Last week, I learned that BYOB is outdated. The new party rule I plan to implement on the regular: BYOC. My first trial run was terribly successful.

Our home is a five minute walk or drive from Whole Foods, our favorite local market, Piggly Wiggly, Publix and a host of other specialty food shops. I can have almost any ingredient I want within minutes. On Edisto Island, on the other hand, my options are limited and I have to make do with what I can find, like MacGyver.

No matter where I travel, there's one small kitchen gadget I've now learned to always bring with me: the humble waiter's key corkscrew. 

It's June and the summer fruit is starting to roll in, which basically translates to jam time in my kitchen.  Like many people, I love jam but sometimes I'm a little taken aback by how much sugar is called for in many classic jam recipes.  For this reason, I always keep a box of Pomona's Universal Pectin in my cupboard.  Pomona's is a low-sugar pectin, meaning you can make jams and jellies using very low or no sugar. 

Accomplished home canner and blogger Allison Carroll Duffy has been working with the people behind Pomona's to create a new cookbook, just released this month, with recipes that use this marvelous product.  Read on for her take on the 5 essential things a home canner should know!

Buttermilk ranch, shrimp crostini, and blueberry bundt cake — all very tasty...

Q: In the Midwest, a 'pudgy pie' is a popular camping food. They are generally made in pie irons, which are often cast iron gadgets with long handles. We'd love to try making them at home, but I can't find an appropriate gadget to do this. It seems pie irons are only a camping tool. Any ideas for how to find or DIY a pie iron for indoor use?

Ambatalia Utensil Wrap from Quitokeeto

• $36
• Quitokeeto

Here's a lovely piece from Heidi Swanson's (of 101 Cookbooks) pop-up shop, Quitokeeto. She found this piece from Molly de Vries of Ambatalia, a textile designer. The roll is perfect for travel or for your daily work lunch, holding a fork, spoon, knife, and chopsticks. Made from sustainably-farmed 100% unbleached Russian linen.

This is a cookbook about celebration: celebrating women who have survived war and other conflicts, and celebrating the foods that nourish us and bring us together. With recipes like sweet, cakey Sudanese Baseema and fragrant Burmese tomato fish curry, it's also a cookbook that will lift you right up from your seat and carry you  straight into the kitchen.

A can of black beans pulled from the very back of the cupboard has saved dinner more times than we can count. With these beans as our base, we know we can find enough other ingredients in refrigerator drawers and on pantry shelves to pull together a whole meal. More

I ate my first kouign amann from the palm of my hand at a farmers market in Oakland almost two years ago, and I will never in all my life forget the taste of those first buttery, caramelized, incredibly flakey morsels. I dream of traveling to Brittany to try a kouign amann straight from the source. Then again, now that I know that making them at home is not only doable, but just as buttery and flakey as anything coming from a bakery, I may not need to. Kouign amann? At home? I'm not kidding. Here's how you, too, can have a fresh batch of kouign amann cooling on your counter right now.

By now, we’ve all been guilty of doing it. It’s one of the fastest epidemics that not even scientists can explain. Anthropologists and historians hundreds of years from now will find landfills of objects once known as a DSLR camera, lenses, hard drives and memory cards. To their surprise, they will discover that their ancestors and predecessors have been taking pictures, tons of pictures... of food?!  

Shooting food has become one of the fastest growing hobbies for hundreds of thousands of people internationally and many have made the successful leap into the professional side of it. Naturally, everyone wants to get better at it too.