• White asparagus is a culinary world darling. It is grown so that the plants are shielded from the sun, never to develop chlorophyll, which would turn it green. Farmers harvest them under cover of darkness to preserve their creamy colorlessness.
  
• If you manage to get your hands on this delicacy, consider making Warm White Asparagus With Dungeness Crab, Poached Egg and Walnut Vinaigrette or Grilled White Asparagus With Pistachio "Pesto" and Balsamic Vinegar.
  
• Tomato season is still at least a month away, and so while you wait for the local ones to hit your markets, turn to canned whole peeled tomatoes. The FoodDay editors have done a taste test of some popular brands. Click here to check out the winners.
  
• Why are San Marzano tomatoes so darn special?
• Instead of calling for take-out midweek, do a little culinary multi-tasking on the weekend, to ensure that you have plenty of leftovers in the fridge all week long.
  
• We all know we should eat more whole grains, but when it comes to pasta, which tastes better? Whole wheat or whole grain?

• A young mother finds a way to feed her family foods that are healthy, local and sustainable, all while lowering her food budget and reducing her environmental impact.
• A FoodDay staffer recalls her family's month in the low-budget challenge that was featured last week in the section. She saved more than $40 a week on groceries and discovered that her family was far more willing to try new foods than she ever thought before.
• Cookbook author and MPR cooking show host Lynne Rossetto Kasper sits down with FoodDay's Leslie Cole to talk about her favorite foods, her love of cooking and her new cookbook, How to Eat Supper.
  
• Fresh, young salad greens are starting to pop up and what better way to eat them than paired with mellow goat cheese.
  
• Fiddlehead ferns, nettles and broccoli rabe are starting to show up in the farmers markets.
  
• We know him as Jared, the man who lost an enormous amount of weight by only eating Subway sandwiches, but his accomplishment now is that he's kept the weight off for ten years.

Pollsters are now looking at how consumer behavior, including eating, affects voter choice. Dr. Pepper is for Republicans, Sprite is for Democrats. Clinton supporters snack on Fig Newtons, McCain fans on stuffed-crust pizza. While some results are weird, others are predictable - Whole Foods is a dead giveaway of liberal orientation.

Cookbook author Susie Fishbein is providing observant Jews with gourmet Passover recipes, including turmeric, tomato and spinach matzoh balls.

**#!*@! souffle! *$*#*!* emulsification! Chefs like to curse in the kitchen. Really.

Eric Asimov talks kosher wine - you don't have to be Jewish to like them.

The Minimalist does Hangtown Fry - eggs, bacon and...oysters.

Cakes masquerading as muffins make breakfast less guilty. Includes a recipe for spicy ginger muffins with currants and toasted pecans.

Food, or lack thereof, in Holocaust concentrations camps is still a taboo subject for survivors, writes Jewish cooking maven Joan Nathan.

Cindy McCain shares her favorite family recipes. Except they were ripped off from the Food Network. A rogue intern is apparently to blame.

The Minimalist suggest new ways to use your microwave - chocolate pudding, parboiling vegetables, baked apples.

The Curious Cook, Harold McGee, follows, explaining the science behind the microwave. You can put aluminum foil in the microwave! Hear that, mom?

Why higher food prices could be a good thing (less cheap junk food; better for small farmers, etc.).

Chatham cod have disappeared from off the coast of Massachusetts. But not from menus.

Wine critic Eric Asimov taste-tests California Pinot Noir.

What to do with tough old birds? Stew! Braise! Slow-cooked rooster with mushrooms and scallions, anyone?

The Minimalist is back, with a video on cooking clams.

Eating cheap in Manhattan by buying food exclusively from 99-cent stores. Doable? Yes. Advisable? Perhaps not.

The New York Times then brings chef Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin in on the skinflint action, challenging him to cook a meal entirely of products from Jack's 99-Cent Store. See what he does with a 99-cent frozen salmon fillet .

