Recipes
Holiday Gift Guide: New Children's Books About Food
Know a kid who's interested in food—eating, growing, or cooking it—or who you wish would be? With the holidays coming up, one of these food-related children's books could be the perfect gift idea.Unless otherwise noted, all titles were published this year. If I've missed something great, please add...
November 30, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Inviting Writing: Family Feasts at a Georgia Granny's House
We've received such wonderful stories from readers in response to our latest Inviting Writing theme about eating at Grandma's house—thank you! This one, a richly detailed recollection of Southern-style family dinners in the 1950s and early 1960s, seems perfect for Thanksgiving week because it's a v...
November 22, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Five Colorful Ways to Eat Fresh Cranberries
Fresh cranberries abound at this time of year, and you may even be ambitious enough to slog through a bog to pick your own, as my friend Bryn did in Massachusetts. (It was fun, but next time she'd prefer to try it without a 30-pound toddler on her back, she said.) After baking all afternoon, she st...
November 16, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
Inviting Writing: Lefse Lessons With Grandma
Continuing our Inviting Writing theme about "eating at Grandma's house," today's story celebrates another Bestemor. Author Jenny Holm is a freelance writer who grew up in Minnesota, but has been all over the place since, from Russia to D.C. to an organic farm in Vermont. Currently, she's teaching E...
November 15, 2010 |
By Amanda Bensen
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
