Category: Food & Dining

Old Bananas, New Trick: How to Make Banana Bread Pudding

Banana bread pudding is a delectable new way to use up slightly ripened bananas and day-old bread. As an alternative to your go-to quick bread, this custard-based recipe—with all of the same flavors as its namesake—is an excellent brunch or dessert option for using up aging bananas. Although it’s exceptional on its own, a warm rum…


These Cheesy Rolls, Originally From Brazil, Are Easy to Make in Your Own Kitchen

Pão de queijo, cheese bread, are small rolls with crunchy exteriors and uniquely chewy, stretchy centers. Instead of using flour like most baked goods, they use a surprise ingredient: tapioca starch. Tapioca starch (also called tapioca flour) is made from cassava root, a plant native to South America, that has been ground into a powder….


Beets Are the Main Attraction in This Tasty Salad

I picked up a bunch of jewel-toned beets at the farmers market this weekend. I’d usually roast them for a hearty salad or slice them up for a sandwich, but I got this fancy new kitchen toy and decided to spiralize them raw and make a salad with the beets as the main attraction. Spiralizers…


Don’t Make These Stir-fry Mistakes

“It has to be done, so it might as well be done by me,” I told myself as I dumped the thawed package of supermarket potstickers into the vegetable stir-fry. I may be crazy, but it’s a lock that my kids will like it. So how crazy could that be? Trying to make a stir-fry…


With Meal Planning, Think Cost per Serving, Not Price per Pound

Pop quiz: Which is the better buy? Pork tenderloin for $2.97 per pound or boneless pork chops at $3.47 per pound—taken from my local supermarket’s weekly ad? If you answered the tenderloin, you’re in good company. Most of us would, but we’d be wrong. Price per pound can be misleading because not all cuts of…


Comfort Food, Lightened Up

Meatballs are a comfort food around the globe. Consider the Swedish kottbullar, Mexican albondigas, Indian koftes, Israeli ktzitzot, or French boules. They all use ground meat and are rolled into balls. From there, the meatball varies according to different tastes and available ingredients. These airy, fluffy meatballs are an easy-to-prepare weeknight dish. They’re lightened up…


A Year-Round Tomato Sauce

If you are like me and enjoy homemade tomato sauce year-round, this recipe is for you. It’s a great way to use up any lingering tomatoes at the end of the season. If the season has already finished, you can still manage a decent sauce with your supermarket variety. The key to developing the flavor…


Widen the Gap With Homemade Bread

If you’ve read my book, “7 Money Rules for Life,” you know that rule No. 1 is so simple it would be easy to overlook it as being too elementary. Here it is: Spend less than you earn. Now, let’s think about this. “Spend less than you earn” is not the same as “Don’t spend…


Explaining Bottle Variation

If you pay strict attention to the wines you buy, you may notice that there often are slight differences between two bottles of the “same” wine. This phenomenon is called “bottle variation.” Wine makers know it’s a hard-to-avoid pitfall. In particular, with wines made in the millions of cases, variations can be great. A 10,000-gallon…


How to Make a Proper Eggplant Parmigiana, Italian Nonna-Style

Summer isn’t officially over until I make a few trays of eggplant parmigiana to freeze for the colder months. The rich, cheesy layers are a joy to eat warm, even in the hot summer months. But nothing beats the utter pleasure of biting into a thick, piping hot, intensely savory slice of it on a…