“We don’t need that!� My Zaidie glares at my mother and puts the second of two (yes, two) containers of homemade cookies back in the cardboard box from whence they came. This ritual is repeated over and over with a multitude of food products—salad dressings loaded with fat and sugar, pack...

Isn’t it fun to learn about the origins of where certain dishes come from? On that note, let’s find out how the Cobb Salad came to be. In 1937, Bob Cobb, who owned The Brown Derby at the time, was feeling some hunger pangs and also wanting to feed some studio exec buddies who were with h...

Ah, hamantaschen: nector of the goods. Ah, Purim: a delightful and whimsical holiday, the centerpieces of which are merriment, games, and, as with most any Jewish holiday, special foods! The edible star of Purim is the hamentaschen. Typically a sweet dessert, made out of of pasty dough cooked around...

I baked bread for the first time a few weeks ago, and it was a life-changing moment. Not just because it was some of the best bread I had ever tasted, but because it also made me think seriously about what bread means. In an age when we have all kinds of grain products at our disposal (rice, noodles...

It’s like a religious ritual: before each meal at my mother in law’s house, we act out the same scene. We all stand around the table, goggle eyed and groaning at the sight, and Laura worriedly hunches her shoulders and states, “I don’t think there will be enough food.â€� She’s right: t...

The Toronto Star recently ran a five-day series of interviews with people who lived through the Great Depression. Some quotes: "She thought back to the first flat they rented in Kensington Market nine years before, when they arrived in Toronto. That apartment had three rooms. Her parents slept in on...

This may shock you, but fortune cookies are not Chinese food, nor are they really Chinese-American food. They started out as a Japanese product, and were copied by Chinese-Americans in San Francisco decades ago to form the dessert staple of cheap Chinese restaurants across the US. (This was detailed...

An article about the nutritional value of modern vegetables A recipe for Jelly Doughnut Pudding Jelly Doughnut PuddingBy Alex Witchel Time: About 2 1/2 hours 3 1/2 cups heavy cream, at room temperature 1 1/2 cups whole milk, at room temperature 1 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons sugar 8 large eggs 4 larg...

There are two schools of thought on the cultural ancestry question: one view holds that it's important to maintain a strong cultural connection to our ancestry and that the deep spirit of our ancestors lives within is, the other view sees this all simply as mythology that we perpetuate for our own c...

PE-Obama is vacationing in Kailua, Oahu, on land that was "once was the private estate of Samuel N. Castle, a sugar magnate whose Castle & Cooke company was one of the Big Five firms that dominated Hawaiian politics for decades," according to the Washington Post. Samuel Castle came to ...