Posted by Dabney Gough

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to eat my way through Slow Food Nation in San Francisco. The first event of its kind in the US, it’s equal parts festival, conference, rally, and party - all in the name of food that is good, clean, and fair.

I attended so many different workshops and events as part of Slow Food Nation, it’s hard to choose a favorite. If pressed, though, I think I’d go with the Taste Pavilion - a “curated” collection of artisanal foods and their producers. What made it special was not just the foods themselves, but the environment in which they were displayed.

The event took place in a huge open warehouse-type space, with similar products grouped together: jams and honeys, charcuterie, coffee, and chocolate, to name a few. Each category’s display area was designed by a different architecture firm, much like a museum exhibit. Each firm was clearly inspired by the products their designs encompassed. The jam and honey area was enclosed by walls made of fruit harvesting crates, stacked up like colorful, human-sized Legos. Inside, a quilt made of beeswax panels hung on the wall. The coffee area (at right) sat under a plywood roof pocked with large holes, which evoked the shade of a coffee grove (or, as my friend suggested, being inside a giant coffee filter). Most impressively, the bread section was anchored by the mother of all food centerpieces: a giant collection of bread loaves, stacked and arranged into the shape of a snail (the “mascot” of the Slow Food organization). Try working that into your next tablescape!

But of course, the point of it all was not just to look but to taste. And did I ever. Here are just a few of the things that I tasted in a 24-hour span:

• Chocolate from five of the ten bean-to-bar producers in the US.
• Single-origin Ethiopian coffee, which smelled exactly like blueberries
• Green tomatoes pickled in a fish sauce-based brine
• Beer that’s been aged in oak casks
• Grilled Monterey sardines
• Espresso-cocoa sprouted rye bread
• Coffee-infused raw honey
• Fresh green garbanzo beans, still in the pod (at right)
• Cornbread drenched in cultured full-fat buttermilk and sorghum molasses
• Figs so ripe that the centers were a jammy liquid
• Rabbit and trotter terrine
• Lardo atop a cracker-thin pizza

This event was so special I couldn't  bear to pass up anything that looked intriguing. But I have to admit, my poor liver is relieved that I'm now back to three square meals a day.

Posted by Rebecca Freedman

Growing up, the only bagels I ever knew were the doughy, New York-style behemoths that we loaded with cream cheese, lox, red onion, and tomato. Yum. But when I met my husband, who is from Montreal, he introduced me to Montreal’s answer to the bagel, which is a different animal entirely. Where New York bagels are fat, Montreal bagels are small and skinny. While New York bagels are so doughy that the hole is pinched to practically nothing, Montreal bagels have a very pronounced hole. Montreal bagels also have a slightly sweeter flavor.

If you’re a New Yorker, you’ll understand why at first, I secretly scoffed at the Montreal version. (How tiny! How unsubstantial!) But after a few years, I’ve come to appreciate them. They’re lighter, and fantastic when paired with delicious Quebec cheeses and smoked salmon.

During a recent trip to Montreal, we hit St. Viateur, which is THE place in town to get bagels. The cool thing about this little shop is that you can stand by the cash register and watch the bakers work. They shape the bagels by hand (at left), boil them, and then put dozens of them at a time into the oven on an amazingly long wooden board called a “sheeba.” (See photo above right.) 

To try the bagels for yourself, visit Stviateurbagel.com. The bakery doesn’t ship to addresses outside of Canada, but you can call or e-mail the company directly to try to arrange a shipment.

Posted by Lisa Waddle

It’s tomato time pretty much across the country, and our latest issue features some fabulous recipes to showcase the darlings of the vegetable patch, heirloom tomatoes.

These colorful beauties are all about variety and richness of color, shape, size, and texture. To capture them in all their glory, we traveled to Waldingfield Farm, a family-owned organic farm in Washington, Connecticut. Owner Patrick Horan, who along with his two brothers cultivates the land that was bought by his great-grandfather at the beginning of the last century, loaded us down with bushels of heirloom tomatoes of all colors and sizes. Many found themselves elevated from the humble vine to starring roles on the pages of our latest issue.


