August is National Water Quality Month.

Whether you rely on tap water, bottled water or both, celebrate it by learning more about this substance without which no life form can live. Clean drinking water (called potable water) is essential to humans and other life forms.

However, about a billion people around the world have no access to potable water. The unhealthy water they drink results in every tragedy from blindness to mortality.

You may wish to celebrate National Water Quality Month by making a donation to CharityWater.org. Just $20 means clean water for one child or adult. You can also support the cause by purchasing an attractive Gelaskin for your phone, iPod or laptop.

Learn more about the water you drink:

Healthful and flavorful, Beanitos are a
better-for-you chip. Photo by Jaclyn
Nussbaum | THE NIBBLE.

Serve Beanitos Bean Chips.

We first wrote about this flavorful bean chip—think bean dip in a chip form—some 18 months ago. They’ve become a favorite snacking chip at THE NIBBLE, so much so that they’re our Top Pick Of The Week.

For Labor Day, serve them with black or refried bean dip, tomato salsa or black bean salsa.

 
Dip Recipes To Serve With Beanitos

As ketchup is to Americans, as soy sauce is to Chinese, the favorite condiment in ancient Rome was garum, an anchovy sauce.

While the Roman Empire is long gone, a form of garum is alive and well. Today it’s called colatura di alici, or juice of anchovies. (It’s also called anchovy sauce or anchovy syrup; the latter is inaccurate, as a syrup is a thick, viscous liquid.)

As strange as “anchovy juice” may sound, colatura is an aromatic condiment that enhances any dish, adding flavor without fuss.

Ask any great Italian chef, and you’ll probably find that colatura is their secret ingredient (it’s an umami food). Chef Lidia Bastianich told the Wall Street Journal just that. She uses a touch of colatura instead of salt.

Colatura (the word comes from the Latin colare, to strain) is made by curing anchovies with salt and extracting the free-run liquid that drains from them. It’s a laborious and painstaking process to create a truly artisan food.

In fact, prior to the 20th century, Italian families would make their own colatura for home use and for gifts.

Today, they can use this time for other pursuits thanks to Cetara, a small fishing village on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. The town produces colatura as an heirloom food.

Is colatura a great secret waiting to be discovered? We think so. Even if you’re not an anchovy fan, colatura is a wonderful blending ingredient, adding a briny, zesty flavor that isn’t fishy. Unlike anchovy paste and Southeast Asian fish sauces such as nam pla and nuoc mam,* the flavor is briny (so use less salt in the recipe).
 
 
Pick up a bottle of colatura di alici online for yourself or your favorite cook. It’s also available on Amazon.

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*Colatura is the free-run juice of salted anchovies, a richer product than most southeast Asian fish sauces. The latter is brine in which fish (or fish parts) have been pickled.
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WAYS TO USE COLATURA DI ALICI

Over the decades, what was once a melt-in-your-mouth confection has acquired the personality of a cotton ball—but not as soft.

In the early 1950s, Kraft Foods developed a technique to make vast quantities of marshmallows commercially. The process drastically changed the delicate texture of handmade marshmallows, and the use of artificial flavors made the airy delight much less delightful. While mass-produced marshmallows are fun to pop into hot chocolate or toast for s’mores, how many of us enjoy eating them straight from the bag?

So today’s tip is: Seek out handmade gourmet marshmallows from a marshmallow specialist.

Think of gourmet marshmallows as you would fine chocolate. They’re an all-occasion gift with the bonus of being fat-free and gluten-free.

If there’s no artisan confectioner near you (or in your specialty foods store), check out our recommendations for the best gourmet marshmallows.

Brush up on the history of marshmallows.

FOOD TRIVIA

Marshmallows get their name from the marsh mallow plant (Althea officinalis), the root of which contains a sticky, white, almost jelly-like substance. The Egyptians combined it with honey as early as 2000 B.C.E., to make a candy.

Take these purple green beans, known as Royalty Purple Pods. While they were introduced in 1957, have you ever seen them? The trick is to arrive at farmers markets early in the day, before the unusual veggies sell out.

While the skin of the Royalty Purple Pod is purple, there’s a green bean underneath. The purple skin turns green when cooked. To retain the color, you can butter baste them in a pan. If you boil them, a pinch of baking soda in the water will help a bit.

Losing the lovely purple color is no fun. So we like to serve these unusual green beans raw:

But how can you resist a purple green bean? Even people who eschew green beans can be tempted to take a bite.

So today’s tip is: Look for something new and different at your farmers market. Make your goal a weekly fun food discovery. Then tell us what you found, and how you served it.

FOOD TRIVIA: What’s the difference between green beans and string beans?

The French call them haricots vert (green beans), the Brits call them French beans, and Americans call them green beans or string beans. The term “string bean” refers to the string that ran up the seam of the bean. It had to be removed before cooking.

The first “stringless” bean was bred in 1894 by Calvin Keeney, in Le Roy, New York, a town in western New York state that is also the is the birthplace of Jell-O.

Today, just about every bean sold commercially is a stringless bean; but the original name has been passed down through generations and is a legacy.