Why settle for the usual burgers and franks at the grill when you could spice things up with a grilled pizza instead?
Five prime eateries perfect for sunny outdoor dining in Minneapolis: Cafe Barbette, Meritage, Sanctuary, Walker Art Center and Tavern on France (which gets another look here).
The Minnesota State Fair will host a slew of foodie contests, from cookies for kids to a salad challenge for olive zealots.
Arrivederci! The 22-year-old fine dining restaurant D'Amico Cucina will serve its last customers on June 27.
Laurie Pyle's baked goods are a hot commodity at local farmers' markets, where customers go wild for treats like cherry-almond scones and buttercream cupcakes.
Author Joyce White gushes over the myriad of possibilities awaiting adventurous salad makers, from fancy vinegars to slivers of anchovies.
A Consumer Reports survey shows that readers are none too happy with Minnesota-based restaurant chains, although Famous Dave's BBQ got lots of reader love in the barbecue category.
In the wake of three restaurant closings six months ago, the Lyn-Lake intersection is showing signs of life.
Washington State is an emerging wine region that boasts high quality under the radar.
This week's wine pick goes green -- literally -- with Vinho Verde, while the restaurant deal of the week is Oceanaire Seafood Room, where you can get a three-course meal for $20.10.
After disliking scallops through most of my childhood, I found them on my birthday dinner plate a few years ago. My friend had whipped up a warm scallop salad for my big day, and it was insanely delicious. Now, of course, I love the things. They're very tasty, pretty versatile, and are ridiculously simple to prepare.
Over the last few weeks, I wanted to use up the last of the big scallops hanging out in my freezer. First, I made the above -- a warm salad to get back to the roots of my scallop love. The key is to have a creamy sauce/dressing, and vegetables that are warm and almost limp (but still holding some firmness). This one had tomatoes, peppers, green beans, basil, and feta.
While in the throes of the sticky days of summer, you don't need to heat up your kitchen to make a filling and gourmet meal. It's the perfect time for a healthy and filling salad.
As a bit of a veggie fiend, I eat a lot of salads. While I rarely change up the ingredients in the salad mix, I sometimes like to change up the dressing, because the same ol' vinaigrette or caesar dressing can get old after a while. One of the best and easiest flairs that I've found for salad dressing is mustard seeds.
After toasting them on a skillet, you just grind them up, like you see above, and add them into your dressing. The ground mustard seeds give a smoky depth to the dressing and brings a great added flavor to the dish. The seeds above were used as part of a great Mustard Seed Dressing recipe that I picked out of The Big Book of Backyard Cooking, and you can check it out after the jump.
I've been meaning for a while to write about healthy alternatives to the usual summer barbecue foods. My family hosted a desserts-only BBQ for this weekend (which turned into burgers and dogs BBQ), and I feel like I've been doing the circuit of barbecues featuring heavy slaws, burgers with lots of toppings, and rich chocolate chip cookies. While I love these foods as much as anyone, I'm trying to put together a list of the best alternative recipes from across the web to replace these often less-healthy favorites. Here's what I have:
We are having something of an unprecedented heat wave here on the East Coast (and it's not even officially summer). Yesterday it was 96 degrees and they are predicting that it will top out right around 100 degrees today (and with the humidity, that means it feels more like 105). I have a brisket in defrosting in my fridge, but the last thing I want to do is turn my oven on long enough to get it cooked (it will just have to wait until Wednesday, when the heat breaks).
On nights like this, I turn to cool summer greens from the fridge and cans from my pantry. I always keep black beans, pickled beets, garbanzo beans, artichoke hearts and tuna in olive oil in the kitchen cabinet, so that I can augment veggies with much-needed (at least for me) protein. I create a table top salad bar with the beans, tuna, diced tomato, sliced cucumber, grated cheese, carrot rounds and anything else I can find and go to town. If you need a carb with your meal, add some crackers or bread from a local bakery.
That's my basic meal for those nights when I can't bear to heat up my apartment. How do the rest of you beat the heat in the kitchen*?
*I know that those of you out on the West Coast are freezing and still wearing your winter coats. What are you eating these days?
Remember the bacon mat that swept the interwebs last summer? That intrepid food/craft/knitting blogger Megan at Not Martha has taken the basic idea of the bacon mat (it is the premise that bacon, if given the proper support, will bond to itself and hold shapes as it cooks) and turned it into bacon cups! Is there anything that bacon can't do?
She designed them as a breadless BLT, using them to hold small salads of lettuce and tomato. The commenters on her site have run with the idea, suggesting other uses for the crisp, porky vessels. How would you fill them?
I am something of a sucker for a good salad. Over the years I've gotten to know which combinations of veggies, proteins and dressings work well together, but I realize that not everyone has that same intuitive understanding of the inner workings of salads. For those of you who need a little help in the salad department, Ms. Ginsu has stepped up to help. She spent nine months making salads professionally and has created a helpful chart listing eight popular varieties of salads and their individual components.
What's so great about her guide is that it not only tells you what goes into these salads, but it tries to help you start to understand what makes a good salad so that you can branch off and create new salads of your own. Because as she says, "
We're conditioned to believe that salads are typically the healthiest menu options. However, our friends over a AOL Body have put together a slide show that features ten of the most unhealthy salads around. Clocking in as some of the worst offenders are Dairy Queen's Grilled Chicken Caesar Salad (48 grams of fat), Chili's Southwest Cobb Salad (970 calories) and Cosi's Signature Salad (52 grams of fat). That last one really makes me sad, as that Cosi salad has always been one of my favorites. Thankfully, the folks at AOL Body also offer ways of making all the salads a bit more heart and diet friendly.
I've been meaning for a while to write about healthy alternatives to the usual summer barbecue foods. My family hosted a desserts-only BBQ for this weekend (which turned into burgers and dogs BBQ), and I feel like I've been doing the circuit of barbecues featuring heavy slaws, burgers with lots of toppings, and rich chocolate chip cookies. While I love these foods as much as anyone, I'm trying to put together a list of the best alternative recipes from across the web to replace these often less-healthy favorites. Here's what I have:
The feature story this week is on the 
Add some 
We're conditioned to believe that salads are typically the healthiest menu options. However, our friends over a AOL Body have put together a slide show that features 
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