A healthy cooking technique made fragrant, delicious: Chinese-style Steamed Fish

Steaming infuses fish fillets with the flavors of ginger, star anise, garlic, cilantro and other aromatics for Chinese-style Steamed Fish. Recipe below.

STEAMING FOOD IS A HEALTHY WAY TO COOK. As practiced in Western kitchens, mostly on vegetables, it’s also often a bland way to cook. In Chinese kitchens, it is an art. Chinese cooks use both steaming and smoking to infuse foods—especially meats and fish—with delicate, complex flavors. Continue reading “A healthy cooking technique made fragrant, delicious: Chinese-style Steamed Fish” →

No. 246 takes a less meat-centric approach to Southern cooking

A new Decatur, Georgia restaurant focusing on pasta, pizza, seafood and farm-fresh produce is the subject of a recent USA Character Approved Blog post.

I remember a Southern Sunday dinner years ago, at my Aunt Veta’s house in Mississippi. I can’t even recall now why we were visiting, but I remember the meal. It was mid-afternoon, and there were more than a dozen of us crowded around a long, oilcloth-covered table on her screened in back porch. And there were three kinds of meat!

Fried chicken, barbecued pork chops and a ham all vied for my attention—and all got it, in turn. I was in carnivore heaven. Much of Southern cuisine still reflects this meat-focused view, especially with the farm-to-table movement and its emphasis on nose-to-tail eating driving a lot of restaurant kitchens. But a pair of chefs just outside Atlanta are taking a less meat-centric approach at their new restaurant, No. 246. Continue reading “No. 246 takes a less meat-centric approach to Southern cooking” →

Sweet meets tart and savory: Grilled Chicken with Strawberry Balsamic Vinegar Sauce

Grilled chicken breasts get a flavor boost with a simple, jam-based sauce. Recipe below.

I read somewhere recently that chicken growers are having trouble marketing chicken parts that aren’t skinless, boneless breasts. And it’s not because chicken breasts are more convenient to cook, or that chicken thighs and legs are more fatty than breast meat. It’s that skinless, boneless chicken breasts don’t have bones and therefore seem less like they came from an animal and are therefore somehow less icky.

Seriously? If you’re going to eat meat, own up to it. You can pretend all you want, but that boneless, skinless bit of animal protein was just as much a part of a living chicken as a bone-in thigh or drumstick.

If you’re not ready to give up eating meat (I know I’m not), but you want to feel better about doing so, there are a number of things you can do. Continue reading “Sweet meets tart and savory: Grilled Chicken with Strawberry Balsamic Vinegar Sauce” →

The vegan grill: Spicy, smoky peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, zucchini and peppers with dill

Homemade Strawberry Jalapeño Jam adds a grown-up kick to the classic kid food, PBJs, and dill gives grilled vegetables a fresh, summery finish in this satisfying vegan grilled meal. Recipes below.

Peanut butter sees almost daily action at our house, often as a simple spoonful scooped from the jar for a quick snack while dinner is cooking. And we’re not alone in our love of the stuff—Americans eat almost three and a half pounds of peanut butter a year per capita, according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center. (Given our consumption, I have to admit that sounded low to me.) Continue reading “The vegan grill: Spicy, smoky peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, zucchini and peppers with dill” →

Small Bites: Snow cones, cocktails and seven pounds of chocolate

Snow cones going artisanal with small batch syrups is the subject of my latest USA Character Approved Blog post. And Marion and I are asked to judge chocolate. Lots of it.

Snow cones are a primal summer pleasure. I remember staring at the spouted bottles of colorful syrup at the snow cone stand as a kid, agonizing over my flavor choice. If the stand allowed you two flavors (or sometimes even three! three!), the decision became exponentially harder.

Now a former Chicago restaurateur is making the decision a lot more interesting. Melissa Yen used to run one of our favorite weekend breakfast haunts, Vella Café. Frustrated by the limited choices in syrups for flavoring coffee for the café, she started experimenting with her own. Out of those caffeine-fueled adventures, Jo Snow Syrups was born. Continue reading “Small Bites: Snow cones, cocktails and seven pounds of chocolate” →

Too hot to cook? Not with this quick Peppery Pork Cucumber Stir-fry

Ground pork, English cucumber, red bell pepper, scallions, lemongrass and ginger come together quickly in Peppery Pork Cucumber Stir-fry—perfect for hot summer cooking. Recipe below.

