"allrecipes" news and stories

These food days and months are usually more specific. We've had National Chocolate Mousse Day and Great American Pie Month, and even National Eat Something on a Stick Day. But this April holiday covers just about everything.

April is National Food Month.

So...I would suggest that this month you celebrate by eating some food. Take a look at the categories to the right and pick some recipes to make. Or check out Food Network or AllRecipes or Epicurious or one of the many other food sites around the web.

I don't think April is National Drink Month, but I would suggest drinking something with that food.

Tuesday afternoon, I was struck with unshakable need to bake a loaf of banana bread. My favorite, basic, go-to recipe generally is the Quick Banana Bread recipe from Joy of Cooking. I've made this loaf so many times that my edition of Joy naturally opens to that page when left to it's own devices. This time though, I wanted something slightly different, something sweetened with maple syrup and including a mass of toasted and chopped pecans. I googled around a bit, until I hit upon this recipe. Taking it as a starting place, I adapted a bit and I think I hit on a winner. It has a very smooth, soft texture that is not too sweet or too bland. I'm afraid my old recipe may have been supplanted by this one! If you want to try it out, the recipe is after the jump.

Source

Vanilla is the pasta of the ice cream world. I have no idea if that analogy makes any sense, but I just made it up and I think I'll stick with it.

What I mean is this. Like pasta, ice cream is something that you can do a lot of things with. You can put various sauces on pasta, mix in chicken or beef, add various cheeses, put it in soups and salads and other meals. Now look at vanilla ice cream -- it's the base for a lot of different flavors of ice cream, you can add fudge or caramel or nuts or chocolate chips to it and it becomes a whole new thing.

Anyway, Happy Vanilla Ice Cream Day. Here's a bunch of recipes, from Good Housekeeping, AllRecipes (using Eagle Brand condensed milk), and SouthernFood.about.com. Oh, and let's not forget Thomas Jefferson's classic recipe.

Wikipedia offers the history of vanilla.

Perhaps this cookbook should have gone up before Thanksgiving, but the menu for that dinner and Christmas dinner is roughly the same and the holiday season is about more than two meals, so there is plenty of time to make good use of Allrecipes Tried & True Thanksgiving & Christmas: Top 200 Recipes. There are menu planners and variations on traditional foods, as well as the traditional recipes themselves. Since the scope of the book is limited to the end-of-the-year holidays, most everything is fall oriented and suitable for big dinners or serving at other types of gatherings. For example, the recipes cover all meals, including breakfast and desserts, in addition to mains, sides and starters. There is even a section on things that make great holiday gifts. The instructions are clear and easy to follow for every recipe and the ingredients tend to be mainstream ones. Some highlights include: Apple Cranberry Crisp, Christmas Breakfast Sausage Casserole, Easy Herb Roasted Turkey, Tangy Honey-Glazed Ham, Orange Pumpkin Loaf and Eggnog Cheesecake.

The reason to appreciate Allrecipes' cookbooks is the same reason to appreciate their site: user feedback. You may not see all the comments in the book the way you will online (although you can look them up there if you want to, as well), but you can feel pretty confident knowing that they were popular with tens of thousands of users and home cooks.

Source

Back in April, we noted that Reader's Digest bought Allrecipes.com and there was some speculation that they might change the user-friendly site for the worse, especially since they said that they planed to use it as "the main portal to its other magazines and websites." So far, there really have been no major changes to the site, but it appears to have just undergone a major facelift. The new site (there is a site tour so you can figure out how to use it) seems to have given a much more prominent space to affiliated magazines and advertising partners and also seems to put more emphasis on the few top-rated recipes from every category. The biggest change is in layout. Instead of the fairly well-spaced pages that we were used to, where all of the non-recipe content was grouped on the right side of the page, it now seems that every bit of the screen is utilized, drawing attention away from the recipe.

They still have a great recipe database, though, so whether you like the new layout or not, there are still plenty of reasons to use the site.