Wine critic Eric Asimov asks whether it's possible to teach teenagers the pleasures of moderate drinking with a little wine at the table. It works for the Europeans, right? Or does it?

A kreplach face-off in Brooklyn. Oy gevalt!

The Minimalist suggests we try a stir-fry with fermented black beans.

Then, he takes us on a photo tour of the Campo de' Fiori market in Rome. Serious vegetable porn.

In Tokyo, Japanese takes on Western food continue to grow in popularity. They seem to involve a lot of ketchup.

Starbucks buys $11,000 coffee machines in ongoing efforts to revitalize their image.

After years of appreciative eating, culinary writers, chefs and other professional foodies get...fat. How do you lose 50 pounds when eating (pork belly, crème brûlée, Camembert) is your job?

Frank Bruni wraps up his tour of his favorite new American restaurants with Ubuntu in Napa and O Ya in Boston.

A roundup of European Easter baked goods: Swiss custard tarts, Finnish rye and wheat bread, current-studded English cakes, Italian pizza al formaggio and more.

Leftover tom yum soup inspires the invention of a coconut fish stew.

Wine critic Eric Asimov discusses Chinon reds from the Loire Valley.

The Minimalist does apple cake soaked in bourbon.

Cow, sheep, goat...camel? Try Caravane, a Brie-like camel milk cheese made in Mauritania

Looking for holiday dinner ideas? A selection of Easter recipes, new and old.

According to a trend piece in the Fashion & Styles section of today's New York Times, an increasing number of young people (the word "hipster" is not used, but certainly implied) are ditching Williamsburg for the farming life, raising free range chickens and organic spinach on rural farms.

"Steeped in years of talk around college campuses and in stylish urban enclaves about the evils of factory farms," twenty- and thirty-something urbanites are getting some real dirt on their trendy Carhartts, the article says.

I guess this doesn't seem particularly new to me. Coming from the more rural environs of Chapel Hill, NC, hip young people working on organic farms is nothing new - my 22-year-old brother, for example, used to work part time in a nightclub and part time on a humane, hormone-free hog farm, and delighted in the fact that he sometimes got paid in pork shoulder. Plus, how many Baby Boomers don't have a story about working on an organic farm in the 1960s?

Chefs in some smaller upscale bistros double as waiters, creating an intimate, dinner party-like ambiance. Only the host never sits down to eat.

Animal rights activists are using hidden cameras to document slaughterhouse abuses, like sick cows being dragged with forklifts. Still hungry for that sloppy Joe?

An ode to pasties and other savory portable pies. Yum.

Frank Bruni continues his coast-to-coast tour of his favorite new restaurants: Fearing's in Dallas, Michael's Genuine Food & Drink in Miami, and Cochon in New Orleans.

The Minimalist does chicken with tomatillos for St. Paddy's day.

Restaurateurs are growing annoyed with online table reservation scalping.

Pickle ice pops? If you say so.

MSG is in more foods than you might think. But it's not the devil.

More on Frank Bruni's favorite new non-NYC restaurants.

Memories of Caribbean jerk chicken with pineapple (with recipes).

One-pot shrimp curry recipe.

How to cook an octopus. Hint: very slowly.

A quick lesson in pancetta.

At the bar, shake up a Golden Orange Sake-Tini, Java Mojo and sip the Wine Pick Of The Week, a 2004 Torres Coronas Tempranillo, making sure to note How To ... Store wine better.

In the kitchen, the Seattle PI is quick cooking Quick Moussaka and seven different recipes, one for each day of the busy week, including Salmon with Lemon Olive Oil Sauce and Walnut-crusted Drumsticks. There's also a recipe for Catalan Fish Stew.

Ballerina Brunson doesn't give up good food for her art.

• Frank Bruni ranks his top ten new restaurants outside New York.

• How to cook dinner without waking your baby. Hint: use plastic forks.

• It's OK to pair oysters with red wine now, says Eric Asimov.

• The new breed of bars are more like bistros, with nearly full menus.

• West Coast frozen yogurt stores, led by Pinkberry, descend on Manhattan. Godzilla-style madness ensues.

