This story category covers quick, easy, healthy recipes; it also covers entertaining plus tools and techniques that make cooking easier.
CREATIVE SOLUTION | Sometimes the most stunningly beautiful solution to a problem is also the most elementary one—like using candlelight rather than electricity to illuminate a snowy walkway.
EATING RIGHT | Jeffrey Steingarten, a leading food writer in the U.S., once compared ingesting a single pecan to swallowing a pat of butter. That didn’t stop the sometime judge on Iron Chef America from indulging in pecans, but this fact stopped me cold when I read it in Vogue—and it put me off pecans forever. After all who would knowingly shove multiple slabs of pure butterfat into their mouth? Read more
EASY & DELISH | The best coffee-flavoured dessert in the world? Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel think it’s the affogato, and I would have to agree. According to the celebrity press, the Timberlakes served this simple Italian treat made with a shot of espresso and a scoop of Italian gelato to go along with the almond and coconut wedding cake at their nuptials in southern Italy. Read more
ALL WE WANT FOR CHRISTMAS | Looking for the perfect little something to give someone you don’t know very well, or someone you do know well who loves to cook or entertain? These mini thumb-pumping stainless steel salt and pepper mills are practical and perfect. I received one for Christmas two years ago and loved it so much I recently bought a second one. Read more
How to devise a storage system for herbs and spices and forever do away with novelty spice racks and their special containers—or purchasing extra spice packets you don’t really need.
PROBLEM SOLVED | Has this ever happened to you? You’re ready to whip up a dish from scratch when you realize your recipe calls for a dried herb that, after rummaging among your cache of spice bottles and bags, you appear to be out of. So you rush out and pick some up only to discover later that you already had a bottle on hand—three, actually, stashed away in the dark recesses of the various places you store this stuff. Read more
EASY & DELISH | In the annals of dinner party desserts that look so impressive everyone assumes they must be horribly complicated to make, the chocolate soufflé is right up there. To begin with, it’s a soufflé for gawd sakes, and everyone knows that making any sort of soufflé can be a recipe for disaster. Read more
QUICK & DELISH | Though no one seems to know exactly where the American phrase “easy as pie” originated, it appears to have nothing to do with actually making pie—unless you’re making a rustic pie like the one pictured here, which, with minimal practice, really can be oven ready in minutes. Read more
EASY + GOOD | Puff pastry is a flaky, crispy ingredient found in a surprising array of show- stopping appetizers, entrées and sweets. Of course you can make it from scratch if you want—à la Julia, perhaps?—but quality premade products found in the freezer section of grocery stores work fine, too.
Author Martha Holmberg used mostly frozen puff pastry for the 50 interesting and original recipes featured in her cookbook Puff—mains like the pizza alternative she shares with Frugalbits readers here. Read more
EASY & DELISH | If you’re addicted to Internet food and home décor porn like I am, you already know who Todd Selby is and can scroll straight down to the bottom of this intro for an awesomely easy nougat noir recipe. It was part of a recent photo essay he did for the New York Times on an out-of-the-way French bakery in Vermont. Read more
CULT RECIPE ALERT | Summer is dinner party season for us. Since early June, we’ve invited friends over for supper at least once a week. We manage this despite busy schedules by sticking to a few proven menus. First-time visitors, for example, invariably tuck into our number-one-favourite no-brainer entrée: Chicken Marbella, which usually results in their asking for the recipe. If you’ve ever made or been served Marbella, you already know the impact its exceptional flavour can have on all who take a bite. Read more