Don’t Try This At Home. On Second Thought, Go Ahead!

In 2005, Jane and Michael Stern published Roadfood, an adoring and adorable guide to dives and obscure eateries across America.  I loved the Sterns' vision of a life lived driving from one delicious thing to the next (although as they revealed in their memoir, it's not as easy as it looks).  They are no longer together, but I'll always have… read more

Somebody has to bring home the bacon

There's a new food magazine that's creating a lot of attention. Lucky Peach is a quarterly magazine about food and writing, described on their website as follows: " Lucky Peach is a new journal of food writing, published on a quarterly basis by McSweeney's. It is a mélange of travelogue, essays, art, photography, rants, and recipes in a full-color, meticulously designed format.… read more

The revival of English food

In the Guardian Sybil Kapoor recently discussed a reissuance of  Arabella Boxer's Book of English Food, a history of English food in the last century. She couldn't help but notice the similarity between a particularly attractive period  - the 1920s and 30s - and today's British food renaissance. As she writes, "In this classic, Boxer depicts English food of the 1920s and… read more

Are you overdoing prep work in the kitchen?

On Sara Moulton's website, she has an interesting article that's creating some buzz in the food world.  Whereas cookbooks, videos, and blogs have - at least for the last 10 years - argued that home cooks should always  prep and measure ingredients before starting to cook (a practice professional chefs call "mise en place"), Sara has decided this practice is… read more

EYB’s favorite cookbook authors

In a recent blog, we posted Food52's top 10 essential cookbooks. The posting inspired us to look at our own site and statistics. However, we ranked cookbooks by authors, looking at how many of our members owned a cookbook by a certain author. Here are the lists and our comments (links are to the authors' pages in the EYB library): EYB's top… read more

Everything you wanted to know about hot dogs

Hot dogs are synonymous with summer - at least here in the United States - but sausages are also world-wide, so we thought this article from Leslie Hatfield at the Huffington Post, All About Hot Dogs: Kosher Controversy, Label Confusion, Regional Flavors and More would appeal both to those of us celebrating summer and the 4th of July and those… read more

Independence, locavore style

Kitchen Gardeners International, the terrific local-food organization whose advocacy helped to establish the White House vegetable garden, used to run a wonderful event called Food Independence Day.  Folks from all over the country would participate online and pledge to eat all or part of their Independence Day meal from local sources.  On an interactive map, you could see who was… read more

Top chefs say that sometimes supermarket brands are best

The New York Times has a recent article, 'When Local Sourcing Means Aisle 12' that helps bring some perspective to the constant media drumbeat to buy all local, all organic, all farmers' market, all the time. They interviewed a variety of well-known chefs who each confessed to sometimes just needing, wanting, or indulging in a good old-fashioned supermarket item. As… read more

Love Whole Foods or loathe it?

Over at Food Republic they've reprinted an essay from the New Yorker, How Whole Foods Created A New Breed of Shopper. As Tom Roston writes,  "In my darker moments, I imagine what it might be like to live through an alien invasion. I'm not a War of the Worlds, death-and-destruction kind of guy; I am more prone to creepier visions of the Invasion… read more

How to make a better peanut butter and jelly sandwich

Many of us sometimes crave a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but the actual sandwich just never seems to match expectations. In this video from Chow, Keena Tallman from the restaurant, "PBJ's," offers some savvy advice on how to keep a PB&J sandwich from disappointing. It's not complicated - just a question of balance and ingredients. And also be sure… read more
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