Amateur chef Mark Zable from Texas has a new culinary invention: fried beer. Zable tells Steve Inskeep this is the first time anyone has successfully deep fried a liquid. He'll debut his fried beer at the Texas State Fair later this month.
Canning -- the source of jams, pickles and relishes that seems tied to the last century -- is on the upswing. There is a debate whether the trend stems from the tight economy or the local food movement, but its fans say the results are delicious.
The long Labor Day weekend marks the end of summer for many in the U.S., but it's also a time when ethnic churches hold massive food festivals to celebrate their origins. For food writer Michele Kayal and her young daughter, Syrian festivals -- and the preparations for them -- are an enduring link to the past.
A quick note on our posting frequency of late… we’ve been busy with canning, a few home improvement projects, and lots of work. We hope you’ll bear with us for another week or so. We’ll be back to our three recipes a week very soon!
Tuesdays are my very favorite day of the work week. I spend the day alone, running, working, tackling laundry, and cooking. This is the day I try to make dinner for my husband, and the day I use to try new recipes, like the red wine caramel that went into my coworker’s birthday apple pie.
Tuesdays are the days I often work with the cat purring on my lap, or with Great Big Sea rocking the house.
This Tuesday though, seemed to fly quicker than most. I looked up and the caramel sauce wasn’t done, the squash wasn’t roasted, and John was due home soon. So I got to work. I roasted a kabocha squash, intending to just soften it enough to easily chop it into cubes, but I got busy with the caramel sauce and it ended up about 3/4 of the way cooked. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue, but I was going to chop the squash into chunks and then caramelize it in olive oil, then mix it with some beef and beans we’d had the night before.
Since the squash was getting soft, I should have done something different with it. But tired, hungry, and distracted that I was, I just threw it in a pan with the beef and bean mixture, added some tomatoes, and cooked it until done.
It was ugly.
Seriously ugly.
It was orange, and brown, and very mushy.
But it was also delicious.
Comforting.
Almost exactly what I wanted.
All this is just a long winded way of saying that a delicious, healthy, and local meal doesn’t have to follow a recipe. Sometimes you need to be willing to experiment. Sometimes you’ll fail. But sometimes you’ll succeed. I knew that combining kabocha squash, beef, and beans, all of which are rather simple flavors, would likely work well. I knew that the dish would need some bite to it, so hence, the tomatoes.
But my point is that sometimes you need to experiment. Soups and stews are my preferred experimentation vectors. They are generally very forgiving. Start with three or four ingredients. Simmer for a bit. If it tastes good, stop. If it’s not quite there, try some salt and pepper or some seasonings. Don’t be afraid to fail. There’s always a backup plan, and sometimes that plan is takeout!
Happy experimentation.
A gelato company in Washington, D.C., is a model of a big trend in the food industry: going artisan. Plenty of people seem willing to pay the higher prices of vendors that use locally sourced products and make smaller batches. A dairy in Pennsylvania is Pitango Gelato's source for the high quality ingredients and natural flavors it sought.
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For this week's Sandwich Monday, we try the new Denny's Fried Cheese Melt. That's four fried mozzarella sticks stuffed into a grilled cheese sandwich.
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