A salad pleading for those leftover cheese
bits. Photo by Kelly Cline | IST.

Don’t toss the tiny pieces or wrap up the bigger ones and stash them away. Instead, plan some recipes to use them up ASAP. Our favorites uses:

• Cheese omelets and “mixed grill” grilled cheese sandwiches

• Slice and add to a pizza, burger, sandwich or salad

• Dice into a garnish for other foods, from soup to rice, potatoes and vegetables

If there’s enough cheese, make:

• Quesao asado (baked cheese, but you can microwave it), and eat it with tortilla chips

• Fondue or macaroni & cheese

Visit our Cheese Section for more cheese tips, reviews and recipes.

It’s easy to create your own customized frozen pops, including cream-filled varieties, in as little as seven minutes.

Use your favorite juices and other beverages (coffee, tea, kefir, smoothies) or fresh fruit purées to make the gourmet pops of your dreams.

Designed to be very user friendly—quick freezing, easy release from molds, reusable plastic pop sticks that have drip guards—Zoku looks to be the best pop-making option we’ve seen.

Why should you give up storage space to a pop-making machine?

It’s easy to make gorgeous ice pops with
your favorite flavors and add-ins. Photo
courtesy Williams-Sonoma.

• You have something new and special to serve guests.

• Things you’d normally drink for health can be turned into pops—from pomegranate juice to probiotic peach kefir.

• You can control for dietary needs—reduced sugar, no sugar or kosher, for example—and allergies.

• Ice pops have fewer calories than ice cream and are fat- and cholesterol-free (unless you elect to make cream pops).

• It’s a fun way to teach the whole family that they can enjoy preparing their own food.

• And thanks to the plastic sticks, there’s no yucky wood flavor that we so dislike with commercial ice pops.

Find more of our favorite frozen treats, plus recipes, in our Ice Cream Section.

Make your own green tea ice cream from
vanilla. Photo © Subsociety | Dreamstime.

Green tea ice cream is one of our favorite flavors, although we rarely come across it outside of Asian restaurants. Ciao Bella Gelato sells it in pints, but it’s not easy to find.

In the absence of ready-made green tea ice cream, we make a quickie version by softening a pint of vanilla ice cream and mixing in matcha green tea powder:

1. Add two tablespoons of matcha, blend thoroughly and taste.
2. If you want a more vivid green tea flavor, add an additional half-tablespoon (1-1/2 teaspoons).

Matcha, which literally means “powdered tea,” is a flour-fine, chlorophyll-green tea powder made from the finest young leaves from spring’s first tea harvest. It is the tea used in the famed Japanese tea ceremony, cha no yu, where it is whipped into a froth in a ceramic bowl with a bamboo whisk.

Matcha is also used in recipes with green tea flavor—ice cream, cake, other baked good, tiramisu, green tea lattes and smoothies and more. Here’s a website with an extensive selection of green tea recipes for every course.

Here’s a recipe to make green tea ice cream from scratch.

Find more recipes and reviews of our favorite ice cream brands in THE NIBBLE’S Ice Cream Section.

Beeler is a Swiss affineur (ah-fee-NUHR), an expert in aging cheeses, and a maître fromagier, or master cheesemonger. A cheesemonger is a vendor of cheese; but he can’t sell it until the affineur ages it to perfection under precise conditions.

Beeler specializes in sourcing the best raw milk cheeses in Switzerland, made by small, artisanal cheesemakers. He then takes over the aging process, and sells the cheeses under the Rolf Beeler label. “Sélection Rolf Beeler” is the gold standard in Swiss cheese. (Note that there’s a world of Swiss cheese beyond the familiar Emmentaler with its big eyes (holes).

Cheese lovers the world over thank Rolf Beeler for his efforts to protect and promote the small cheesmakers, artisans who are too busy crafting great cheese to promote themselves.

Prattigauer is a washed-rind raw cow’s milk
cheese—intensely robust, nutty and rich.
Photo courtesy ArtisanalCheese.com.

Taste Rolf Beeler’s Emmentaler, a multi-award-winner that is so much more complex and mouthwatering than any Emmentaler you’ve had before. The Toggenburger, his best raw milk Appenzeller, is another award winner that must be tasted. And we love the Hoch Y Brig. But then, all Beeler cheeses must be tasted!

Beeler urges you to try Sbrinz, a cheese that rivals Parmigiano-Reggiano—but, as Beeler says, “It has the more complex flavor and is less salty.” According to Beeler, the Italians used to transport the large wheels of Sbrinz over the Alps to Italy. They got tired of transporting the wheels and just copied the Sbrinz recipe. “Thus,” Beeler says, “the Parmigiano was born.”

To find a Beeler retailer near you, contact the U.S. importer, Quality Cheese Inc.:
qualitycheese@comcast.net.

As tempting as it may be to buy two different
bags, don’t buy more than a week’s worth.
Photo by Hannah Kaminsky | THE NIBBLE.

Whole beans aren’t impervious; they are at peak flavor when fresh-roasted, but then start to decline—though not as quickly as ground coffee.

For a more flavorful cup:

• Don’t buy more coffee than you can use in a week.

• Store the coffee bag in a plastic storage bag; squeeze out the excess air before sealing.

• Keep the bag in a cool, dry, dark place—but not the fridge, which has very moist air.

Now that you’ve got the beans down, here’s how to brew a great cup of coffee.

Find our favorite coffee (including organic and Fair Trade), plus lots of great coffee information, in our Gourmet Coffee section.