Sometimes food can be so beautiful. These beet and goat cheese "jewels" are simply made by layering those two ingredients. The trick is that the beet coloring — from both golden and red beets — seeps into the goat cheese, which is what gives the terrine that beautiful, varied shading.

When you were a grade school student, you probably complained about particularly bad school lunches to your parents or your friends, but fourth grader Zachary Maxwell didn't stop there. He decided to bring a small video camera to school so he could show his parents what his school lunches really looked like — and then spent the next six months documenting the food served in his New York City lunchroom.

Louisa Shafia is a Brooklyn-based chef and cookbook author whose first book Lucid Food was lauded for its fresh approach to cooking with organic, seasonal food.  In The New Persian Kitchen, she turns her attention to the vibrant flavors of Iran. She was introduced to this food as a child when her Iranian aunties would visit, bringing unfamiliar ingredients like pomegranate molasses, turmeric, and dried lime and filling the kitchen with enticing, delicious smells and tastes. 

Have you ever smuggled delicious pancetta home from Italy? Yes, smuggled. As in, broken the law. At the end of this month, your actions may be retroactively legal. (No, I am not a lawyer, so I actually don't know if you are absolved. So don't go calling the feds and confessing, okay?) The ban on importing salumi, at least some of it, has been lifted.

Have a vegetable garden? Then you should hopefully have earthworms. A lot of earthworms. You may already know earthworms are the great transformers of landscape, but there's another reason why you should want them in your garden: turns out if you have earthworms you're less likely to see damage inflicted by...

This is a sweet, simple idea for an outdoor play kitchen. All all you need is a crate, a fruit box, and a couple of cans!

We've all heard how blueberries are powerful antioxidants and how quinoa's health benefits stretch beyond its trendiness, but do we really know how to integrate all these "super foods" into a complete and sustainable diet? Enter Longevity Kitchen. This cookbook brings it all together, thoroughly explaining these doctor-recommended ingredients and helping you build a healthy (and tasty!) diet that works for you.

So, you may be thinking to yourself, "That meal looks horrible." And it was. The only redeemable thing on the plate was the ham loaf in the back. Stirred into an omelet the next morning, it tasted like pancakes and sausage. 

But I adore old cookbooks, especially from the 70s and 80s, the dawn of the career woman. With Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" in the background, these books were meant to help women have it all — a career, a family, and a fabulous reputation as a hostess. As it happens, we can't really have it all. And, while some of those cookbooks are full of old school goodness, others didn't make anything easier, as I recently discovered when I revisited one of the recipes.

"It's the most powerful food in the landscape of American culinary experience," according to Glenn Roberts, founder of Anson Mills, producer of handmade milled goods from organic heirloom grains. Glenn is a purist. His favorite way to enjoy the delicious milled corn dish is plain, eaten alone and with reverence. I can't say that most of us southerners are so calm around our grits, but we do love them. 

This week I am in another country, sharing a table with new friends, asking to see strangers' kitchens, and cooking with tools I can’t buy in the States over fire using woods I have to look up in my nature book. 

If you let it, this kind of travel will strip you down to your most innocent, vulnerable and open self. You’ll struggle to say hello and thank you even though you feel it more deeply than when you are at home, you will eat things you are not sure the names of, and you will fumble with customs that are foreign. You will grow.