Writing in The Root, Slate's online magazine covering African-American topics, Bryant Terry makes the argument that soul food has gotten a bad rap. Soul food is portrayed in popular culture as salty, fatty, sugar-laden comfort dishes like mac n' cheese, greens with ham hocks, fried chicken and lard biscuits. But half a century ago soul food meant the simple dishes Southern African-Americans ate for dinner, with plenty of fresh local ingredients - sauteed okra, stone ground grit cakes, homemade peach chutney. Sure there was fried chicken and cobbler, but that was hardly the whole picture, Terry says. Terry, a Bay Area cookbook author originally from Memphis, hopes that bringing back locally focused, veggie-heavy soul food can help lower rates of obesity and diabetes in African-American communities. The article includes recipes for grit cakes and citrus collards with raisins. Yum.




When my dear friend Yukari brought my red velvet cake the other afternoon, I thought I must have died and gone to some sort of sugar-baked heaven. I asked her where she discovered this bizarre, deep red, Satanic looking concoction. Apparently it's all over Brooklyn, and she'd found out about it while working in the Buttacup Lounge.
Newsweek recently featured an 







