Marinating the meat doesn't always yield a tender dish. Try this next time!

• Writer Alex Witchel sheds -- heh -- lots of love on the benefits of grabbing a doggie bag.
• Mark Bittman explores the wonder of Tuscany's Zuppa Arcidossana soup.
• Exploring Cafe Bustelo from its roots to its bohemian fame.
• Adventures in the supermarket's cheap meat bins from beef chuck deckle to loin chops, and new cuts of beef like Sierra and Petite Tender.
• A look into Cruze Farm's cultured buttermilk -- a beverage that's been relegated to "ingredient" but still features a multitude of perks.
• Yankee Stadium -- good with ballgames, bad with beer selection -- and a look at craft pilsners.
• Buzzed-about restaurant Marea, among other soon-to-open upscale eateries, hopes a little opulence can work despite troubled economic times.
• Anthos Upstairs, Halfsteak, DFF and Per Se's new lounge menu: recession beaters for those who want great food in a more affordable package.
• A review for Michael Ruhlman's "Ratio" -- a great book of technique not suited to beginners.
• Balducci's says goodbye to the Big Apple.
• 'Inoteca Vino, Cucina e Liquori Bar offers oversweet drinks but great grub.
• Tequila, meet hibiscus -- all about Gran Centenario's hibiscus-infused Rosangel elixir.
• Products and gadgets: tasty new butters and super-cool salt slabs.
• Restaurant openings: Brasserie 1605, Chocolate Bar, Anne-Sophie Pic, Clerkenwell, Le Magnifique and Sensing.
• The Times' food calendar: from Austrian Vines to dining and donating.

We admit it. After last week we're kinda sick of ham and reached our saturation point with our delicious but waaayyy too plentiful braided baked challah. Still, being loath to toss out any viable leftovers, we decided this weekend's cooking projects should be all about respite and reformatting.

Hence, a Friday night meal of hard-fried leftover Cheerwine ham with freshly-grated parmesan, egg and black pepper over radiatore (crinkly-shaped) pasta for a makeshift carbonara, and finally (for the sake of our sanity and marriage) a furlough in another part of the barnyard. Saturday night's chicken rubbed all over with a lazy pesto -- basil, garlic, lemon juice and olive oil whirred through the food processor -- was delectable straight from the oven. Somehow it was even more satisfying with the leftovers, bones and giblets cooked down for an herbed-up chicken soup with radiatore a day later.

We trotted back to the pig pen with smoked ribs slathered in mustard on Sunday, but that was just to keep us from making an all-day gobblefest of our challah bread pudding buttermilk ice cream. See, our challah recipe (we like Flickr user mollyali's recipe, pictured above) yields two big braids, and though we foist some on friends and flip up plenty of French toast throughout the week, inevitably a portion goes stale, and we were taught not to waste. Bread pudding seemed a simple solution, but we'd had a cup or ten of caffeine by that point and an awful lot of buttermilk on hand from the ongoing Biscuit Mission. So we got to cranking up some ice cream.

Get the recipe after the jump and use the comments to let us know if ramps are up yet where you are, whether you busted out the grill, or tell us whatever else you rustled up this weekend.

Flour is the basic structural ingredient. It's the starch in the flour that will, when mixed with liquid and heated in the oven, gelatinize and set when cooled. Flour also contains the proteins you need to make gluten, which is great for baking bread but not so desirable for making pie crusts. All you have to do is use a flour with a lower protein content, which generally means all purpose flour (cake flour might be too weak).

Fats are considered tenderizing agents for baked goods like cakes and pie crusts, rather than shortening agents like they would be for bread. In pie crusts, fats like oil, vegetable shortening, butter, and lard prevent gluten from getting formed in the first place by coating the flour granules, thus ensuring tenderness. Flakiness is achieved by the way you mix the dough: larger chunks of fat from less mixing make for more flakiness while more mixing and smaller fat chunks make a less flaky crust. They also add a lot of flavor, especially in the case of butter and animal fats. Lard and butter are also generally considered to have a better feel in the mouth, and lard is reputed to create a flakier crust than other fats.

