What can you do to turn a scoop of vanilla ice cream or frozen yogurt into a sophisticated dessert?

Drizzle it with balsamic glaze and add some strawberries. And if you prefer, use strawberry ice cream or yogurt.

Plain strawberries with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar or a balsamic glaze is a classic Italian dessert. We’re not sure whether Italians or Americans added ice cream to the recipe, but it’s a winning combination.

WHAT IS BALSAMIC GLAZE?

Balsamic glaze is balsamic vinegar that has been reduced into a syrup equivalent to 25% of the original volume. The difference from just drizzling vinegar from the bottle is a thicker sauce, but you can certainly skip the reduction and use balsamic from the bottle.

 
You can make balsamic glaze or buy it; in addition to a plain glaze, you can find it in blood orange, fig, pomegranate and strawberry. You can also make or buy a white balsamic glaze.

The simple addition of a balsamic glaze adds wonderful flavor to simple dishes, both sweet and savory (berries, grilled chicken, fish and other proteins; crudites, steamed vegetables, whipped cream and so on).

MAKE YOUR OWN BALSAMIC GLAZE

You can make a batch and keep it in the fridge, on call whenever you need some culinary magic. The refreshing sweet-and-tangy taste perks up just about anything (if it’s too tangy for you, add some sugar to your reduction).

Two cups of vinegar reduces to a half cup of glaze.

Ingredients

3. Remove from heat; allow to cool. Store in the fridge, in a jar with a tight lid, for up to a month.

Find more of our favorite ice cream recipes.

Our tip of the day is to try some hemp foods. June 4-10 marks the third annual Hemp History Week, an event that aims to generate awareness of hemp as a healthful and sustainable food crop for both America’s families and farmers (while American farmers often net less than $50 per acre for soy and corn crops, Canadian farmers just across the border net an average of $200-$400 per acre for hemp).

Chef Johnny Gnall recently tried a variety of hemp foods. His report follows. You can email Chef Johnny. directly at with questions and suggestions.

Hemp foods, long available in health food stores, have been slowly creeping into the mainstream. The biggest problem is government, which classifies all three hemp plant species in the genus Cannabis with the variety that produces marijuana; and many consumers think the same.

But fiber and food hemp have no drug value. Food hemp is harvested for the seeds, which contain little to no measurable amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive ingredient in drug forms of Cannabis. Eating hemp-based foods will not cause a false positive drug test. But it will supply outstanding nutrition.

WE’RE HAPPY WITH HEMP FOODS

If you’re looking for an easy way to pile on nutrition, start eating more hemp foods. Before you assume that this advice comes from some sandal-clad liberal living in a commune (not!), consider the facts:

 
This makes a pretty compelling case for all of us to start eating more hemp-based foods. Step into a natural foods store and you’ll find hemp is made into culinary oil, hempmilk (a nondairy milk that is more digestible than soymilk), ice cream and snack bars; bagels, burgers, oatmeal, pasta and taco shells. The shelled seeds—called hemp hearts—are added to cereals, dressing, desserts, omelets, salads, smoothies, soups and yogurts for added nutrition, and are toasted as snacks.

I recently tried a number of hemp products available in my local natural foods store, and found them to be easy to use as substitutions and additions in various recipes.

Moreover, the fact that most hemp products are gluten- and dairy-free makes them a great go-to ingredient for those with food allergies or other dietary restrictions.

Hemp seeds typically add a subtle nutty flavor to foods, pleasant and in no way overpowering—almost like a hint of peanut butter.

There are four hemp products that I found to be particularly versatile and tasty. The brands are trusted ones, but it’s the foods themselves to which I‘d like to draw attention.

Use these suggestions as a starting point, but realize their versatility and think outside the box. What foods can you think of that could use an upping of protein and good fats? You’re only limited by your own imagination…and you’ll be healthier for it.

Hemp Milk (“Tempt” from Living Harvest): I used it to make polenta, and it was excellent. The nuttiness was welcome, providing a creaminess despite the lack of dairy. The hemp milk behaved in the same way dairy milk would. There’s no reason you can’t substitute it wherever you might use cow’s milk.

Cold-Pressed Hemp Oil (Nutiva brand): Don’t use hemp oil to sautée or fry; do use it in bread dippers, on salads and in other dressings, and anywhere you might drizzle olive oil. I actually used it (along with the hemp milk) to make a couple of batches of cornbread, and the subtle nuttiness worked extremely well. Baking is probably the only way you should cook with hemp oil; it generally shines best when raw.

Raw, Shelled, Hempseeds (Hemp Hearts from Manitoba Harvest): You can pretty much eat these little guys plain and by the handful. Their light, fluffy texture and that same nutty flavor are actually quite pleasant. You can also mix them into just about anything, including batters and doughs, cereals, grains and pastas. I found them to be particularly tasty in quinoa, where its flavor and texture were right at home.

Hemp Oatmeal (Nature’s Path brand): This is essentially oatmeal with hemp seeds mixed in, a tasty and convenient product in individual packets. Try it with a tablespoon of maple syrup and handful of raisins, or with a few ounces of hot milk (or hot hemp milk) stirred in. Or mix the entire packet into another cereal, homemade granola, trail mix or even a muffin batter. It’s a tasty way to get some essential nutrition.

