Cooking
Soufflés: The Original Molecular Gastronomy?
Since my wedding earlier this year, I have made it a personal goal to use all of the kitchen tools I received as gifts. Some, like the glass nesting bowls and the microplane zester, got a good workout from the get-go. Others, namely the ramekins and the soufflé dish, have so far languished in the c...
November 12, 2010 |
By Lisa Bramen
The Wild Mushrooms of Fall
I know I am probably in the minority, but I despise mushrooms—at least the little white button ones you get at the supermarket. They rank up there with cilantro on my short list of ingredients I wouldn't want to meet in a dark restaurant, or a well-lit one, for that matter.Raw mushrooms are relativ...
November 03, 2010 |
By Lisa Bramen
The Magic of Kale, and Five Ways to Eat It
If Lisa's post about the connection between chocolate and child labor has made you reconsider your Halloween candy-buying habits, here's an alternative for you to feed the trick-or-treaters: kale!Yeah, you're right—that's probably not a good idea unless you want your house egged. But did you know t...
October 26, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Five Ways to Eat Kohlrabi
Kohlrabi isn't the coolest kid in its class. It has a weird name, and looks even weirder. I admit I've always ignored it in favor of prettier, more popular vegetables. Why befriend it now?Well, because kohlrabi is nutritious: no fat, lots of fiber and vitamin C, even some protein. It's cheap and in...
October 21, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
The Game Less Eaten
I don't hunt, and I've caught (and released) a total of three fish in my life, so I'm not exactly a regular reader of Field & Stream magazine. Over the weekend, though, I picked up the latest issue for the purposes of research, and a short article caught my eye. It was called "Acquired Tastes: ...
October 13, 2010 |
By Lisa Bramen
Five Ways to Eat Lima Beans
Lima beans used to remind me of a line in a Josh Ritter song: "I'm trying hard to love you / You don't make it easy, babe."You know what I mean, right? That wan, wrinkled skin; that wet-sawdust texture; that hospital-cafeteria smell...those are the lima beans I recall picking out of the "frozen mix...
September 30, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Food in the Raw at the U.S. Botanic Garden
After almost three years of working right down the street, I finally made time to explore the U.S. Botanic Garden on a recent lunch break. I expected mostly flowers, but found a food nerd's Eden: So many of my favorite edibles, in their purest forms! So many tidbits of culinary history and science!...
September 29, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Eating Irish Moss
Today's post is by Smithsonian staff writer Abigail Tucker.On my recent trip to Ireland—where I discovered "real" Irish soda bread—I expected to encounter potatoes aplenty, and I wasn’t disappointed.Traditional champ (or mashed) potatoes and chips (fries) were offered alongside more cosmopolitan sp...
September 28, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Classic Irish Soda Bread
Smithsonian magazine staff writer Abigail Tucker wrote today's post.Great-grandmother O’Neill and I met only once, when I was one and she was 100, but her Irish soda bread remains a staple of family celebrations. A tiny woman who spoke with a lilting brogue, she never left Brooklyn to go visiting w...
September 21, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
A Cookbook for Geeks Brings the Scientific Method to the Kitchen
Geeks have come up in the world since the 1980s, when John Hughes movies depicted them as scrawny outcasts with headgear braces and excessive knowledge of things called "floppy disks." In the dot-com boom of the 1990s, the computer-savvy became millionaires, considered heroes instead of neo maxi zo...
September 16, 2010 |
By Lisa Bramen
Five Challenges We Wanted to See on Top Chef, D.C.
Today's guest writer is Brian Wolly, the magazine's Associate Web Editor.Last night’s penultimate episode of Top Chef: DC saw the "cheftestants" leave Washington, D.C. for Singapore, where the winner of the elimination-style cooking competition will be decided. Back when Bravo announced that D.C. w...
September 09, 2010 |
By Brian Wolly
Five Ways to Eat Ground Cherries
What tastes like a cherry tomato injected with mango and pineapple juice, and looks like an orange pearl encased in a miniature paper lantern?No, I'm not just trying to cram as many fruit references into one sentence as possible. It's a real plant: Physalis pruinosa, aka the "ground cherry."I'd nev...
September 02, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Five Ways to Eat Okra
Okra's a strange little vegetable, the kind of thing you might not guess was edible if no one told you. Its prickly skin can sting your fingers, and slicing into it reveals little more than seeds and slime. I admit, if okra hadn't been included in our CSA share these past few weeks, I would probabl...
August 26, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Farmers Market Finds: Purple Long Beans
Walking past a farmers market on my lunch break last week, I did a doubletake at what looked like a basket of baby snakes for sale.Getting closer, I was relieved to see that the tangle of dark and sinuous shapes was in fact a lone quart of unusually long beans. I picked one up and held it up to the...
August 10, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
A Summer Reading List for Food Lovers
It's a sticky August afternoon, and the family members are facing their third day of vacation in a tiny beach town. The thrill of splashing in the surf and crafting sand castles has faded, replaced by streaks of sunburn around the edges of swimsuits and sandal straps. ("I told you to put lotion eve...
August 05, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Shelling Out For Soft-Shell Crabs
This blog has inspired me to try several types of seafood I've never had before, like sardines, lionfish and jellyfish. I cracked open my first crabs last summer, and my first whole lobster earlier this year (although that one deserves a mulligan, since apparently most lobsters aren't full of black...
August 03, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Five Ways to Eat Tomatillos
Somehow, I lived for 30 years without tomatillos, but there's no going back now. While I was on my way back from South Africa last weekend, my husband was on his own to select the vegetables for our CSA share (some programs pick for you, but ours lets us choose at the farmstand). When I returned, h...
July 22, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
A South African Barbecue
I spent last week in and around Cape Town, South Africa, traveling with my mom to attend my brother's wedding. All we knew ahead of time about South African cuisine was that they love a good cookout, and sure enough, our first meal there turned out to be a braai (Afrikaans for "roasted meat," thoug...
July 20, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Clam Chowder: Thick or Thin?
I spent a glorious 4th of July weekend on Martha's Vineyard, where I set a personal record for the amount of fresh seafood eaten in four days. This being our honeymoon, my husband and I splurged on a couple of very nice dinners. But my favorite meal was probably the lunch we had on our second day: ...
July 13, 2010 |
By Lisa Bramen
A Brief History of Popsicles
Are you as hot as we are? Temperatures are hitting the triple digits in D.C. this week, which makes me want to say something clever about third digits and obscenities, but my brain has melted past the point of cleverness and seems to be functioning as little more than a nerve center for "Me Want Ic...
July 07, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
