We all know Cookie Monster loves to eat cookies, but it turns out he's quite the baker, too! Cookie Monster's famous cookie dough recipe first appeared in Big Bird's Busy Book, from the 1970's. If you like a bit of nostalgia mixed in with your sugar and eggs, this recipe is for you:
More

Meat carcasses hang from the rafters. There's blood and sawdust on the floor. Doll-sized butchers stand in front, looking severe. (One is even holding a knife.) A historical mock-up for a museum, you think? Nope. This is an actual toy butcher shop for kids, circa 1850, and it was a runaway hit at the time. More

What presidential candidate doesn't play up a love of a hometown favorite, from pancakes at a diner, to a cheeseburger? While these details can seem trivial, food has played a significant role in the White House throughout history. Just take First Lady Dolly Madison's famous layer cake from 1809. She used egg whites to lighten the batter, a pretty novel concept at the time. Read on for more presidential foods and even recipes. More

A person's first taste of the Chinese soup dumplings called xiao long bao is a magical one. I've seen it again and again on the faces of friends and family eating the dumplings for the first time at Din Tai Fung in Arcadia, a nearby outpost of the Taiwan-based soup dumpling chain: there is wonder, followed by bliss, and finally greed, as they mentally calculate the remaining dumplings divided by the number of people at the table. So how did this regional specialty from the outskirts of Shanghai come to be a beloved food in Southern California and beyond? More

Weck jars are a popular canning in jar in Europe that are really catching on here in the States and Canada. They are unique in that they consist of a tempered glass jar, a rubber gasket, a separate glass lid and metal clamps to hold the gasket and lid in place. Where did these jars come from and how long have they been in production? More

We all have our family cooking lore: famed recipes that get passed down from generation to generation, and others that just get lost somewhere in between. Either a selfish cook doesn't share his closely-guarded secret, or a recipe doesn't get written down until it is too late. And then there's the cherished recipe that fails—perhaps it lacks a key ingredient or important step. These chocolate peanut clusters? They only lacked one thing. My Nana. More

For all the times that my mother and I have stood hip-to-hip slicing apples for sauce, stirring soups, and making big batches of chocolate chip cookies, I don't know that we've ever really talked about cooking. She grew up in the 50's and 60's, when convenience foods like canned beans and Spaghetti-O's were coming into popularity and the role of women in the kitchen was starting to look very different. I was sure she'd have some interesting stories to share with us for Family History Week; I only needed to ask. More

Back when our grandmothers started baking cookies, they probably weren't reading articles about the gluten content of cake flour versus all-purpose, or the melting points of butter and shortening. Baking is chemistry, it's true — but it's also more than that, as writer Deborah Blum realized when she set out to recreate her grandmother's chocolate chip cookies. More

Settling in to cook a recipe isn't what it used to be. Instead of pulling out a worn recipe from your recipe box, you're probably more likely to pull out an iPad, or a few printed sheets of paper from an online recipe. Nevertheless, we continue to associate handwritten 3-by-5 cards with recipes, particularly treasured recipes. How did the recipe card come to be? More

Original recipe cards passed down from older relatives are invaluable, but like any physical object, they don't always survive the passing of years intact. If your family recipe box resembles the photo on the left—a mishmash of old cards, splattered and stained, the handwriting faded after many long years of storage and use—then you might want to try this preservation trick from Martha Stewart.
More