Discovering potted shrimp
As the weather turns chilly, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere, it's time to start curling up with murder mysteries. And part of the fun - at least in old-fashioned English mysteries - is reading about the food.…
2012
The one thing I can't abide in a cookbook
Poivrade artichokes. Veal kidneys. Gilt-head bream. Mastic crystals. These are a few of the ingredients I've seen as I page my way through hundreds of cookbooks on my long, slow path to holiday roundup. And, though I…
The best holiday gift of all, plus 2 additional gift guides
Here in the United States, there is a tradition that the day after Thanksgiving is the best day to go shopping. On "Black Friday" (so-called because for many retailers it's when they finally go black - i.e. earn a…
Holidays & Celebrations Recipes
Marcus Samuelsson's 10 ways to use up Thanksgiving leftovers
We're sure all our non-U.S. members are getting a little tired of our Thanksgiving blogs, but we promise this is the last one - it's hard to overlook the one holiday truly devoted to eating. And for our final blog, what…
Food Online Holidays & Celebrations
Introducing the Thanksgiving Cherpumple and the Sir Plumple
Now that a Turducken has become almost mainstream (we even wrote a serious blog about it), we're very pleased that Serious Eats has taken up the gauntlet of producing a new, outlandish Thanksgiving treat - and not just…
What's up with the sausages?
When the whole preserving-canning thing took hold in the cookbook world a few years ago, it seemed to me that it owed its resurgence to an essentially vegetarian source culture - you know, homesteaders and beekeepers…
Antipasto Holidays & Celebrations
An assortment of food-related apps
In their article, Six tablet apps for making the perfect Thanksgiving dinner, TechHive has some great apps for iPads and other tablets that are applicable not only for Thanksgiving but for all holidays and even everyday…
How to insure a crunchy brownie top
With the demise of the Twinkie, we thought we'd refocus on a comfort sweetie that will never go out of style or production - the homemade brownie. And the perfect brownie has to have a crunchy top - it makes the fudgy…
R.I.P. Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and Devil Dogs
We'll admit that we haven't eaten a Twinkie or Ding Dong in far more years than is possible, but the fact that these iconic U.S. lunch box treats will no longer be available is worthy of notice. Due to a variety of…
Holidays & Celebrations Recipes
Happy national bundt cake day!
It seems that every day is a "national" day (or week or month) for some sort of food item. It's easy to ignore most of them, but every now and then a "national day" comes along that should be celebrated. We feel that…
The NY Times gives Guy Fieri's restaurant the cattiest review ever
We'll confess that every now and then cattiness makes for a fun read. Dorothy Parker made a whole career out of it - as in once reviewing a Katherine Hepburn performance as "running the gamut from A to B." And there was…
The rise of the blog book
At first, it was only Julie Powell, blogging her way to stardom as she chronicled her mastery of Julia Child's magnum opus. David Lebovitz and Pam Anderson were out there too. The books food bloggers used to write…