Useful How-tos for Cooking Bacon & Eggs

My how-to articles are among my most popular posts on this blog. I don’t write nearly enough of them, because it’s tough to write a good how-to, especially for tasks I might do all the time and consider second nature.
That’s why I wanted to highlight some great how-tos that I’ve run across recently on my [...]

What’s in Season? Potatoes

Fingerling potatoes simmered with butter and herbs, originally uploaded by shannon_turlington.
I’ve been seeing a lot of potatoes at the farmers market lately: red-skinned potatoes, teeny fingerlings, Yukon Golds, Peruvian purples, even baby russets (which would make excellent mini baked potatoes). Who doesn’t love potatoes? Well, I know a couple of people who don’t, but clearly [...]

Recipe Deal Breakers

Recently, there was an interesting article in The New York Times about recipe “deal breakers” — those instructions or ingredients or equipment requirements that make you walk away from a recipe or even a whole cookbook. This got me (and much of the rest of the food blogosphere) to thinking about what my recipe deal [...]

Glazing Vegetables

Glazing vegetables is an extremely useful technique for punching up an otherwise boring vegetable side dish. I used to avoid recipes that used this technique, because I associated glazed vegetables — specifically, carrots — with a sugary, syrupy sweet dish. If I wanted to eat dessert, I’d have ice cream.
But I was wrong. The traditional [...]

A Buying Guide for Seafood That’s Safe for You & the Environment

It is not easy eating seafood these days. There are a number of health concerns, mercury being the number-one issue that has been in the news lately. Beyond that, you also have to worry about PCBs, pollutants and chemicals in your seafood. And if you care at all about the environment, there are a host [...]

Running the Home Kitchen Like a Restaurant, Revisited

Recently, I blogged about running my home kitchen like a restaurant kitchen in order to ensure we get a nutritious, home-cooked meal each night, even though my hands are full taking care of a 2-month-old baby. I was going to try to prep ingredients for meals ahead of time so that when it was dinner [...]

How to Make Rice Pilaf

Did you know that some parts of the world are currently experiencing food crises? A perfect storm of high energy prices, drought (possibly caused by climate change), increasing demand in countries like China and India, and usage of grains for biofuels instead of food is contributing to shortages of key staples like wheat, corn and [...]

Pan-roasted Asparagus

This past week we have been eating a lot of asparagus. I love asparagus, not only because it tastes good, because asparagus means spring is here.
We’ve been having a strange spring, weather-wise. By this time, I’m looking forward to beautiful days of blue skies, temperatures in the mid 70s and colorful flowers busting out all [...]

Running the Home Kitchen Like a Restaurant

One thing I have quickly figured out about being a parent is that the days are unpredictable. I can no longer count on having a quiet hour to prepare dinner in the evenings. Rather, my quiet hour may come in the morning, after lunch or who knows when.
I don’t want to fall back on takeout [...]

Simmering: A Technique for Cooking Flavorful Vegetables

There are probably two main ways we all learned how to cook vegetables with liquid: boiling and steaming. But both of these techniques have disadvantages. Boiling vegetables in a lot of water often yields overcooked, mushy results that many of us remember (and hate) from our childhoods. And steaming all too often lets the flavor [...]