Extreme weather puts us in the mood to take it extremely easy in the kitchen. I’ll let Marion tell you about a quick stir-fry she whipped up that tastes far more delicious than the short time spent in the kitchen would suggest.

All my complaining about the cool, non-summery weather has led to it being miserably hot and humid and weird. This month alone, we’ve had a giant hailstorm that swept across the city accompanied by lightning (we heard it coming, this low drumming advancing toward us in the dark, long before we figured out what it was, and then so much hail, no rain, just hail); then a derecho uprooting trees and hurling around heavy objects on its thousand-mile path; then, this weekend, a day of basement-flooding, record-setting rainfall.

And in between all of this, most of the time it’s been hot—at times so hot that my colleagues in places like Florida and Arizona and California have been helpfully pointing out that it was actually being cooler there, in all those places. (Guys! Thanks, guys!) And along with the heat is a chemical veil over everything, so that when the wind blows, you actually feel worse.

So we have been hunting for dinners that cook up fast. Things mostly made from ingredients, not products, things refreshing to the eye, and nothing including the word slow. Continue reading “Too hot to cook? Not with this quick Peppery Pork Cucumber Stir-fry” →

Purple Asparagus: Changing the way kids eat, one classroom at a time

Purple Asparagus, an organization that’s teaching kids to eat in ways that are healthier for the body and the planet, is the subject of my latest USA Character Approved Blog post.

The numbers on obesity in America are staggering. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than a third of us are considered not just overweight, but obese. And while obesity rates have doubled for adults from 1980 to 2008, they’ve tripled for children. A frightening 17 percent of children aged 2 to 19 are now classified as obese.

Overweight kids tend to become overweight or obese adults, and that puts them at risk for associated adult health problems, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke and several kinds of cancer. In fact, some overweight and obese children are starting to show signs of cardiovascular problems formerly only seen in adults. Purple Asparagus is one of a number of organizations working to get kids—and communities—eating healthier. Continue reading “Purple Asparagus: Changing the way kids eat, one classroom at a time” →

The (sort of) French connection: Grilled Lamb Chops with Lavender

Fresh lavender blossoms, rosemary, thyme and garlic deliver complex depth with a slight French accent to Grilled Lamb Chops with Lavender. Recipe below.

Cooking with lavender got me thinking about some of the strange things we humans put in our mouths. Whether out of desperation or sheer culinary curiosity, we’ve eaten just about everything, from grasshoppers to poisonous blowfish, stinging nettles and even Marmite. And while much has been comedically made of how hungry the first person to eat a lobster must have been, I’m far more impressed that anyone ever decided that there might be something worth eating inside a sea urchin.

By comparison, cooking with lavender seems downright tame. Continue reading “The (sort of) French connection: Grilled Lamb Chops with Lavender” →

BODUM’s colorful new knife holder is no chip off the old knife block

The unboring, unblocky BODUM Bistro Universal Knife Block is the subject of my latest USA Character Approved Blog post.

One of the biggest problems in most kitchens is storage. More precisely, the lack of enough of it. For many home cooks, storing knives is one of the toughest challenges. You need them readily available when you’re cooking, but you also need them some place safe—both for you and the blades.

For years, wooden knife blocks have been the answer. The chunky, counter space-gobbling answer. And if you’ve built your knife collection one carefully chosen knife at a time (the best way to do it, by the way), chances are the knife block’s pre-cut slots won’t perfectly accommodate your collection. Enter BODUM’s Bistro Universal Knife Block. Continue reading “BODUM’s colorful new knife holder is no chip off the old knife block” →

Cooking in Cabo: Zucchini Tomato Goulash

Inspired by a cooking class on an organic farm in Los Cabos, Mexico, this hearty goulash combines zucchini, tomatoes, garlic, fresh basil, jalapeño peppers and ricotta cheese to create a lively side dish or vegetarian meal. Recipe below.

You know how when you’re traveling and one of the locals asks where you’re from, then says wistfully, “Wow, I’ve always wanted to go there”? I didn’t get that once in Los Cabos. Not once. And I live in Chicago, a place I consider capable of generating a certain amount of destination envy.

I was in Los Cabos a few weeks ago, at the southernmost tip of Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula, on a culinary press trip to explore the foodie side of this popular tourist destination. Continue reading “Cooking in Cabo: Zucchini Tomato Goulash” →