The Kitchn Archive: May 2011

In today’s food news, via our friends at Food News Journal: Duff beer is apparently doing quite well in Latin America. But is it licensed for distribution in the United States? Plus, China cracks down with the death penalty for food safety violators.Read on for more news of the day via Food News Journal.• E.

Every one knows that moving is no fun, so those details will be spared. Let’s just fast forward to a post-move scenario, one where you’re still living in your original place but all your stuff was taken away the day before and while you thought you had organized things down to the last salt shaker, it turns out that you forgot the fact that there are still a few last meals to be eaten here. Like breakfast.

The first time I ever nibbled on a chard stem while prepping a big bunch of greens, I was blown away by the flavor of this usually-discarded bit of vegetable. Crisp and salty, chard stems are good chopped up in salads or cooked alongside chard leaves, but the recent issue of Bon Appétit suggests an even better use: spicy refrigerator pickles!The idea comes from Doug Flicker, a chef at the Minneapolis restaurant Piccolo.

As we type this, we’re looking down at two unhappy, bandaged fingers. Lesson learned: don’t daydream while cleaning the food processor blade!Over the years we have experienced plenty of minor kitchen accidents (fortunately no major ones) and then, after scolding ourselves for being so mindless, we file the incident away and learn to be safer next time.

This post is about the pleasures of being unambitious. Not lazy (although I approve of that as well) but not all determined and zealous either. Unambitious, as in making just one jar of strawberry jam, instead of mounting a jam-making superproduction, complete with vats of boiling water and industrial sized bags of sugar and cases of fruit. Not that there’s anything wrong with a good, old-fashioned canning-palooza, but sometimes the circumstances are such that you have to aim small.

Sometimes when life is playing rough and pushing you too hard into a corner, you have to find your balance in the most peculiar places. For me, it was this scoop of strawberry ice cream. My gritty, hot, tangy-bitter day met the cool silk of frozen cream, sugar and strawberries and for a moment – exactly the duration it takes to eat a scoop of ice cream with a tiny shovel-like spoon, plus about 10 minutes of afterglow – for a moment, all was well.

If you think chef-branded foods like Ina Garten’s cake mixes and Rick Bayless’s sauces are new to supermarket shelves, think again. A man named Ettore “Hector” Boiardi (pronounced boy-ar-dee, get it?) was a forerunning culinary sell out before there was such a thing. But did you know he once worked as a chef at New York’s Plaza hotel? This week, TIME chronicled how Boiardi helped shape American Italian food, for better and worse.

I’m not what you’d call a celebrity-obsessed person, so when I heard that Gwyneth Paltrow was releasing a cookbook, I admit I rolled my eyes a little. Who needs to be told how to cook by someone who probably has an army of assistants cooking for her? But then I actually read the book. And you know what? It’s a good cookbook.Still not convinced? Here are four reasons why I think you should give Gwyneth’s cookbook a chance:1. It’s heartfelt.