Food & Nutrition

Jalapeno popper dip is a warm and creamy party appetizer taking its flavor cues from jalapeno poppers and turning them into cheesy scoopable bites. Try this party favorite with cream cheese, sour cream, bacon, a four-cheese Mexican blend and fresh jalapenos topped with a crispy panko bread crumb layer. Today we’re making a jalapeno popper dip that’s a great appetizer to bring to the Super Bowl party, get-togethers and potlucks. It delivers all the flavors of a warm, creamy and cheesy jalapeno popper, without all the work. It gets a little kick from fresh jalapenos (which you can also roast for even more flavor) but not so much heat that you’ll be running for a glass of milk. Customize the spice level to your tastes by removing or keeping the seeds. For more fun party dips, try...

The Quebecois arc of taste is assumedly saccharine; Quebec produces more than two-thirds of the world’s maple supply. I still remember, years ago, between attending a Habs game and eating late-night poutine at La Banquise, when I stumbled upon my first taste of tire d’érable during the Montréal en Lumière festival. The confection is made by pouring boiling-hot maple syrup over fresh snow, an à la minute taffy that is then rolled onto a wooden tongue depressor like a lollipop. It’s shtick like this that’s hard to escape when you’re surrounded by maple. It was Derek Dammann, the chef and owner of Montreal’s Maison Publique and McKiernan Luncheonette, who took me to my first cabane à sucre (sugar shack) a decade ago. These establishments were once ...

There’s something deeply poignant about Liza Treyger’s joke about ordering pancakes for the table. During her stand-up set for Late Night with Seth Meyers in 2016, she describes the act as a “power move.” With one deft menu choice, she penetrates the souls of her dining compatriots, knowing what they all want without speaking it into existence. They want pancakes. They all want pancakes. But nobody at that table was going to order them for themselves. Pancakes are the immutable presence on every child’s dream breakfast plate—an easy go-to for many parents looking to feed their kids without much complaint: the combination of flour, buttermilk, and sugar produces something pillowy and recognizable, easy to eat and the perfect vessel for sweet sy...

A Tasty Pasta Recipe With Spinach, Garlic and Guanciale Sauce I don’t even know where this recipe for strozzapreti pasta with spinach, garlic and guanciale sauce came from because I prepared it before we moved to Utah. I liked it enough to add the recipe to my drafts to be completed later so here we go. Ingredients Strozzapreti Pasta (stroh-tzuh-PRAY-tee) Strozzapreti is similar to cavatelli pasta but elongated. They look like short twisted pasta that are typically rolled by hand but I’m guessing commercial companies have been able to figure out how to make them by machine. I found this good video on YouTube explaining how Strozzapreti is made by hand. The video shows you how to make the dough from scratch, but I started it at the point of making the pasta and finishe...

These 3-ingredient slow cooker grape jelly meatballs only take 5 minutes of prep to make a fun appetizer for game day or holiday parties. Slow cooker grape jelly meatballs are a classic party appetizer and crowd-pleaser that’s great for game days or as a cocktail appetizer for holiday parties. With only 3 ingredients and 5 minutes of prep time, it’s quick to throw together but still has plenty of room to build on. You can use either BBQ sauce or chili sauce for this recipe with some grape jelly as a base flavor profile. Try adding in some smoked paprika for a smoky aftertaste, or spice it up a little with some chili powder/cayenne. You can even use the sauce to cook some little smokies instead. It’s a pretty simple recipe that’s more of a guideline really since there’s not muc...

The butter-laden mashed potatoes that American families serve by the heaping, swirled mound can be traced to the Lenten suppers and dinner tables of 18th-century London. But centuries before colonists exported the tuber from its native Peru, Andean people cultivated potatoes for everyday sustenance. In the Andes Mountains, one mashed potato dish with hot peppers is the ancestor of the contemporary causa limeña—the chilled potato puree with salt, aji amarillo (a yellow hot pepper paste), olive oil, and lime juice that Lima’s creole cooks layer with savory fillings of shredded tuna or chicken salad. An early predecessor to the quintessential American Thanksgiving style of mashed potatoes appears in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and...

What defines our current era of home cooking? Is it an aspiration toward mindful eating? An eye for verdant vegetables? Maybe it’s all those things, mixed with a healthy dose of realism about climate crisis? Over the course of her first three cookbooks, A Modern Way to Eat, A Modern Way to Cook, and The Modern Cook’s Year, English author Anna Jones has grappled with this question. It’s a topic we talked about when Jones was a guest on the TASTE Podcast three years ago, and it’s a topic that Jones has returned to, with great purpose, in her latest cookbook, One: Pot, Pan, Planet. One: Pot, Pan, Planet provides a wholistic, feasible, and flexible plan for how a home cook can think about the massive, daunting question of eating sustainably. There...

This hearty and flavorful homemade spaghetti sauce uses simple pantry ingredients is sure to become a family favorite dinner staple. It’s freezer-friendly and is great over pasta or lasagna. Today we’re making a lovingly simmered homemade spaghetti sauce. While the store-bought jarred kind is pretty convenient, it is missing a whole lot of flavor you can get by building on a tomato base with a few extra ingredients. Add a few pantry staples like ground beef, onions, garlic, bell peppers, tomatoes and some seasonings like Worcestershire sauce, red pepper flakes, basil, oregano and Italian seasoning for the best go-to spaghetti sauce. Serve with some garlic bread or garlic knots and enjoy a fun pasta night. If you like Italian-inspired recipes, try out this spinach and three che...

Supreme Your Way into a Dreamy Citrus Season Many of us wait with great anticipation for winter’s colorful citrus to arrive around the beginning of each new year. I get excited just thinking about the juicy, sweet, and acidic navels, blood oranges, and other heirloom citruses, like pink pomelo, Oro Blanco, and Meyer lemons, showing up at my local farmers’ market at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. My social media feeds quickly become sunset-colored messes of salads and citrus upside-down cakes, punctuated with thick rounds of January orange. Those uniform circles are pretty and all, but pinwheels aren’t the only way. One suggestion is to opt for the oblong jewels that are supremed citrus s...

The World’s Best Rice comes in a sturdy, gold-embossed box containing six slender packages. Sold for ¥10,800 for 840 grams (that’s $95 for less than 2 pounds), it’s nearly 30 times more expensive than what you’d pay at a supermarket in Japan. The Guinness World Records named it the priciest rice on the planet in 2016. Japan’s rice milling and processing giant Toyo Rice Corporation, which sells the product mainly to well-to-do customers in Japan, the United States, and Singapore, commands the princely sum by blending several of the top-placed finalists chosen by judges in a blind tasting of the International Contest on Rice Taste Evaluation, the country’s most prestigious rice competition, which takes place each November. The winning batches are st...