"everyday food" news and stories

I've been subscribing to Martha Stewart's Reader's Digest-sized Everyday Food since she first started publishing it in 2003. I have every single issue I've ever received (although most of them are currently being used to hold up the end of a wall-mounted cabinet that is falling apart). So the new cookbook, Great Food Fast, which pulls 250 recipes from the pages of those magazines wouldn't necessarily be something I'd need to own. However, even though I've seen most of the recipes before and made more than a few of them, I find this cookbook really appealing. That's because they've done a really lovely job of making it easy to navigate and visually interesting. The pictures, which never get particularly big in the magazine, have been blown up, without any loss of quality, to fill the pages of this book and illustrate their accompanying recipes.

Organized by season (as recipes from a mostly monthly magazine should be) this book makes it fairly easy to find quick dishes for dinner that you know will be fairly tasty and foolproof. Say what you will about Martha Stewart, her recipes are typically reliable. If you haven't been subscribing to the magazine all along like I have, then this is one you should take a peek at next time you're in the bookstore, as it's pretty nice.

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I like recipes that are "light" but still manage to get chocolate in them three different ways.

These Light Chocolate Chunk Brownies from Everyday Food have chocolate and cocoa powder inside and chocolate chips outside, so they'll make chocolate lovers happy (the readers at the Everyday Food site say these are more cake than brownie). They also utilize unsweetened applesauce and low fat sour cream, so I'm itching to try these. I've been craving brownies all week for some reason. I hope I'm not pregnant.

I think it's pretty safe to say that we wouldn't have this big crafts/home & garden/cooking industry that we have if it wasn't for Martha Stewart. Sure, there were people doing it before her, but not in such a big way. Her 1982 bestseller Entertaining really paved the way for everything we have today.

Stewart is going to be celebrating those 25 years on her show tomorrow. Besides giving her audience a first edition of the book, she's also going to talk with Alan Mirken, the former Clarkson/Potter president who discovered Stewart) and other execs and employees Stewart has worked with over the years.

In other Martha news, PBS will launch a new show titled Everyday Baking, a spinoff of the Everyday Food show, which is based on the magazine of the same name.

I have been subscribing to Everyday Food, Martha Stewart's squat cooking magazine, since it's inception January 2003. I still have every single issue I've received (although right now I'm using issues 1-34 to hold up the corner of a wall-mounted cabinet in my living room that is falling apart). A couple of weeks ago, Megan at Not Martha posted about her own collection of Everyday Food mags, prompted because a commenter on her site had mentioned that the original issue of the magazine had sold for $50 on eBay. The best part of Megan's post is the list she put together, complete with links, to all the recipes from EF that she likes and uses.

Her post got me thinking about my own collection of EF mags and started me flipping through some of my old issues (the ones that aren't anchoring said piece of furniture, at least). I stumbled across a recipe in the December 2006 issue that I made once last year and remembered loving. It's for Braised Chicken with Shallots and is perfect for these cooler winter days. It's also easy and makes good leftovers. The recipe is after the jump.

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Hours before I even heard about the recall of Banquet Frozen Pot Pies, I had decided to post this recipe from Martha Stewart's web site for Lighter Chicken Potpie (I've seen it spelled both ways - "potpie" and "pot pie" - and I'll use Martha's spelling for her recipe and two words for Banquet, because I don't want Martha mad at me). It's a healthier version of the classic chicken potpie recipe, using more veggies, low fat milk, and oil instead of butter. Full recipe after the jump.