• The Minimalist cooks with canned tomatoes, with a video on roasted tomato soup.

• Alex Witchel writes about bigos, Polish sauerkraut soup; Elaine Louie discusses a one pot recipe for homemade meatball sausage cooked with tomato sauce.

• Charlie Trotter will open a restaurant on Madison Avenue.

• We all need dried cherries, artisan cheeses and bamboo shopping bags...

America (at least the segment of the population that reads the New York Times Dining & Wine section) has already embraced artisanal raw milk cheeses, boutique breads, bacon from pigs hand-fed on nothing but acorns.

Now, according to the lead story in the Wednesday Dining & Wine section, small-batch milk, cream and butter are the next Big Thing in refined gourmandise. In the article, It-chef Thomas Keller of Napa's French Laundry raves about butter handmade at a small Vermont creamery. "It has a different flavor profile and nuances throughout the year," he rhapsodizes. Fresh local dairy products are great, certainly - I buy pints of thick, downy cream from a nearby farm, and love nothing more than a hunk of baguette slathered with good butter, paved with sliced radishes and sprinkled with sea salt.

But my favorite part of the story had less to do with food and more to do with seventh-grade giggles: a quote from Nancy Nipples, founder of the Pike Place Market Creamery in Seattle. Full legal name: Nancy Nipples the Milkmaid.

Remember when everyone went crazy over soy? Products from breakfast cereal to cookies touted their "soy isoflavone" content, credited with protecting against heart disease. Now a number of studies show that soy consumption has no affect on cardiovascular health and people are fretting that it may even increase the risk of some cancers.

The jury is still waaay out on just how specific foods affect the body.

So I rolled my eyes a bit reading this article in the New York Times about California restaurants claiming to serve immunity boosting foods.

Crustacean, a Vietnamese restaurant in Beverly Hills, puts a special icon next to menu items it claims boost immunity. Its Buddha roll, made with shiitake mushrooms which contains iron and Vitamin C, gets an icon, as does its lemongrass soup (lemongrass has folate, zinc and iron).

Sounds like a good way to sell more Buddha rolls. And to make a dinner out a little more like a trip to the doctor's office. I'll stick to my reasonably balanced diet (with the occasional unreasonable quantity of ice cream or pork barbecue) and pop a vitamin pill now and then for good measure.

What do you think? Any foods you believe boost your immune system?

This week, a slight departure from pure food and dining with a story on where animals that were once destined for the dinner plate actually go for sanctuary. Also, beef jerky becomes haute cuisine, sort of.

In the kitchen, Mark Bittman does chicken wings and blackberries come into season.

On the dining scene, Frank Bruni vists Perilla, the restaurant by Top Chef winner Harold Dieterle, gluten-free menus are becoming more popular, and the best way to eat during the summer is a series of starters.

Every restaurant wants to get a good review in the paper, whether they actually like the reviewer or not, and there have been so many books from the critic's perspective (Garlic and Sapphires, for example) that most people don't have a clue has to how a restaurant actually handles a review, good and bad. The Denver Posts's dining critic, Tucker Shaw, sat down with restaurateur Danny Meyer to try to get some perspective on how reviews are seen from the other side of the kitchen door.

Meyer has 11 New York restaurants, including Grammercy Tavern and Eleven Madison Park, so he is certainly no stranger to reviews. He says that all reviews will have positive and negative consequences, regardless of the content of the review. Reviews bring the team together, creating a support system that helps the kitchen perform better. Negative reviews not only drive customers away, but they also drop morale, meaning that some staff members might leave, too. Positive reviews can set the bar too high, leaving new customers disappointed and spreading negative word-of-mouth.

Meyer, while he and his staff members have some coping strategies, also said that restaurant critics and restaurants need each other to some degree and, no matter what the reviews are like, he tries to make sure that everything is always done the best that it can be. In the end, he rightly points out, it is the diner that makes the final decision, whether they believe the review or not.