How many times have you come across a certain ingredient in your pantry and wondered if was still safe to eat?

If you keep up with the news, you've probably heard about the food shortages and riots in Haiti and Egypt. You've also probably heard about the drought in Australia and the fact that China and India are limiting exports of rice. That's all going to lead to a lot of problems worldwide, as it already has in some places, but have food shortages hit the US?

According to this article in the New York Sun, the answer is yes. Some stores in New York and California are limiting the amount of rice and flour that consumers can take home. Retailers are also complaining about spotty deliveries for rice in California.

We tend to think of food shortages as something very far away, something that doesn't affect us. With the possibility that Americans could be affected by this, will we be able to come up with a solution in time to prevent a real crisis?

Have you ever stood at your stove cooking pasta sauce and you realize it's too watery, and you don't have any tomato paste, flour, or corn starch? Here's how to thicken it.

I bet you were more than relieved when the final glittery colored Easter egg was found. Finally! A moment to relax from all the holiday-ing of March from St. Patrick's Day to the First Day of Spring to Easter. We're not looking at another food holiday until, what? Mother's Day in May?

Wrong. If you thought November and December were crazy holiday months, the real madness is March, which happens to be National [insert-food-here] Month for no less than seven different things. So get ready to throw a few more dinner parties and brunches to, uh celebrate?

First up, March is National Flour Month, which we at Slashfood are going to celebrate by not doing anything because in case you haven't been paying attention, the price of flour is going way way up. So we salute flour in all its luxury, but will be happy getting our carbohydrate requirements from potatoes.

Stay tuned over the next few days to see how we celebrate the rest of March is National [insert-food-here] Month!

I'm a chronic muffin baker, and I love adding whatever I have in the kitchen into the mix -- chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, nuts, dried fruits, seeds, marshmallows, oats, really anything. The problem with adding extra ingredients to muffins, however, is that they frequently sink. It's not so bad with seeds and other light additions, but it become very annoying with chocolate chips and heavier ingredients.

There are tons of suggestions about preventing chocolate chips from sinking, but some are definitely more useful than others. Firstly, you can try coating chocolate chips in flour before folding them into your mixture. I've found this to be moderately helpful, but I've read accounts of people who call it completely useless. You can also make sure that your batter is thick enough to suspend chocolate chips -- the thinner the batter, the more likely they are to sink. If you stand by your thin batter however, try using smaller, lighter chips, or reserving half of the chips to sprinkle on top after you've spooned the batter into the muffin cups.

The problem isn't limited to muffins, so feel free to try these tips with anything that you are baking. And though these are some of my favorite methods for suspending chips and other ingredients, I'm sure there are others out there, so please share any that work for you!

Pizza, that inexpensive, staple food of students and late night revelers, is about to get a little more expensive. Pizza shops and other businesses that use a lot of flour are feeling the pinch of rising prices and are starting to pass those costs along to the consumers. According to a report on Philadelphia's NBC10, in addition to being effected by rising fuel costs, flour prices are also going up as farmers plant corn in place of wheat in order to meet the demands of alternative fuel manufacturers.

Pizza will still remain relatively inexpensive, with slice prices going up in $.25 and $.50 increments. Whole pie might run you a buck or two more than they did in the past.

[via NBC10]

OK, that title is slightly misleading I guess. This recipe from Meg over at Megnut.com is actually for a Mean Chocolate Chip Cookie. She asked for chocolate chip cookie receipes from her readers and then took the average of all the recipes and created her own recipe. The measurements are rather...exact?

After the jump, the recipe Meg came up with.

Our pancake roundup this morning only included eight delicious recipes that were sure to tempt just about everyone to get out their frying pan and make up a batch. But as tempting as they may have been, most of the recipes presented there would not be good choices for gluten-free eaters because they were almost all flour-based. In fact, most pancake recipes are. Fortunately, there happen to be a lot of equally delicious gluten-free pancake options out there that ensure everyone who wants to can celebrate Fat Tuesday (a.k.a. National Pancake Day).

The easiest GF option is a pancake mix. Jay used Kinnikinnick Pancake Mix to make the lovely stack pictured above. There are many mixes out there to choose from, including Bob's Red Mill, which is widely available at Whole Foods Stores.

If you want to make your own, try using an alternative flour, as was done in these Rice Flour Crepes or Almond Flour Pancakes. You can find several more GF pancake recipes here, which use buckwheat, quinoa, potato flour and other gluten-free bases.

[Thanks for the reminder, Jay!]

The luscious looking gluten free blueberry muffins I mentioned on Wednesday were from an original recipe from a gluten-free blogger who told readers that it takes patience and a willingness to experiment to be able to produce good gluten-free baked goods. Since I don't have to avoid gluten, I ended up making a batch of regular muffins to satisfy my craving, but The Gluten-Free Gourmet Cooks Comfort Foods: Creating Old Favorites with the New Flours may be the perfect book to add to your collection if you are looking to learn to use gluten free flours your kitchen.

