Life’s delicious messes

Indexed blog Food52 posted that we should "give up on clean hands and clean shirts" because it's cherry season. Contemplating the delicious mess of cherry pitting got us to thinking about other ingredients and foods that made messes in the kitchen but are so good they're worth it. The first task that came to mind was seeding a pomegranate, another… read more

Featured Cookbooks & Recipes

Whether they are from cookbooks, magazines, or blogs, all the recipes we feature in these weekly round-ups have online links so you can add any of them to your Bookshelf. Even if you have a free membership! But the recipes shown here are just the beginning. The EYB Library has over 143,000 online recipes to choose from including over 21,000… read more

Make room in the pantry for ajvar

Sometimes an ingredient or food product that was once only locally or regionally popular sweeps across the culinary world, like pimentón did a few years back. The Telegraph reports that a British chef is aiming to create a new such craze with a Balkan roasted pepper and aubergine relish called ajvar. Ajvar has been a pantry staple in Macedonia and surrounding areas since the time… read more

Camera cuisine

We've all heard the phrase "we eat first with our eyes." That has never been more true than in the digital age, when if a meal isn't on Instagram, it didn't really happen. Digital photography not only allows us to share (and perhaps overshare) our meals, it has also changed the way chefs approach their craft, according to Pete Wells… read more

Are cupcakes dead?

"The cupcake is dead." So says the tweet from Russ Parsons, food writer with the L.A. Times, with a link to an article that announces five foods that "could be the next cupcake." The post was in response to the news that Crumbs, a publicly-traded chain of cupcake shops, was closing all of its stores.  Other tweets echo the sentiment:… read more

Reference vs. selection in cookbooks

Today, I opened a book package and found a square-formatted paperback entitled, simply, Shake.  Without looking at the title, the flap, the press release, or the back cover, I started thumbing through the pages (sometimes I just plunge in cold like that, to avoid any preconceptions I might get from the marketing). "That's odd," I thought to myself.  There was something… read more

Unripe and ready

Everyone awaits the first tomato of summer with eager anticipation. The same holds true for most fruits and vegetables, but toward the end of the season one often encounters a glut of produce that must be harvested before a frost hits or before the heat wilts the plants, even though the fruits may not yet be ready. Over the years,… read more

Andy Ricker’s top 10

Pok Pok by Andy Ricker is a popular and highly-rated book among EYB members. Now Ricker's fans can learn more about the dishes that inspired his career in this First We Feast interview. A native of Vermont, Ricker started cooking at a young age. But it wasn't until he opened Pok Pok in Portland, Oregon that his popularity soared. He… read more

The power of three

What flavors define a cuisine? Given the nearly endless array of possible herbs, spices and other flavoring agents, one might think it impossible to distill the essentials of a cuisine to only a handful of ingredients. But as FoodBeast reports, the folks at DataDial have attempted to do just that. They've created an infographic that lists the three essential "spices"… read more

How sweet it is

While hot tea may be associated with English tradition, iced tea is closely linked to Southern hospitality. In restaurants across the Southern U.S., iced tea (almost always served sweetened) is revered. The importance of the beverage to the South can be summed up by a quote from the movie Steel Magnolias: Dolly Parton's character calls sweet tea "the house wine… read more

Featured Cookbooks & Recipes

Whether they are from cookbooks, magazines, or blogs, all the recipes we feature in these weekly round-ups have online links so you can add any of them to your Bookshelf. Even if you have a free membership! But the recipes shown here are just the beginning. The EYB Library has over 143,000 online recipes to choose from including over 21,000… read more

History to chew on

When people think of Vietnamese food, one of the first things that comes to mind is banh mi. While many people love these sandwiches, they may only know a smidgen of the history behind them. Lucky for us, Andrea Nguyen knows the fascinating history of the sandwich that inspired her latest cookbook, The Banh Mi Handbook. (You can enter our… read more

Cookbook giveaway – The Banh Mi Handbook

Andrea Nguyen, cookbook author and contributing editor at Saveur, has penned a new book celebrating banh mi, the Vietnamese sandwich that owes its unique combination of flavors and textures to the influences of several cultures. (You can learn more about the history of banh mi in our author article.) The Banh Mi Handbook offers over 50 recipes for everything from… read more

Buckle, Betty, and boy bait: learn all about cobbler-like desserts

What do grunts, slumps, pandowdys, buckles, and Bettys all have in common? They are all colorful regional names for baked fruit and dough creations, sometimes put in the category of "cobbler-like" desserts. (Not to be confused with cobblers that are drinks.) If you have a hard time telling these various treats apart, indexed blog Serious Eats offers an in-depth guide to these desserts. While… read more

Summer on a stick

Something about summer just calls for food on a stick. Maybe it's all of the fairs and festivals that try to outdo each other in novelty foods: deep fried butter on a stick and hot dish on a stick. Or perhaps it's because we spend a lot of time cooking and eating outdoors and want to minimize the use of… read more

What’s an hour worth?

It's summer here in the northern hemisphere, and the days are long.  Well, they may not actually be longer - most of us are still awake roughly 16 hours of the day - but they feel longer because the sun's with us for so much of that time.  It feels like there's plenty of time for interesting projects and creative endeavors.  It… read more
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