Take three basic ingredients (you get pasta water and salt as freebies), plus some comfort-food inspiration, and you’ve got a grown-up version of buttered noodles that’s light with just a hint of indulgence. Dry white wine, a pat of butter, and nutty Parmesan come together for a light summery sauce for any pasta you’re cooking up. It’s a no-fuss homemade sauce you can call on any night of the week, and it doesn’t need much more time or effort than it would take to heat up the jarred stuff.
“How do you store fresh summer rolls, though?” This is the question I most often get when I profess my love of these rice paper-rolled treats to anyone who will listen. It’s a genuinely great question, as summer rolls are often best just after rolling, but the answer depends on how long your summer rolls need storing. Here are two smart ways to store summer rolls, whether you’re making them ahead for a party or stashing leftovers in the fridge.
We love subway tile as much as the next home cook, but it’s not the end all be all when it comes to kitchen backsplash options. If you’re looking for some inspiration for your soon-to-be renovated space, or you just want to ogle some pretty kitchens, check out these beautiful subway tile alternatives — in real kitchens! — and prepare to swoon.
Amazon is the Jack of all trades: It’s an online marketplace, has its own video and music streaming service, owns upscale organic retailer Whole Foods, and has a popular home assistant (Hi, Alexa!). Now the company is slowly dipping its toes into the meal kit market.
(Image credit: kate pugsley)
Fruit will always be ripe for children’s literature — “A is for apple” graces the first page of almost any self-respecting alphabet book, after all — but a peach is a particularly rich fruit for this job, conveying a sense of sweetness around its dark stone center, or its regional and cultural connections. It’s just unusual enough to be slightly left of the more typical fruits.
Take, for example, Roald Dahl’s fantastical novel James and the Giant Peach. With Roald Dahl’s talent for storytelling, there’s no question that James and the Giant Cherry (actually a real consideration according to Dahl’s private diaries) would have been successful, but there’s something about James and the Giant Peach that evokes the story itself — the kind that will leave juice running down your chin, the kind with a hard center that will surprise you if you’re not careful.
This is Dahl’s trademark, after all — mixing the sweet with the sour and the downright dark. What else besides a peach, with its complexities and contradictions — a fuzzy exterior, juicy interior, and hard stone in the middle — would suffice as the vehicle for magical and twisted adventures with a cast of fantastically large insects?
With the Tour de France zipping through the countryside this month, I’ve been thinking about what one would have to eat in preparation for a 2,200-mile, 23-day bike race. A person’s typical daily meal plan probably isn’t enough to power the trip, right? So how many calories would you have to consume? I asked Nigel Mitchell, head of nutrition for Cannondale Drapac, an American professional cycling team competing in the race, to break down the diet of the average cyclist for his team.
The menu is actually quite involved, which got me thinking even more: Wouldn’t it be easier if everyone just ate baguettes instead? The competition is in France, after all. Based on Mitchell’s description of an average meal plan (and the calories in an average two-ounce French baguette), here’s what that would actually look like.
Like clockwork every summer, I decide that the only thing I want to eat, maybe forever because when it’s warm out I completely forget winter is coming (I’m sorry, I had to), are variations on tomato-cucumber salad. We did a world tour of these last year and it might take me another decade of Smitten Kitchen-ing but I will get to them all. Left to our own devices, my husband and I probably would probably eat do exactly this for dinner at least a couple nights a week but when feeding kids, I always feel the need — I mean, what are they, growing rapidly and we’re supposed to fuel them with balanced meals or something? — to provide a little more than a bowl of cucumbers and tomatoes for dinner. You know, protein and stuff.
In the U.S., we generally think of hummus (which simply means “chickpea” in Arabic) as a cold snack, a dip you buy in the fridge case to help distract you from, say, cool ranch potato chip dip or something. But throughout the Middle East, there are hummusiots/hummsias, places that serve hummus warm and freshly made, often a little softer than what we get here, usually heaped with other things. Yes, as a meal; a heavenly one. Toppings might include additional tahini or chickpeas, cooked fava beans (ful), sautéed mushrooms, roasted beets, hard-boiled eggs, falafel, spicy ground beef, chopped tomato-onion-cucumber salads, pickles, and/or green olives plus always a stack of freshly baked puffy pitas. In some areas, hummus is a breakfast food, accompanied with labneh and mint. And it is from daydreaming about all of this — with a reminder from this oh-so-tempting Ina Garten photo from last week — that I realized that the easiest way to turn my tomato-cucumber salad obsession in to a meal was to serve it hummusiot-style.
The brains behind the incredibly popular food blogs How Sweet Eats and Two Peas and Their Pod have launched a meal planning subscription service. Called Sweet Peas Meals, the goal is to get people to cook balanced and delicious meals without having to spend too much time in the kitchen.
“When we first started talking about Sweet Peas Meals, our main goal was to create something that would simplify your everyday life, every single day,” reads the website. “We do all of the work for you to plan delicious, family-friendly menus week after week, giving you the time to focus on enjoying the joy and fun that mealtime should be.”
In theory, artificial sweeteners offer consumers the promise of sweet without the extra calories. In the U.S., a quarter of children and 41 percent of adults report eating artificial sweeteners like aspartame, sucralose and stevia. But a scientific review of 37 studies on non-nutritive sweeteners, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, found that there is no evidence to suggest sweeteners help in weight management.
“We were really interested in the everyday person who is consuming these products not to lose weight, but because they think it’s the healthier choice, for many years on end,” Meghan Azad, lead author of the review and an assistant professor in the department of pediatrics and child health at the University of Manitoba in Canada, tells NPR.
(Image credit: Noosa)
In the seven years that Noosa yogurt has been on the market, it has gained quite a loyal following. Compared to the low-fat Greek yogurt trend of the last decade, Noosa doesn’t shy away from fat. The resulting yogurt is decadently creamy and rich, making it an equally viable option for breakfast or dessert.
The latest innovation from the Colorado-based company goes a little more mainstream along the lines of Chobani and Fage. Last month Noosa announced it was going to release a new line of yogurt called “mates,” which basically combines their yogurt with a small packet of mix-ins.