COOKING VIDEO: Spicy Vietnamese Soup

  Next week’s Top Pick focuses on a ready-made base for for phö—one of the world’s great soups. But if you’ve got time on your hands this weekend, you may want to make some from scratch. This recipe starts with beef shanks, oxtail, onions, ginger and star anise in a stock pot. Sliced beef and…
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HALLOWEEN: Festive Chocolate-Covered Strawberries

Show of hands: Are these Halloween strawberries cuter than yesterday’s meringue ghost cookies? Not as cute? A tie? You can send them as a gift, via SharisBerries.com. Or you can make your own. You can even plan a strawberry-decorating get-together this weekend. Ask a friend or two if they want to bring their own ingredients…
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HALLOWEEN: Make These Meringue Ghost Cookies

Melt-in-your-mouth meringue ghosts. Photo © Michael Klashman | ButterFlourEggs.com.   We loved this idea from Michael Klashman of ButterFlourEggs.com so much that we signed up for all of his blog feeds. Meringues are gluten-free, cholesterol-free airy bites. Airy ghosts are perfect Halloween fare. This recipe makes about 24 ghosts, each 2- to 3-inches: crunchy on…
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TIP OF THE DAY: Make Your Own Peanut Butter

Last month we wrote about Planter’s Peanut Butter, “the creamiest peanut butter ever.” But what if you don’t like a creamy, homogenized PB paste, writes a reader? Or the amounts of salt and sugar in your PB? Your dilemma can be solved in minutes, with a bag of peanuts and a food processor. You can…
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PRODUCT: Hellfire Pepper Jelly, Cream Cheese & More

We love a good pepper jelly—and not all of them are good. Many are just too sugary, throwing the sweet/heat balance way over to the sweet side. In eight years of reviewing specialty foods, the only pepper jelly lines we’ve liked enough to review are Aloha From Oregon, Cherith Valley and Diane’s Sweet Heat. And…
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