Recently in cooking Category

More from the NY Times Most Emailed List: This week, foodie extraordinaire Mark Bittman (author of my most-used cookbook, How to Cook Everything) has been at the top of the list for several days with his post about how to stock your pantry. 

OUT Bouillon cubes or powder, or canned stock.
IN Simmer a carrot, a celery stalk and half an onion in a couple of cups of water for 10 minutes and you're better off; if you have any chicken scraps, even a half-hour of cooking with those same vegetables will give you something 10 times better than any canned stock.

Duh! We ran out of homemade chicken stock for our soup this week, and I ran to the store for a couple cans. 

OUT Spices older than a year: smell before using; if you get a whiff of dust or must before you smell the spice, toss it. I find it easier to clean house once a year and buy new ones.
IN Fresh spices. Almost all spices are worth having. 

Um, we just celebrated our 10-year anniversary. We still have a spice rack with several of the spices someone gave us at our wedding. 

OUT Grated imitation "Parmesan" (beware the green cylinder, or any other pre-grated cheese for that matter).
IN Real Parmigiano-Reggiano. Wrapped well, it keeps for a year (scrape mold off if necessary). Grated over anything, there is no more magical ingredient.

Super grateful for this advice. I grew up with the green cylinder, and we still have been using a bit pricier pre-grated Parm for years. My wife recently discovered a cheap but tasty block of Parm-Regg, and we have a couple blocks in our fridge. I'm glad to know I can keep them for a year. 

Mark Bittman--author of the most essential cookbook ever (I open it just about every single week)--offers cautious hope about the state of our food culture in this weekend's NY Times Magazine: 

[F]ood continues to be fetishized; organic food has been commodified; the federal government subsidizes almost all of the wrong kinds of food production; supermarkets peddle way too much nonreal food ("junk food" or, to use my mother's word, "dreck"); and weight-loss diets still discourage common-sense eating. 

But questions like "Would you prefer a mass-produced organic grape from Chile or a nonorganic one from a backyard vine in Upstate New York?" are more common in conversation, and the dialogue about food routinely includes words like locavore, vegetarian, sustainable and flexitarian. 

The real issues -- how do we grow and raise, distribute and sell, prepare and eat food? And how do our patterns of doing these things affect the rest of the world (and vice versa)? -- are simply too big to ignore. And if we are obsessing about where our food is from and how it's grown rather than whether our fries are cooked in beef fat or "cholesterol-free oil" (or, even worse, whether our gold-leaf-topped foie gras is good for us), this is progress.