Join natural products advocates, retail stores, health and wellness practitioners and citizens across the country in celebrating hemp. Check out Hemp History Week.

More about hemp.

That’s why passing a cheese board at the dinner table is an invitation to over-indulgence.

So take a tip from top restaurants that offer a cheese plate:

Serve small bites of several cheeses, plus fruit and nut condiments.

Cut half-ounce servings of four different cheeses—a hefty tablespoon of each—with an assortment of healthful fruits and nuts (check out our chart of cheese condiments).

You don’t need to serve a basket of bread, either: Eat the cheese with a fork and knife. You can add a slice of walnut bread, raisin bread or baguette; or, as shown in in the photo, a piece of panforte, along with a walnut half and dried fruit (shown, a date and a dried apricot).

Browse through our Cheese Glossary to get some ideas of what you’d like to serve. Half the fun is deciding on a theme for your cheese plate (fresh cheeses, goat’s milk or sheep’s milk cheeses, blue cheeses, country-of-origin cheeses [all French or Italian cheeses, for example], and so forth.)

Then, there’s the “wild card sampler”: Look at the cheeses in the store and pick a broad variety of what appeals to you (a fresh cheese, a smoked cheese, a stinky cheese and an aged cheese, for example).

A conventional round plate is fine. But we have a set of rectangular plates like those in the photo.

They add drama to just about any course, and are perfect for samplings (we like to use them for dessert samplers: a small piece of key lime pie, a small slice of brownie and a meringue or macaron, for example).

If it’s not in the budget to treat yourself to a set or two, put these plates on your birthday or holiday “gift registry.”

If your steaks don’t taste as good as restaurant steaks, it could be the quality of the meat. Or it could be your cooking technique.

Restaurant chefs start with searing the seasoned steak in a cast-iron skillet or grill pan. Sometimes they finish cooking the meat in the oven. In this demonstration, the seared meat is tented—no oven needed.

Check out the technique in this video. And check out the different cuts of beef in our Beef Glossary.

We love food garnishing, making each dish or drink special with tasty, edible decor (here’s a basic book to start with).

A lemon or lime wedge, for example, is nothing special. But you can make it so by cutting small grooves, or channels, in the rind.

To do this, you need a small tool call a stripper (a channel knife), which is available by itself or as a combination stripper/zester (and also available in a left-handed version).

For cutting wheels or serving a half-lemon with seafood, first strip the citrus vertically, from top to bottom. For wedges, first, strip the citrus horizontally.

The stripping tool works with any citrus or hard fruit (apples, for example). The peel you strip away can be added to tea, salads, baked goods, and other recipes; or you can wrap it in plastic and save it in the fridge or the freezer to garnish seafood, vegetable dishes, and anything that pairs well with the citrus.

You can use stripped wedges or wheels for everything from drinks to seafood. We’ve already stripped our citrus for this evening’s cocktails.

So we now transition to cocktails:

Have you ever had a Cognac cocktail?

After you check out the recipe, take a look at the basics of Cognac, below.
 
 
RECIPE: COGNAC COOLER

Ingredients Per Drink

 
Preparation

1. BUILD all ingredients in a highball glass over ice, pouring in the ginger beer last.

2. GARNISH with squeezed lime wedges.

Brandy is a spirit distilled from grapes. Cognac is a type of brandy made only from white grapes; brandy can use white and/or red grapes.

Cognac is named after the town of Cognac in France, and only spirits distilled in the region, following strict rules imposed by the Bureau National Interprofessionnel du Cognac (BNIC), can be called Cognac.

By law, Cognac must be twice distilled in copper pot stills, then aged at least two years (often considerably longer) in French oak barrels from the French forests of Limousin or Tronçais, where it matures in the same way that fine whiskey and wine matures.

The result is: divine!

There are official quality grades of Cognac based on age, established by the BNIC. As with all spirits, prices climb along with the length of barrel aging.

However, in the ongoing game of marketing new products, some Cognac producers release their own expressions (for example, C by Courvoisier and Remy Martin Coeur de Cognac, and the more comprehensible Courvoisier 12 and Courvoisier 21), which have no official designation but can really tax a Cognac buyer to figure out what’s in the bottle.

Official designations include:

 
Why are the names of the different grades in English, rather than French?

Because England was long the primary market for Cognac, and the British importers/merchants named them.

Fine Champagne does not refer to age, but the provenance of the grapes: a blend of Grande and Petite Champagne Cognacs, with at least half coming from Grande Champagne.

WHAT IS FINE CHAMPAGNE COGNAC

More confusion: It has nothing to do with the wine-producing region of Champagne.

There are six different districts (called cru in French) within Cognac. Each has been graded by the government according to the quality of the grapes and Cognac produced there. The best district is Grande Champagne, followed by Petite Champagne, Borderies, Fins Bois, Bons Bois and Bois Ordinaires.

A Cognac bottle labeled “Fine Champagne,” is as good as it gets in its age level.

Time for a drink!

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*In 2016, the minimum age of the youngest Cognac used in an XO blend will be increased to 10 years.