Food & Nutrition

Zucchini Tian   By Meg Jones - wife, mother,professional, contributor Last weekend we traveled to Wellsboro, PA in Tioga County, home of the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon.  While the primary purpose was to bike a 16 mile stretch of the Pine Creek gorge (mission accomplished), it also turned into a bit of a foodie weekend.  It all started with a call from our host while we were en route, checking to see if we “liked lobster” HA!  Do we ever!  His neighbor had returned from Maine with a cool dozen and was looking for some eating buddies, so the four of us teamed up to demolish half the supply along with an at least equal amount of fresh picked corn – best of the summer in our opinion.  A strong beginning. The next day’s fare, after some paddling on a local lake, incl...

Postcard from Sweden: Where Potatoes Cut Like Butter We had it all planned out. My husband and I would leave Hong Kong in the early summer, have our wedding ceremony in Sweden, go for an indulgent honeymoon in Italy, and when the temperatures dropped in the fall, settle down in Taiwan. In an alternate reality, we might be sitting on a balcony in Venice, sipping on champagne right now. Instead, we find ourselves lodged firmly in Sweden for the time being, in the midst of an impromptu stint in homesteading. It was jarring to arrive in Sweden in late June after six months of social distancing and prudent mask-wearing in Hong Kong. Unlike in Hong Kong and many places in the world, restaurants in Sw...

The names, oh, the names. Mocktail, virgin, soft drink (so ’80s!), zero proof, neutral, zero percent, proofless, temperance bevies. In aggregate, proper drinks, good drinks, served without alcohol, have done a pretty poor job at marketing themselves to the general population. The term “mocktail” has caused a mockery, and it’s been tough to write about them with a straight face for…basically ever. But thanks to seasoned editor and journalist Julia Bainbridge, the often poorly covered world of NA drinking is brought into tight focus in a book, Good Drinks, featuring recipes from the brightest bartenders around America. About the recipes: Many are challenging. Many are also worth the effort. While doing research for the book, Bainbridge visited 29 s...

Growing up in Idaho, my family didn’t overthink corn, but often we overcooked it. That brief few weeks right around when school started always seemed too short a window for considering alternatives to our usual method, which was: shucked cobs plunged into boiling unsalted water for—ten minutes? twenty?—then affixed with corn holders and rolled, while hot, over a sacrificial stick of butter. I relished these fleeting few weeks around Labor Day that marked the turn of the season, even if a soft, mushy texture had come to define the corn that was the centerpiece of those meals. Since then, many cooks and cookbooks have nudged me in better directions—towards embracing the kernels raw, adding smoky notes by turning the ears over a hot grill, and seizi...

Anyone who tells you that canning tomatoes is easy is, frankly, lying. There’s a reason the process has been largely outsourced to industrial operations. It requires a significant amount of planning, it’s labor-intensive, and, done improperly, it could kill your unsuspecting friends. But, without fail, it’s one of the best investments I make in my future self. Every September, as summer begins to melt into fall, I spend an evening elbow deep in tomatoes, dutifully blanching, cooling, peeling, blending, jarring, and sealing my way through 40 pounds of Jersey’s finest. By the time I have a few dozen jars cooling, my kitchen usually looks like a scene you’d hear about on a murder podcast, and I’m ready to pass out. I’m also proud as hell. You may be...

What Is the Difference Between Prime Beef and Choice Beef? I get asked this question about the difference between prime beef and choice beef all the time. Which one is better? Which one tastes better? Which one costs more. There are actually several more categories of beef grades but we don’t hear about them because they are not sold in our local supermarkets. The two you see most often are USDA Choice and USDA Select and if the store has a good meat department, USDA Prime. How Is Beef Graded? There are two ways beef is graded. Quality and Yield For quality, beef graders look at the ribeye muscle between the 12th and 13th ribs.They’re looking at the meats texture, color, firmness and the amount of marbling. They are also looking at the age of the meat. Younger meat...

Millions of tourists travel to Peru every year to eat. The draw is Lima’s unique comida criolla (creole cuisine)—the 500-year fusion of Andean, Spanish, African, Chinese, and Japanese culinary cultures. The cuisine is famous for dishes like spicy and citrusy ceviche; cubed sole tossed with salt, limes, hot peppers, and onions; or the ginger and soy sauce stir-fry of steak, onions, tomatoes, and French fries that is lomo saltado. But some of Peru’s most iconic street foods, from grilled beef-heart anticuchos marinated in a vinegar sauce to the deep-fried doughnut-like picarones made from spiced sweet potatoes, come from a legacy of slavery. Sixteenth-century conquistadors brought Black slaves from various African tribes to the Viceroyalty of Peru....

How to Make Store Bought Tomato Sauce Even Better I started a group on Facebook called, What I Cooked For Dinner Last Night.  People post photos of meals they made the night before. It’s a great way to see what other people are preparing for dinner and perfect for new ideas. This week I asked the group to share some of their own ideas for doctoring up store bought tomato sauce to add to my last post, How to Doctor Store Bought Tomato Sauce. I already have over 20 ideas for you to try and will add more as they come in. I encourage you to share your ideas below or on the other page. Pasta and Sauce Club For my birthday back in June, my wife signed us up with a pasta and pasta sauce club. Each month we get two different types of pasta and two jars of tomato sauce. Pl...

Turn You Supermarket Tomato Sauce Into Something Special As much as I would like to make my own homemade tomato sauce and either freeze or jar it for when I need it, I’m not going to do it. I say every August when the Jersey tomatoes are at their finest, this will be the year, but I just don’t get around to it. Here you will learn how to doctor tomato sauce with ingredients on hand to make it taste homemade. That’s not to say I don’t make my own homemade sauce during the year, but it is usually with canned tomatoes. But I do always have a few jars of store bought tomato sauce in our pantry for when I want to make a quick and easy pasta sauce. And with a few extra ingredients to dress it up a bit, I can make it even better. Store Bought Tomato Sauce Typically, we get our ja...

Over Paula Forbes’s long career as an editor and cookbook reviewer, patiently cooking through books while writing about the rhythms of the industry for Eater, Epicurious, Food52, and Lucky Peach, the Wisconsin native and proud Texan has hunkered down each summer to assess the upcoming fall season. Cookbooks, like frozen turkeys and sous-vide wands, sell big in the fall, as the big cooking and gifting holidays approach. Since leaving Epicurious in 2016, Forbes has written her own cookbook and launched a newsletter, Stained Page News, that has become essential reading for fans of cookbooks and the people in the industry that makes them. To note, Paula and I have been friends for years, and she’s kindly written about my cookbook projects in the past. ...