Patrick, who has become known as “The Tomato Guy” around FC’s offices, also hawks his beautiful vegetables at farmer’s markets around western Connecticut. If you find yourself in the area, it’s worth a drive in the country to check out Waldingfield’s bounty. He’s got a schedule of farmer’s markets on his Web site, or check out LocalHarvest.org for a list of farmer's markets in your area. (For our readers north of the border, here’s a link to a list of farmers’ markets in Canada).

Posted by Sharon Anderson

At a recent food show, after sampling cheese after cheese after truffle after truffle, a booth abounding with fresh fruit appeared like a mirage at the end of a long row of vendors. There were mangosteens and lychee and all kinds of hybrid stone fruits, but the coolest thing were these striped lemons (at right).

Robert, our friends at Melissa’s, informed me that they are Variegated Pink Lemons. With yellow and green striped skin and the faintest blush of pink, they’re gorgeous. Cutting into one reveals truly rosy flesh and an intense lemon aroma. As I tasted one, I was expecting it to be sweet, something like a Ruby Red grapefruit. Instead, it was pleasantly bright and tangy like a normal lemon, though perhaps slightly stronger and with a more pronounced floral note.

Robert sent me home with a few of these beauties—not enough to make a pitcher of real pink lemonade (which is what I was fantasizing about). But they certainly spruced up my cocktails the next few nights. If I happen to get my hands on a couple more (they’re in season in November, so I don’t have too long to wait!), I'm on the look out for the perfect lemon dessert to showcase their tart, fragrant flavor and gorgeous colors. Any suggestions?

Posted by Denise Mickelsen

Food and product blogs and websites are a fun and necessary part of an FC editor’s job. How else can we stay on top of what’s going on in the world of food?  Here is a little something that I discovered the other day on CoolestGadgets.com. As a bacon-lover from way back, I think this alarm clock is pure genius! 

Yes, that’s right, this is an alarm clock that wakes you gently in the morning with the aroma of sizzling bacon. How is this miracle possible, you ask?  Just pop a frozen strip of bacon into the little tray before you go to sleep, set the alarm, and about 10 minutes before you’re set to wake the clock flips an internal switch and two tiny halogen lamps begin to cook your bacon.  The aroma wafts over you as your dreams turn to breakfast, and the alarm begins to chime... what is that wonderful smell, you think groggily?  Ah yes, it’s your fabulous alarm clock with bacon benefits, ready with your first food treat of the day.  The only thing better is not setting an alarm at all.

Posted by Rebecca Freedman

For years, my Canadian-born husband has been trying to convince me that we should  relocate to Montreal. But as a native New Yorker, discussing moving so far from Manhattan is sheer blasphemy. And who needs those cold Canadian winters anyway?

But here’s the thing that always gets me: The food in Montreal is just incredible. Not only in the restaurants, but at the markets, the bakeries, the specialty shops! (It doesn’t help that, where I live in Connecticut, there’s a pathetic lack of good markets, and I often find myself bouncing from store to store for the groceries I need.) Simply put, Montreal is foodie heaven.

So you can imagine my delight last week, during our vacation there, when we hit Jean-Talon market, a gigantic farmers’ market surrounded by a dazzling array of specialty stores. This place is absolutely enormous, way bigger than any market I've seen in the States, and filled with every fruit and vegetable you can imagine, plus fresh cheeses, barrels of olives, gorgeous displays of honey and olive oil…I could go on and on.

Despite the fact that we’d been walking the city all day long, I felt renewed energy as we stocked up on bags of tomatoes, hunks of delicious goat cheese, and several kinds of locally grown berries. And the New Yorker in me hates to admit it, but for just a few moments, with all those ingredients at my fingertips, I thought to myself, “Hmmm. Is there something to that “moving to Canada” idea after all?”

Posted by Sarah Breckenridge

Lately there's been a big kerfuffle in the blogosphere over whether a blogger has the right to publish another site's recipes...and it's raised the issue of why food magazines test their recipes over and over again. Is it to get the recipe to a level of absolute perfection--a platonic ideal of potato salad? Or is it just to ensure that when a reader tries a recipe, they're assured of reliable results?

