Throughout October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, you can send specially packaged “Pink Pears” as a gift. Nine large pears, some wrapped in pink foil, plus a limited-edition pink tote bag, are $36.95.

Your purchase helps fight cancer: 25% of proceeds will be donated to breast cancer research.

Pear Nutrition: Pears are a nutritious food. In addition to fiber, they contain large amounts of vitamin C and copper, both antioxidants that help fight free radicals (learn more in our Antioxidant Glossary).

Consumption of pears has been linked to cardiovascular and colon health; and they help to fight against postmenopausal breast cancer and macular degeneration.

Pears for the cure. Photo courtesy
Harry and David.

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• Learn how these comice pears got the name “Royal Riviera.”

Pear History: Pears have been cultivated in what is now western China for 3,000 years. However, they may date back to the Stone Age, some 2.9 million years ago.

The original wild pear is small and bitter. For millennia it was made into a fermented drink (now called perry), similar to cide. The ancient Romans cooked and served it with meat, the common practice until the 16th century, when it was discovered that some varieties could be consumed raw. In the 17th century, botanists discovered how to breed sweet, juicy varieties.

The pear came to America with early colonists. America remains the world’s largest producer of pears, along with China.

Make wine ice cubes. Photo courtesy
iSi Orka.

Then, when a sauce calls for a few tablespoons or a quarter-cup of wine, just pop and drop one or two into the saucepan.

This saves you from opening a bottle of wine for cooking, and provides far better flavor than a cheap bottle of “cooking wine.”

We keep a red wine tray and a white wine ice cube tray in color-coded, lidded iSi Orka ice cube trays (read our review). But you can make the cubes in a single tray and then store them in freezer bags.

You can also use the cubes in wine cocktails, or “winetails.”

What’s up, doc? Here’s a little history of one of our most popular veggies: carrots. According to the USDA, Americans consume 11.8 pounds a person per year. (Beyond raw carrots, this figure includes carrot cake, carrots in soups and stews, and so forth.)

In the beginning, all plants and animals were wild. Over thousands of years of cultivation/domestication, many took on different forms, as farmers bred them for the most desirable characteristics.

The domesticated carrot, botanical name Daucus carota subspecies sativus, started life about 10,000 years ago as a bitter white root vegetable. Over thousands of years, it has been bred into a fleshy, juicy, sweet edible root.

Its name originated in the Indo-European root ker-, for horn (due to its horn-like shape). That evolved to the Greek karoton, the Late Latin carota and the Middle French carotte.

Cultivated carrots originated in present day Afghanistan some 5000 years ago, most likely as purple or yellow roots. Mutants and natural hybrids occurred naturally, that crossed the purple and yellow carrots with both wild and cultivated varieties and produced other colors, including the now-ubiquitous orange.

For a long time, purple carrots were the norm, with occasional mutations producing yellow and white varieties, which lacked the purple pigment anthocyanin. You can still find these heirloom breeds in farmers markets.

It was Dutch farmers in the late 16th century who took mutated strains of yellow and white carrot and, over time, bred them into the orange carrots that are standard today.

Some believe that the reason the orange carrot became so popular in the Netherlands was in tribute to the emblem of the House of Orange and the struggle for Dutch independence. This could be, but it also might just be that the orange carrots that the Dutch developed were sweeter and plumper than their purple forebears.

THE ”INVENTION” OF BABY CARROTS

Fast-forward 200-plus years to the next carrot innovation:

In 1986, a California carrot grower named Mike Yurosek sought a use for carrots with flaws and imperfections that could not be sold whole. These “reject carrots” accounted for up to 70% of the carrots headed down the bagging conveyer belt! Yurosek made lemons out of lemonade and invented the baby carrot. He took the broken and dwarfed carrots and sold them as “baby carrots,” which have become the fastest growing segment in carrot industry.

But if you want to save money and slice your own from conventional carrots, we highly recommend a crinkle cutter. It makes veggies as fun as…baby carrots.
  

For the best steak experience, splurge for
dry-aged. Porterhouse steak from Morton’s
The Steakhouse.

Aging the beef allows a steer’s natural enzymes to break down its tough connective tissues. The result is deeper flavor and better texture.

Supermarket beef is wet aged, a less expensive process that takes 5 to 7 days. The beef is sealed in its own juices in plastic bags, producing a milder, less meaty-flavored beef. The process is known as Cryovac, a system developed in France in 1937 (originally using latex bags).

Dry aging, a more time- and labor-intensive process, takes place for 11- to 30-plus days. The longer the aging, the “meatier” and more buttery the beef. The side of beef is hung in a special room, where the temperature is controlled. It loses 15% to 30% of its weight due to water evaporation, concentrating the flavor.

Macaroni and cheese is one of America’s favorite comfort foods. Adults and kids both love to reach for a box of mac and cheese mix.

But there’s no need to purchase a boxed mix or prepared mac and cheese when it’s so enjoyable to prepare it from scratch. One of our favorite culinarians, Chef Terrance Brennan of Picholine and Artisanal restaurants in New York City, shows you how easy it is in this week’s cooking video.

More ways to enjoy mac and cheese:

You’ll find many more how-tos in our Cooking Video Section.