Water and milk are the most common liquids, while buttermilk, eggs, and cream can also be used. Liquids function as a binding agent: they allow all of the ingredients to be evenly dissolved and incorporated. They also hydrate the the starch and protein in the flour and activate whatever leavening is being used. If you're using a liquid besides water, you're also adding fats, sugar, and acidity which is a good thing. The fats add tenderness, the adds to crust color, and the acidity makes the dough more stable and easier to roll out as well as taste better. Make sure to always use a cold liquid to keep the fat nice and cold, so it'll retain its shape/temperature and produce a flaky product.

Eggs are used for hydrating the dough, creating structure, giving color to the dough, and flavor. The whites are 90% water and the rest protein, so that aids in hydration and structure. The yolks are 50% water with the rest being mostly fat, contributing to hydration and tenderness as well as flavor and crust color.

Sugar adds sweetness and contributes the most to crust color. Ths crust turns golden brown because the sugar in the dough caramelizes as it's baked. Also, the texture of the dough can be changed by using sugar ground to different levels of fineness. For instance, powdered sugar makes a dough that is smoother, even if it doesn't taste as good as granulated.

This last weekend, we had a party for my boyfriend's birthday. We bought lots of food for the festivities, and while the guests ate a good deal of it, there's more than three pounds of cheese in the fridge leftover from the assortment we put out on Saturday night. So I've got cheese on the brain, imagining all the delicious ways to use up this surfeit. So it makes perfect sense that this picture of a bowl of Buttermilk Bleu Cheese and Cauliflower Soup leaped out at me and asked to be featured (have I mentioned my deep and abiding love for cauliflower? Oh, and I have 1/2 a quart of buttermilk languishing in my fridge from a very tasty biscuit experiment).

The picture is actually a couple of years old (although that doesn't make it any less delicious-looking) and comes to us from the cheezemaster. You can find the recipe for the soup in the archives over at What We're Eating.

And as always, don't forget to come and join us over at the Slashfood Flickr Pool. All people and food pictures are welcome.

I've met a lot of people who love bananas but hate banana bread. I guess I can understand that. I love peas but hate pea soup, and I hate anchovies but I like Caesar Salad. Different forms, different flavors.

So I doubt that banana bread haters would want to try this recipe. It's for the A-Number-1 Banana Cake, and you can check it out over at the new and improved AOL Food. Recipe after the jump.

I know that we had eggnog popovers yesterday morning, but I couldn't resist just one more eggnog-based recipe. Actually, it was the fact that the popovers were so tasty and reminded me so much of pancakes that I decided to try these.

Eggnog, especially prepared eggnog, is usually relatively thick, so it substitutes in equal volumes for buttermilk in a recipe. It does not have the same properties as buttermilk, however. Buttermilk is slightly acidic and recipes that use it often also use baking soda, which reacts with that acid to produce lift. Since eggnog is not acidic, I used baking powder and also added a beaten egg white to give the pancakes some lift. Overall, the pancakes were tender and tasted lightly of eggnog. You can add a little bit of rum extract, if you have it on hand, to jazz them up a bit, too.

I was looking for something to spice up my pancakes this morning and I couldn't stop thinking about the Cranberry, Orange & Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies I made earlier this week. Chocolate chips are for "special occasion" pancakes and I'm not a fan of dried fruit in them, but I thought that orange would be a very welcome flavor in my breakfast. I ended up adding in the zest of one orange and a splash of cinnamon. The resulting pancakes, when topped with maple syrup as well, virtually screamed fall. The tender pancakes were addictive and there was just enough flavor from the orange and cinnamon to make them interesting, without becoming overwhelming. What a great way to start of a Sunday!

Cranberries are the perfect fall fruit, at least as far as baked goods go. It is true that pumpkin and apple pies are wonderful, but the vibrant color of cranberries makes them look incredibly festive, not to mention that they add a lot of flavor to desserts, as well. Camille, the French food blogger from Cakes in the City, baked these perfect-looking cranberry upside down cakes. Getting a shot like this is quite a feat because, as most food blogger/photographers will tell you, red foods are usually the most difficult to photograph. To get back to the cake, the reason that this is called an upside down cake is that the berries are placed at the bottom of the pan and topped with the cake batter. Once it has baked, the cake is turned upside down to showcase the gorgeous cranberry layer. Camille added some gingerbread spices to the berries, as well as sugar and butter. The cake base is a light and tender buttermilk cake, which adds a mellow flavor that highlights and tempers the tartness of the berries.

