VALENTINE’S DAY: The Best Date

Another healthy Valentine idea: Medjool dates. Whenever we encounter the Bard Valley Medjool Date Growers at a trade show, it’s our favorite booth. The melt-in-your-mouth, better-than-sugar dates have been called mankind’s first candy—and maybe the best. The Medjool variety has been called “the fruit of kings,” and unlike other “favorites of kings”—horse racing, for example—everyone…
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TIP OF THE DAY: 10 Chef’s Tricks To Change Up Your Foods (Part 1)

Slice, caramelize and add to salads. Photo courtesy Microplane.   Chef Johnny Gnall shares this inspiration for cooking. He calls it “Going Against The Grain: Raw Foods You Should Try Cooking And (Typically) Cooked Foods You Should Try Raw.” Johnny chose 10 common ingredients and switched them from their typical use to “the other side.”…
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PRODUCT: Baked Brookster Mix, A Brownie/Cookie Combo

If you need a Valentine gift, run to your nearest Williams-Sonoma store to pick up a box of Baked Brookster Mix (also available online). Brookster? We’re guessing “brookie” was already trademarked. But a mix by any other name would taste as yummy. Popular New York City bakery, Baked Brooklyn, combines a fudgy brownie with a…
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PRODUCT: Diet Snapple Half ‘n Half

Photo courtesy Snapple.   Snapple didn’t invent the “Half ‘n Half,” a refreshing beverage made of half iced tea, half lemonade. The drink was popularized by golfing great Arnold Palmer. As the story goes, in the 1960s, after a long day spent designing a golf course in Palm Springs, Palmer asked a bartender for a…
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VALENTINE GIFT: Healthy Black Currants

First, the truth about currants: Most products called currants are raisins, in a botanical family unrelated in any way to the current, except at the highest, Kingdom, level (*detail addicts, see the footnote at the bottom of this article). As for why real currants were banned from America for 82 years, read the story, a…
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