The recipes are great and there are plenty of comfort-food favorites to choose from, like Biscuits and Gravy, Lemon Pudding Cake, Macaroni and Cheese, Banana Bread, Buckwheat Pancakes and Chicken Pot Pie , all of which have had gluten-containing components eliminated. The most useful parts of the book are probably the sections that discuss the properties of different "exotic flours" and other supplies that are commonly used in gluten-free baking, many of which will not be familiar to someone who has relied on wheat flours before.

Shortly after I wrote about the bread manga Yakitate!! Japan a while back I started watching episodes of the anime on YouTube. It's fascinating as anime, but also because its Alton Brown-like discussion of yeast and flours is actually teaching me quite a bit about baking bread.

Lately I've started to nosh on sweet Japanese bread while sitting in front of my computer and watching Yakitate's hero Azuma Kazuma face off against other bakers. You can't imagine how excited I was to learn that the Japanese have developed sweet wheat, a hybrid variety with twice as much sugar as common wheat. Its developers say that the wheat will eliminate the need to add sugar when its flour is used to make baked goods.

Japan's National Agriculture and Food Research Organization and Nippon Flour Mills created the sweet wheat by repeatedly breeding varieties with lower and lower starch production thus resulting in a final product with a much higher concentration of sugars. Now that's some sweet science.

Berries, along with chocolate chips, nuts and other mix-ins you might like to add to cakes, breads and muffins, often seem to sink to the bottom of the pan during baking. While you still get to eat the same number of berries per muffin, this usually means that you have one bit of berries and several of plain cake. Berries sink when a batter is not thick enough to support their weight and hold them up during baking. Choosing a recipe that you know has such a batter will produce the best results. One other benefit of using very thick batters is that you will get a much more bakery-like dome to your muffins, since the muffin will be able to support the weight of a high rise better.

But to prevent the berries from sinking into a thinner batter, tossing them with a little bit of flour before stirring them in can help a bit. The flour helps them "grab on" to the rest of the batter and remain in position during baking. Adding a teaspoon of flour will not change the way the recipe works or tastes, so it's a good trick to keep in mind just in case, whether you're working with a thick batter or not.

You can also simply poke the berries into the top of the batter once it is in the pan, instead of stirring them into the batter while it is still in the mixing bowl. This way, even if they sink, they have a much better chance of remaining in the center of the muffin or cake.

Inevitable I suppose - the hot weather has led directly to a lower than normal wheat harvest. Combine this with rising fuel costs and the price of bread is set to rise in the UK. It is not a huge increase - just 3 or 4 pence per loaf.

The National Farmers Union has warned for several weeks that the shortages of crops, wheat especially wilted in the extreme July heat, would result in higher prices for consumers. BBC reports that the UK's two largest millers - Rank Hovis, which owns eight mills and ADM Milling, which has nine, are both raising the price of flour. This is likely to hit the smaller craft baker more than the own-label ranges pushed out by the supermarkets.

As a side note - did you know that there is a Flour Advisory Bureau in the UK? Me neither. But the site has recipes, conversion charts, sandwich ideas etc etc.

The sales of White Whole Wheat Flour have increased dramatically this year over previous years and as consumer interest has grown, so have supplies. More grocery stores, large and small, now carry the flour. While the product is not new, having been available for more than a decade, its sale is no longer limited to specialty stores and it is far more widely available than ever before. This increased availability means that more people are exposed to it but many are still unfamiliar with the product.

White whole wheat flour is made from a naturally occurring albino variety of wheat. The wheat does not have the tannins or phenolic acid that are found in the outer bran of ordinary red wheat, so not only does it lack the color, but it does not any of the slightly bitter taste that is often associated with whole wheat flour. The flavor is mild and sweet, very similar to that out plain or all-purpose flour, though it does have a hint of the nuttiness of whole wheat.

In the UK, the Food Standards Agency is considering implementing a program that would require fortification of white flour with folic acid. The reason for this is that folic acid has been linked to a decrease in birth defects such as spina bifida. In the US and Canada, white flour has been fortified with folic acid since 1998. Since that time, studies have shown a significant drop in stroke mortality when the rates were compared with data taken from the UK. This appears to have been an unintended benefit of the folic acid fortification, but is likely to be a contributing factor to the Food Standards Agency's move towards require the same policy in the UK. If they adopt the plan, it would be the first mandatory food fortification since the 1940s.

Folic acid is found in whole grain wheat, but is largely stripped away by the refining processes used to make white flour. Some bakers and other manufacturers in the UK voluntarily fortify their flour with folic acid already.

Congratulations! You have successfully made delicious, homemade dinner rolls. After gathering all your ingredients, you proofed the yeast, kneaded the dough, shaped the rolls, baked the rolls and now that the rolls have had sufficient time to cool you get to taste the rolls. They have a hint of crispness to the crust and a soft interior. You can see the color difference in the rolls that are brushed with egg (top left, in the photo) and those that were not (all the others). The rolls brushed with egg bake up darker in color, though the egg does not add anything to the flavor of the roll.

Eat these with butter and jam, or use them to mop up gravy. Enjoy!

[Photo by Nicole Weston]