While it doesn’t take much effort, steaming vegetables may seem intimidating, especially if you’ve been scarred by overcooked carrots or bland broccoli. These simple instructions will help you steam perfectly textured and flavorful (and healthy!) vegetables every time…
Like selecting the best fruit, being able to choose the freshest and tastiest vegetables is a combination of seasonal knowledge, asking farmers and shop owners for advice, and using your senses. This guide has the last part covered. Get ready to use your eyes, noses, and hands!
There’s nothing like a perfectly luscious strawberry, crisp apple, or juicy watermelon. Besides shopping for fruits at their peak season, it helps to know how to spot – and smell and feel – the very best at your local farmers’ market or grocery store. Here’s how…
In our discussion of cast iron cleaning, we mentioned that you can rub rust away using a raw potato. This tip is so unusual, yet handy (and non-toxic!), that we thought it deserved its own spotlight. And the potato trick isn’t limited to cast iron – you can use it to remove rust from baking pans, knives, and other household tools.
At McCall’s Meat and Fish Company, the highly-anticipated new butcher shop in Los Feliz, the selection is modest but exceptionally well-sourced and curated. Run by two professional chefs, it combines gourmet sensibilities and passion with the attentive service and intimacy of an old-school neighborhood butcher.
Instructions for cast iron skillet cleaning often include a lot of don’ts: don’t use soap, don’t use steel wool, don’t put it in the dishwasher. It’s almost enough to scare one off from cast iron completely! However, with a few simple techniques, you’ll be able to keep your skillet clean, rust-free, and well-seasoned. (And, worst-case scenario, you can always re-season it.)
Lemongrass is a fragrant herb used in curries, meats, tofu, and other dishes where a zesty, lemony flavor is desired. If you’ve never bought or cooked with it before, the thick, grassy stalks may be a bit daunting. But it’s really quite simple. Here is our guide to buying and preparing lemongrass, whether your recipe requires sliced, minced, or bruised.
There are few better comfort foods than Vietnamese phở. When I’m on the verge of a cold or in need of a culinary pick-me-up, I sit myself down to a restorative bowl of aromatic broth, slippery rice noodles, and fresh, customizable garnishes.
Some of the best cookbooks, in our opinion, are ones that inspire beyond their specific recipes. They offer readers a fresh look at familiar ingredients as well as new ones, teach new ways of approaching cooking, and encourage improvisation. Maria Elia’s The Modern Vegetarian is one of these.
Where do you buy your seafood? According to a Greenpeace report, consumers buy half their seafood at supermarkets. The organization has ranked 20 major grocery stores based on the sustainability of their seafood sourcing and selling, and commends retailers like Wegmans, Ahold, Whole Foods, and Target for increasing their “green” seafood practices. Target, which is currently number four on the list, continues to march forward and just yesterday announced that it will stop selling farm-raised salmon.
Compared to the curled quills of most cinnamon and cassia varieties, the rough, flat bark of Vietnamese cassia-cinnamon might seem inelegant, but the flavor is something quite remarkable. Sweet, spicy, and robust, it’s the cinnamon we reach for most often when cooking anything from baked goods to phở.
Haggis will be on the menu for many celebrating Scottish poet Robert Burns today, but we’ll be forgoing the offal (blasphemy, we know) for another Scottish favorite: girdle cakes. These stove top scones are quick, charming, and best eaten just out of the pan with a dab of butter and honey.
In our continuing experiments with adding citrus to, well, just about everything, an orange found its way into our roasted almonds … and it worked!
Everyone knows that kale is hearty and nutritious, but have you ever thought of it as lively? Refreshing? Composed of wonderfully textured black kale ribbons, juicy blood orange, and fragrant Meyer lemon, this bright winter salad will energize your palate.
Last week, in a reversal of its 2008 declaration that Bisphenol A (BPA) was safe, the FDA expressed “some concern” about this chemical found in plastic bottles and metal cans. Noting “the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and young children,” the FDA says it will conduct more in-depth studies. For now, though, BPA remains legal and unregulated. Here are some ways you can reduce your exposure.
We truly wrestled with whether to share this report from Sunday’s Hollywood farmers’ market. On the one hand, we know many of our readers (and writers) live in colder climes than California, and strawberries might not be the most welcome sight if you’re having yet another root vegetable meal…
Earlier this week, we highlighted one of the latest additions to our spice cupboard, anardana, or dried pomegranate seeds. Experimenting with the souring ingredient led to this recipe for warmly spiced chickpeas with a touch of sweet tartness. Served with grains or tossed in a salad, they make a zestful and wholesome vegetarian meal.
One of our New Year’s resolutions is to find more ways to use kitchen scraps, and with all the Cara Cara oranges, Kishu mandarins, and other citrus fruits we’ve been eating, we now have plenty of dried peels saved. Here are some of the ways we use them. Let us know if you have any tips, too.
For the conscious consumer, food shopping may involve much label deciphering, interpretation, and confusion. Organic this, certified that … what does it really mean? If you shop for beef, National Geographic’s Green Guide has an interactive label decoder to help you sort out the various certifications and buzzwords.