If you can't read her recipe in French, you can try a slightly different variation found here or here.

One of the appealing things about cupcakes is that the individual serving sizes are incredibly convenient when you are serving them to company. There is no "I'll just have a sliver" or "I want a piece twice that size!" Each person gets one. But you don't always want to make cupcakes because, in part, no matter how trendy they are, they're still not exactly the most elegant way to serve cake. The Buttermilk Mini Cakes with Lemon Frosting, from Jenjen at i love milk and cookies, demonstrate a great way to take advantage of pre-portioned cake servings without opting for cupcakes. The cake is baked in an ordinary rectangular pan, then cooled and sliced before frosting. Jenjen used some beautiful sugar crystals to top hers off, and for a closer look, take a look at this photo.

I always wonder how restaurant pancakes turn out so much lovelier than my home-cooked efforts. No doubt a large griddle surface and an industrial-sized spatula is the key to making such massive pancakes, and my home cook-surface is more limited. Ah well, I can always drive fifteen minutes down the road and have a fresh stack of these lovelies from my favorite breakfast hangout, the Monument Cafe. They're thick buttermilk pancakes filled with a smattering of sliced strawberries and whole blueberries. Quite delightful!

As I mentioned earlier, you really need to have cake to make some occasions - birthday parties, etc. - work, although you never need an excuse to make the cake in the first place. These are tasty, basic cupcakes that will be welcomed both at birthday parties and as an afternoon snack with a cup of coffee, so they're a good choice whether you need or just want a cupcake fix. The cake is light, tender and has a lovely buttery flavor from the buttermilk. The frosting is a quick and easy type of buttercream that is a great topping for just about any flavor of cake, although I think that the contrast of vanilla cake with chocolate frosting is a classic one.

The recipe is after the jump.

An ever-growing number of restaurants are putting it on their menus and it is more frequently called for in recipes than it was even a year or two ago, but crème fraîche is still not an easy-to-find ingredient, nor is it one that everyone is familiar with. Crème fraîche is a thickened cream, with a slight tang and a texture that is somewhere between sour cream and whipped butter. In France, the cream is made with unpasteurized cream and is allowed to thicken naturally with bacteria already present in the milk. In the US, the cream must be pasteurized (heated to kill bacteria), so crème fraîche is made by adding a small amount of buttermilk or sour cream to get the thickening process started, then it is pasteurized again to kill the bacteria before sale.

Sour cream makes a good substitute for crème fraîche in most recipes, but unlike crème fraîche, sour cream can break or curdle when exposed to high heat. Fortunately, it is easy to make a version of crème fraîche at home. Simply add 2 tbsp buttermilk to 1 cup of heavy cream and let the mixture stand at room temperature for 8-24 hours, until thickened, before refrigerating.

What is a birthday party without a birthday cake? A disappointing celebration, that's what. Any dessert can be appropriate for a birthday if you stick a candle on top, but a lovely cake doesn't need candles to be appropriate - especially if the birthday boy/girl doesn't want to think about how many candles should be topping of that cake. This cake recipe is from Cooking Light and is a lovely, easy-to-make layer cake.

The cake itself is light and moist, and the frosting is fantastic. The brown sugar mix melts in your mouth and develops a slight crunch on the outside as it sets. I had to double the original recipe to make enough frosting to cover the cake and a tiny bit left over that was a great dip for some pretzel sticks. I would make the icing alone again and serve dipped pretzels as a salty-sweet snack food, but I wouldn't hesitate to make the whole cake again, either. I just need another occasion.

I debated over what to name this dessert. The recipe that inspired it was in a recent issue of Cooking Light and was called a sorbet, but I felt that the rich, smooth taste of the dessert did not really fit the sorbet name. To me, sorbet inspires an icier treat and not a creamy one, not to mention the fact that most sorbets contain no dairy products at all. Ice creams usually have cream in them, but I think that in this case we can make an exception because the dessert, Black Cherry Buttermilk Ice Cream, is delicious enough to satisfy any ice cream lover.