Also on the topic of food shopping, I couldn’t help but share this brilliant project devised by public radio’s The Brian Lehrer Show (is anything they do not brilliant?).
Introduced this month, the “crowdsourcing” project forgoes statistical evidence and cuts right to the vox populi in discerning the costs of basic supermarket items in the New [...]

sweet dolci spreads at Bella Cucina
Last Tuesday, I was inspired. I don’t mean that I had rushed home with a fresh purchase of groceries and a spontaneous, must-make-tonight, dish idea. Or that I was struck with an urge to expound upon any national cuisine, penny-pinching technique, or environmental cause. No: I had just roamed the [...]

I have this problem often with clothes. I’ll conjure up exactly the pair of pants, for instance, that I want in my head, down to the weft and stretchiness of the twill and exact shade of, say, cerulean blue and go off on a desperate search to find them, which always (obviously) ends in failure. [...]

It used to be that when a potluck presented itself to me, I would default to one of a number of tried-and-true party favorites. Now that pool has run rather dry. But no fear — a new pasta crank is here.

The UK has been making impressive headway in isolating what makes us eat what. Namely, it’s our genes.
“More often than not, our genetic make-up influences our dietary patterns.”
So said Tim Spector, a Professor at London’s Kings College, in this BBC News article about a study he led that suggested identical twins shared the same eating [...]

super squash-caramel sundae
Not butter rum ice cream, not just butternut squash ice cream (although you can just omit the rum if you care for that), but buttery, yummy rum butternut squash ice cream. Say that five times fast. Now try it after some more of that rum.

needs more peas, according to Bittman
It seems (belatedly) that I am not the only one with pasta on the mind. Mark Bittman’s recent article in the Times offered hoards of recipes for pasta lore that I can’t wait to try out sometime soon. But he also touched on a point that I found interesting, [...]

I got a brand new toy. Alright, it’s gently used and I bought it on eBay for $10, but check this out: A true Italian Marcato (aptly named) “Pasta Queen” pasta crank with 7 thickness settings, 2 pasta widths and a table clamp. Early Christmas in New York.

Restaurant food is pretty. Home-cooked food, not so much. Oh yes, we try. We, of the conscientious, borderline obsessive home cooking set, have every intention of making a meal beautiful on both the inside and out. But unless you have plating and presentation skills of the likes of Matt Armendiraz, it ain’t nothin’ compared to [...]

This land is corn land: Curt Ellis (left) and Ian Cheney in Queens
It’s not a joke. More than 80 million acres of corn were planted in the US last year. Yet only 253,500 of them were sweet corn, for eating on the cob. Where does the rest of it go? Leave it to Aaron Woolf, [...]

I enjoy tea a lot. All kinds of tea. I haven’t taken this passion to the next level of home DIY experimentation, drying out leaves and whatnot, but lately it’s crossed my mind. Typically at around this time of the year, I return to the comfort of tea. Having a propensity toward being cold all [...]

I find it no coincidence that so many cultures like to tame eggplant by beating them to a pulp. My run-in with not-so-well-cooked eggplant earlier this summer has put me off the poisonous plants for a little while, but I’m not calling it quits just yet. Baba ghanoush, eggplant “caviar,” so to speak, has been [...]

No, it’s not my blog’s birthday part II. Last weekend was the birthday of a couple friends of mine — a couple, who happen to share the same birthday. No, they’re not twins. So, since everyone loves cupcakes and two birthdays is certainly that much more reason to, I baked up a batch of mini [...]

little garlic, where came thee?
It’s no surprise to me, as an average American consumer, that nearly everything I wear, step on, brush my hair with, carry my things in, or merely touch in my day-to-day routine was made in and exported from China. So perhaps I should likewise not be surprised that something as ubiquitous [...]

Vinda-who? Has it been this long since I’ve dined in an Indian restaurant? I suppose so. You see, I’ve been spoiled by always having plenty of Indian friends while growing up that the taste of authentic curry was never too hard to come by. Nowadays though, things have gotten a bit dicey. I’ve long forgotten [...]