Here at FC, we think that cooking is not just a science but a passion--and part of that passion comes from applying your own inspiration to the techniques you learn from our much-tested recipes.

Case in point: when I stumbled upon a cache of tart cherries this weekend (oh joy! I thought I'd totally missed the brief sour cherry season), I wanted to use them in a rich pastry, but one that would also show off their beautiful color. I immediately thought of Kim Masibay's Mixed Berry Jalousie from an earlier issue of FC. Swapping out the berries for a mix of sweet and tart cherries was simple, because the recipe was so detailed that I knew the purpose of each step--and where I should tread cautiously in making substitutions.

Want to play with our recipes even more? We've created interactive recipe builders from our popular Cooking Without Recipes Feature--they let you tailor your own recipe with your favorite flavors, then print and save your results.

P.S. in case you're curious, here's how I modified that Jalousie recipe:

Sweet-and-Tart Cherry Jalousie
Serves six to eight

8 oz. pitted tart cherries
6 oz. pitted sweet Bing cherries, halved
3 Tbs. granulated sugar; more to taste
1/2  tsp. fresh lemon juice; more to taste
Pinch kosher salt
1-1/2 Tbs. cornstarch
1 large egg
1 sheet frozen packaged puff pastry, thawed overnight in the fridge
Flour for rolling out the dough
1 tsp. turbinado sugar

In a medium (3 qt.) saucepan, stir together the cherries, sugar, lemon juice, and salt. Heat over medium high until the cherries start to release their juices and those juices bubble, 1 to 2 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium and simmer, stirring gently from time to time, until the cherries release more juices and soften but still hold their shape for the most part (the sour cherries may break down a bit moret han the sweet), about 6 minutes. Remove from the heat.

With a slotted spoon, scoop out the cherries, letting as much juice as possible drain through the spoon, and put them into a small heat-proof bowl.

Dissolve the cornstarch in 3 Tbs. cold water. Whisk into the juices in the pan. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Boil, stirring with a wooden spoon, until the mixture is very thick, a full 2 minutes. Scrape the sauce into the bowl with the cherries. Fold them together. Taste. If too tart, add a little more sugar; if too sweet, add a little more lemon juice. Let the filling cool completely before using.

For directions on assembling and baking the Jalousie, just follow the original recipe.

Posted by Denise Mickelsen

I suffer from several food addictions, but chocolate has never been one of them. I’ll take a slice of sour cherry pie over a hunk of chocolate cake any day.  But I know that many, many people feel otherwise, and so when I was offered the chance to attend a live demonstration of Valrhona’s new chocolates and pastry techniques, I jumped at the chance.

Philippe Givre (above left), the Pastry Chef at l’Ecole du Grand Chocolat Valrhona, and Derek Poirer (above right), the Pastry Chef for Valrhona USA, put on a fabulous show.  They walked us, their rapt audience of pastry professionals and journalists, through the incredibly complicated steps of creating a Valrhona dessert.  I’m talking about baba au rhum with Earl Grey tea-infused mandarin syrup, chocolate whipped ganache and a manadarin sauce. Or one of my favorites from the demo, “the Jungle,” featuring a chocolate-striped cake (meant to resemble a zebra) that’s thinly sliced and then oven-dried until crisp, topped with two kinds of whipped ganache, a red tea granite, a red tea caramel, and fried chocolate.  That’s right, fried chocolate: they made a chocolate tempura-like batter, and deep-fried it. It was so cool.

All along the way, we sampled the company’s new chocolate products - a 64% Taïnori chocolate made from 100% Dominican Republic cocoa beans that had dark, rich, fruity flavors and a hint of almonds, a 66% Alpaco chocolate made from Ecuadorian beans that was almost flowery in aroma and taste (this one was beautifully paired with the baba au rhum described above)… even their new line of chocolate bonbons. Add coffee to that mix and I was fairly buzzing by the end of the four-hour demonstration. And, truth be told, I was a choco-convert.

