Eat

These days, many of us are weighing the impacts and ethics of meat eating in general. So the prospect of buying and cooking a holiday roast is more daunting than ever. Here's a guide to navigating today’s meat markets and making a centerpiece roast worth celebrating.

Source Quality Beef

The single most important decision to make is what beef to buy, because flavor is largely predetermined before the roast goes into the oven. Quality beef is strongly correlated with the cattle’s quality of life: Did it live on pasture, even during its final 120 days eating grasses? Did it live without stress—especially right before slaughter?

Broccoli is a vegetable that makes for a wonderful salad. Its bright green color and crisp-tender texture can be appealing if cooked properly.

Cooking broccoli properly might seem like a no-brainer, but many people do not do so. Broccoli, and all cruciferous vegetables, must not be overcooked, otherwise chemicals in the plant break down and release sulfurous compounds, such as ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, and interact with the chlorophyll in the plant, which cause the broccoli to turn an unappetizing brownish-grey color and have a very unpleasant smell.

Let’s get cooking! We’ve pulled together a few recipes to help you explore the kitchen—and each other. All three aphrodisiac food recipes are chock full of organic, healthy ingredients and, as an added bonus, all three contain ingredients that are known aphrodisiacs!
Here are a three simple aphrodisiac food recipes to help get you in the mood and #makeitgood:

Cauliflower is about to become the new kale, according to something I read online. And that's just fine with me, because I have grown awfully tired of kale. When a vegetable becomes nothing but a raw garnish, as kale has, a limp and lifeless ruffle at the edge of your plate, then you know its star-studded status is truly over and done with.

I suppose kale had its virtues, but there is a reason we all had to be taught to love it, and not only to love it, but to contort it into all sorts of iterations, some of which were less than inviting. Raw kale in a salad, for me, is just plain roughage, and as for a kale smoothie, well, the less said the better, I feel.

At a certain point in many people's lives, something magical occurs. Your blind, blinkered, unreasoned, gut-churning hatred of spinach—you've never even tasted it, but you just KNOW you loathe it—is transformed, like Cinderella's pumpkin, into a thing of joy and beauty. That might be overstating things, but you get the point.

Perhaps the widespread childhood revulsion to spinach is due to the brutal treatment so much spinach has suffered at the hands of careless cooks over the years. A slimy mound of battle-dress greens on a plate is never going to tempt youthful taste buds, especially when promoted with the dreaded tagline: "And, it's GOOD for you." Yeah, right.

A large plate bursting with colorful plants and topped with a zingy vinaigrette—a big salad—has been part of my regular dinner repertoire for years. Happily, this concept is finally getting the love it deserves as a result of today's increased focus on plant-based diets. Forget the naked salads of the 1980s, cruelly deprived of dressing. Follow these five tips and get creative to make salad the star of tonight's supper.

I have a whole shelf’s worth of books on the art of preserving—from the "Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving" to Sandor Katz's "Wild Fermentation." All of them attentively detail the equipment, ingredients, safety measures and mechanics of food preservation. But not one of them reveals how an everyday cook can reasonably manage the workload of canning in the home kitchen.

After 15 years as a devoted food preservationist, I can tell you that things can very quickly get out of hand, even small-batch canning. What with washing and sanitizing jars, peeling and cutting fruits and vegetables, and timing the steady boil in the giant cauldron called a canner, it's always more involved than I remember.