"iceberg lettuce" news and stories

• Is your meal ready for its closeup? Photographing your food is one of the odder trends of the new century.
• Induction cooking "just may be the iPad" of kitchen technology.
• Cooper Square Hotel's Faustina is the latest haunt of chef Scott Conant, "the city's most inventive practitioner of Italian-American top-dollar cooking."
• If great wines pack history in a glass, then Conterno Barolos are a survey course.
• Mark Bittman stands up for the losers -- the loser lettuces, that is.

I feel like I'm revealing some deep, dark secret, but here goes: I microwave my salads.

Now, this isn't because I like my lettuce and carrots and salad dressing really hot, it's because of bacteria. I started doing this a couple of years ago, when we had all those recalls and scares involving pre-made bagged salads and spinach. I make my salad on a plate then zap it for about 20 seconds. Just enough to kill something but not make the salad get hot and shrivel.

Now, I have to stress that I have no idea if 20 seconds in the microwave will even do anything to destroy bacteria, but it makes me feel good anyway.

I now return you to your normal Slashfood posts.