Food & Nutrition

Enjoy this crowd-pleasing and addictive million dollar dip with toasted almonds, cream cheese, cheddar cheese, zesty green onions and chunky bacon bits. Also known as the Neiman Marcus dip, this chilled delicious appetizer is a wonderful combination of a few simple ingredients with addictive results. It’s a vintage recipe that has stood the test of time and with good reason; its crave-worthy flavors of cheese, fresh and crisp green onions, toasted golden almonds and big chunky bits of crumbled bacon make this one a party favorite. It’s perfect for making in advance and is a huge hit on game day, parties, or cookouts. Serve it with some crackers, chips, pretzels and veggies or as a spread. So bring this one to the next party and watch it disappear. For other dip ideas, try out ...

With cautious optimism and vaccines flowing, America has begun its slow return to whatever normal looks like now in the summer of 2021. And while we aren’t out of the woods yet—and the international situation remains sobering—it is perhaps alright to carefully celebrate the moment by once again enjoying the company of friends, returning to our favorite bars and restaurants, tipping gratefully (over 30 percent, of course) in every service interaction, and enjoying a nice social drink—or three—or more. We’re about to embark on a drinking season like no other. After a year spent pent up and worried, our very souls are thirsty. Thirsty for a cool schooner of grisette, a perfect pre-dinner martini, a scotch and a cigar in the backyard with friends, o...

Gooey dollops of beige fufu dunked by hand into bowls of steaming hot, reddish-brown beef stew. Curried jollof rice, as orange as Halloween pumpkins, packed full of tender shredded chicken breast and fragrant fried onions. Barely sweet chin-chin—tiny fried squares of dough, crisp on the outside and scone-like on the inside. As a first-generation Nigerian American growing up in a small Central California town, I treasured these foods from my father’s homeland, which he would prepare for my siblings and I during occasional weekend dinners together. As a kid, I was entranced by the cooking—and the inevitable stories that would arise during the cooking—about schoolboy pants pockets stuffed with cooked sweet potatoes for a midday snack; or dried beef...

Uyen Luu is used to cooking for a crowd. On a near-weekly basis for the past decade, she’s been feeding upwards of thirty to forty supper club guests in her East London studio and kitchen. What started as her homage to Italian osterias evolved into her supper club’s current form: large family-style dishes of lemongrass-scented ribeye, woven rice noodle sheets of bánh hỏi, and pandan cheesecake, all reflecting her Vietnamese roots. London’s past year of lockdowns put a pause on her dinner parties (which are tentatively set to resume in July), but in her downtime, she wrote her latest cookbook, Vietnamese. Her recipes embody the spirit and conviviality of Vietnamese cooking—which, she emphasizes, is not always about finding exactly what you’d get ...

Enjoy this 25-minute restaurant-worthy pan-seared salmon piccata in a white wine lemon butter caper sauce with fresh garlic and parsley. I had some leftover parsley and capers from cooking this creamy salmon pasta a few weeks ago (we enjoyed this one SO much). So today we are going to make a quick and easy salmon piccata. This cooks in under 30 minutes and goes great over a bed of pasta, with a side of rice, or some greens like asparagus, broccoli, or green beans. It’s a simple, fresh and zesty sauce to accompany the crispy pan-seared salmon perfectly seasoned with salt and pepper. Cook this one as a quick skillet meal for a weeknight dinner. Let’s start cooking. SALMON PICCATA TIPS AND TRICKS Skillet: You will need a 12″ skillet to be able to fit 4 salmon fillets. I use...

I was probably about ten when I had my first taste of pâté. It was at a small, hole-in-the-wall French bistro and café in Charleston, South Carolina, that I still frequent as an adult. I remember sitting up at the high-top counter and smelling the rich black coffee that was brewing, seeing all the brightly colored murals and pictures of past guests plastered on the walls, and looking out to the left to see horse-drawn carriages clicking and clacking down the street. I’d never been outside my little city (and still haven’t been outside the United States), so for me, that early afternoon lunch was as close as I could imagine France to be. I don’t quite remember which family member I was with, but it was someone who knew how to feed my curiosity a...

As Heidi Swanson, a prolific writer, photographer, and early food internet fixture, tells it, she was waiting for a phone call that never came. “I was on the waiting list for a decade and never got the call,” she recalls in a recent Zoom conversation from her home in Los Angeles. We’re talking about the move south from her longtime home in San Francisco, and the community garden back in the Bay that she’d been itching to join for years. “I got down here, and a friend was casually like, ‘Oh, hey, there’s plots at the Long Beach Community Garden,’ so, basically immediately, we got this big, 20×30 plot. And it’s great, and growing down here is—I mean, it’s magic.” Vegetables are Swanson’s vibe. Her acrylics. So getting that garden spot near her home in Belmont Shore was no small victory for...

Like leftover confetti after a party, poppy seeds are often seen as superfluous decoration on Kaiser rolls, bagels, and the frequently pedestrian lemon-scented muffin. Yet there’s way more to this story. Despite their baked-goods ubiquity (fun fact: it takes millions of poppy seeds to compose a pound!), these sun-dried specks, harvested from the pods of the poppy flower, are rarely given a chance to show off their true flavor—nutty, fruity, floral, and earthy—both spice and seed in one. Optimistically, a handful of nostalgic bakers are bringing innocuous poppies back to the forefront through careful sourcing and bold recipe choices that are anything but stale. A profusion of purple and white poppies have covered the fields of Afyonkarahisar for ...

My culinary education began by watching the people around me cook, starting with my grandma, great-grandma, and aunts, and stretching to the women who became mentors and caregivers for me as I lived across the South. Whether it was for a barbecue, baby shower, funeral, or just a weekday meal, I would watch the way they moved their hands while preparing and cooking collard greens, each step carefully planned. I paid attention to the splash of the water as they scrubbed the leaves clean of dirt in a sink, then ripped them off their woody stems in one fluid motion and put them in a layered pile on a countertop or in a bowl. Gathering the leathered stack of green, they would gently roll the leaves like tobacco in a cigarette. Cutting them down in...

For Amethyst Ganaway, food is an entryway to talking about history, theology, agriculture, and sustainability. Between cooking in restaurant kitchens in South Carolina, Georgia, and New Mexico, and working as the head recipe developer for Yolélé, Ganaway has written about the history of Black communities using food as protest, the finely tuned art of red rice, and about Edna Lewis’s roast duck technique. As TASTE’s newest Cook in Residence, with exciting original writing and recipes rolling out over the next two weeks, Ganaway will be diving into the world of offal and giving us a fresh perspective on the myriad cooking techniques we tend to classify as French. As a self-proclaimed grits snob, she’ll be showing us the way to a silky bowl, topped...