yolks that I get from my farmer every week. (Thanks to the proliferation of farmer’s markets and community-supported farms, even urban dwellers can get honest-to-goodness eggs laid by hens who spend their days scratching in the dirt for tasty bugs…as opposed to eggs from factory-fed [...]
In the world of natural sweeteners — i.e., unrefined sweeteners like maple syrup and molasses — there aren’t as many solid sweeteners as there are liquid ones. Normally, this works out fine when baking, because most baked goods include liquids (which allows you to tinker with the overall total amount of liquids), but some baked [...]
Continue reading about Creating Tasty & Healthy Chiffon Cakes (Amongst Other Things)
I can’t be sure about this, but I’m guessing Italian panzanella sprang out of that greatest of all culinary traditions: using up the leftovers. After all, who hasn’t grown up hearing “waste not, want not”? The original Tuscan recipe calls for making a caprese salad — tomatoes, basil, fresh mozzarella, red wine or balsamic vinegar, [...]
The concept of stacking various foods and seasonings atop a flat, fairly resilient piece of bread is such a good idea that most culinary traditions do it. Some breads are flatter and rounder than others, and some are more flexible than others — burritos are tidy, bread-bound packages, too — but if you’re willing to [...]
Here’s an example of how top-notch ingredients can transform standard ballgame junk fare into a dish you’d be proud to serve Emeril Lagasse. Seek out grass-fed hot dogs (Trader Joe’s carries products from Applegate Farms), whip up your own homemade cocktail sauce, and enjoy a truly American meal. The proof really is in the dog!
Real [...]
I always love to tinker in the kitchen (when my dad does so in his workshop, we call it “puttering”), but lately, I’ve been even more inspired to see if the sometimes-odd-sounding culinary combinations I come up with in my head actually taste as good as I’m hoping they will. Sometimes they do, sometimes they [...]
When I was a kid, I thought cranberries were sweet — after all, cranberry juice sure was! But then I finally tasted an honest-to-goodness whole cranberry and realized that good ol’ Ocean Spray had added a fair amount of sweeteners to make the juice palatable for the American tongue. Now that I’ve veered off the [...]
I love ice cream. (Who doesn’t?) I love chocolate. (Ditto.) Lately, I had the best chocolate ice cream I’d ever tasted — it was silky and creamy beyond belief and hinted at a little something past the cocoa. The secret, I figured out after the third spoonful, was that it was made with coconut milk [...]
