Cherries are lusciously red, but they also stain devilishly if they explode anywhere but in your mouth.

You may not be able to produce a glass of orange juice with an orange and a fork, but you'll easily be able to extract enough juice for various recipes.

I have no idea what makes this a "space" cocktail. It has gin, frangelico, and lemon juice, but I don't really see anything space age or astronomical or sky-oriented about it. Maybe it tastes like space? Well, if something tastes like space to you maybe you're taking something a little stronger than frangelico.

The recipe is from 1001 Cocktails, and it's pretty straightforward.

The summer is coming on strong and that means lemonade, lemonade, lemonade. Yesterday I gave a recipe for the rather interesting Hickory Smoked Cherry and Bourbon Lemonade, and here's another lemonade concoction, from Eating Well. This one utilizes cucumbers! English hothouse cucumbers, to be exact. Recipe after the jump.

If your family is like my family, you get into holiday ruts. This can often be a great thing, because if you're cooking something year after year after year, and everyone eats it, then it must be right. But sometimes it's good to experiment, maybe make another version of a dish, so we can have a choice and try something new.

That's very true of stuffing. A lot of families stick with one kind (bread stuffing, oatmeal, cornbread, etc) and stick with that, but this year I'm going to bring something new to my sister's house, and I'm thinking about this dish. It's Rice and Nut Stuffing. What intrigues me about it is the use of pistachios and raisins.

Celebrities are touting the maple syrup diet, which is a type of detox diet that is also known as the Master Cleanse diet, or the lemonade diet. Essentially, you drink a mixture of water, maple syrup, lemon juice and cayenne pepper (a very small amount) for about 10 days. Without getting into the sticky issue of whether or not you are really cleansing your body, if you even need to, the diet is a way to drop a few pounds quickly, for better or worse. It works because you take in relatively few calories and a lot of liquids.

All in all, it seems to result in a relatively quick weight loss of a few pounds, but certainly neither a long term solution nor a substitute for a more traditionally healthy diet. It is great for the sales of maple syrup, though, since some stores are reporting that their sales have more than doubled in the past few months.

One woman's account of her time on the diet can be read here if you're interested in getting the daily details of the "cleanse."