Posted by Denise Mickelsen

I am a lucky editor.  As the FC staffer responsible for reporting on new food products and trends, I go to culinary conferences, food demonstrations, and trade shows galore to try the newest products and learn about innovative techniques.  And did I mention the cheese?!  One of my all-time favorite foods in the world is cheese, and luckily, there are a lot of them out there that I need to taste.

One of my top-10 cheeses is Cypress Grove Chevre’s Humboldt Fog, a creamy, tangy, soft-ripened goats’ milk cheese with a layer of vegetable ash in the middle that makes the cheese look like a layer cake, but in a good way.  I have been known to eat entire wedges of this cheese by myself.  Off a butter knife.  It’s that delicious.

So, happy was I to find that Cypress Grove had a booth at the Fancy Food Show in NYC earlier this month.  I had been walking and tasting for about 6 hours and then, there it was: my favorite cheese, beckoning to me from the Cypress Grove Chevre counter, begging to be tasted yet again.  I gave in.  In between mouthfuls, I also asked the kind people behind the counter if they had anything new to share. 

Did they ever. Truffle Tremor (at right) is one of their newest cheeses, having made its debut just last summer.  The story goes that for the company’s 25th anniversary, they wanted to try something special—a combination of their fresh, natural goats’ milk cheese with Italian black summer truffles. The cheeses were made, tasted, and spit out. Okay, not really spit out, but “it was not a happy marriage,” said Mary Keehn, the company’s owner and founder. Still, Mary had a hunch. Since they’d already made the cheeses, chock-full of expensive truffles, she figured they should let them age for a bit and give them another try.

Weeks passed. The cheeses were all but forgotten.  One day, Mary reminded Bob McCall, Cypress Grove’s sales and marketing guru, to bring the cheese out for a tasting.  Everyone took a bite; the room fell silent. It was incredible!  Rich and earthy from the truffles, creamy with a delicious tang from the goats milk. They had created a truly tasty, sophisticated cheese that I, for one, adore. Seek their cheeses out at your local cheese or gourmet shop, or on their web site. One try and I know you’ll feel as lucky as I do.

Posted by intern Evan Barbour

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I can't weigh in from a nutritional standpoint, but it certainly is true from a psychological one. For me, breakfast is one of the few times of the day that I have to relax, catch up on the news, and figure out my daily plans--especially during a busy week. For this reason, oatmeal is my go-to choice. A filling, warm bowl doesn’t take long to prepare, and it can be enjoyed slowly without falling prey to the sogginess that cold cereal develops.

Even during the summer months, I prefer oatmeal over anything else, and it’s easy to make it summery by adding sliced peaches, blackberries or strawberries to it. But I have to admit that my favorite way to dress-up oatmeal is wholly autumnal, and probably sacrilegious to make during the summer. But I don’t care. It’s delicious, and if you try it, you’ll understand.

Since I always have canned pumpkin for baking and fresh ginger root for stir fries and noodles (it stores beautifully peeled and placed in a Ziploc in the freezer), this variation is an easy way to use some of my favorite kitchen staples. I’m sure that ground ginger would work just as well, but it won’t provide the exact same bite and flavor.

Pumpkin Spice Oatmeal
Serves one.

I like big breakfasts, but you can easily scale this recipe down to meet your preferences.

1/2 cup, plus 3 Tbs. thick rolled oats (I like Bob’s Red Mill)
1/2 cup canned pure pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)
Honey or maple syrup to taste
1/2 tsp. of vanilla extract
1/4 tsp. salt
A drop of almond extract (optional)
2 tsp. grated fresh ginger (I use a rasp grater)
1/2 tsp. cinnamon; more or less to taste
Ground cloves to taste
1 Tbs. almond butter

Combine the oats with 1-3/4 cup water in a large cereal bowl. Cook the oats in the microwave on 50% power for about 7 minutes. Watch them closely, as they may start to boil over (if they do, stop and stir them, and resume microwaving). Let the oats stand for about 5 minutes to soak in excess moisture, and microwave on full power for about a minute more.

Add the pumpkin, honey or maple syrup, vanilla extract, salt, and almond extract to the oats and stir until combined. Add the ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, and stir until well combined. Finally, stir in the almond butter.