Over on SenseList today, I posted a list of 70 different things you can get in the mail every month with a subscription. More than half of these are foods. I’ve personally been a member of a fruit-of-the-month club and a chocolate-of-the-month club, and for a while we subscribed to the Illy a Casa program [...]

One of the few things I’ve been craving regularly since being on the South Beach Diet is pizza. Not just any pizza, of course: genuine New York-style, foldable, greasy pepperoni pizza is my personal favorite. Still, in an emergency, something is better than nothing. If only a local business cared enough about my cravings to [...]

I’m delighted to announce that you can now purchase a lovely printed version of Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner. Thanks to our friends at Qoop, we’re now offering the print-on-demand edition—7 x 9 inches, with a Wire-O binding to lie flat on your kitchen counter and a laminated, color cover. The pages inside can be [...]

Bake it or buy it, but blog about it. Monday Oct. 16 has been declared World Bread Day by the International Union of Bakers and Bakers-Confectioners. The idea here is to appreciate this “universal product, found in every civilisation.” Over at the kochtopf blog they’re urging people to photograph and blog about their favorite bread and [...]

I can hardly think of a more attention-grabbing headline than the following, from SFGate yesterday: Chef Makes Wedding Gown With Cream Puffs. I am deeply fond of cream puffs in any form (the two Beard Papa’s franchises near me, about which more in a future post, are more tempting than I can begin to tell [...]

Given the choice, I’ll nearly always opt for coffee over tea, especially when I can get my coffee from a superautomatic coffee machine. However, as much as I rely on coffee’s high caffeine content and strong aroma for their stimulant properties, I do enjoy a nice cup of tea from time to time. Recently, I’ve [...]

Because we worked hard to get Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner published in plenty of time for Thanksgiving in Canada, and included Canadian-friendly metric measurements, I take a keen interest in how Canadians will be celebrating the holiday today. To be sure, Canada doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving on the same scale as the United States, and [...]

In Morgen’s Interesting Thing of the Day article about Aquanomy, she described this new trend—the connoisseurship of water—which results in some trendy restaurants having water lists as long as a good wine list. She said:

This may seem like decadence to those used to drinking water straight from the tap, or a huge luxury when even [...]

I’m trying to decide whether I like this idea. Following these instructions at InventGeek.com, you can outfit an ordinary bread box with a UV light that will prevent mold from forming on the surface of the bread, supposedly extending its shelf life to two weeks. I’ve certainly had to toss out bread that became moldy before [...]

I’ve always loved the idea of being able to buy M&M’s in nonstandard colors, such as purple. And you can do so at any of the M&Ms retail stores or online at M&M’s.com. At some point within the past couple of years, they started offering Custom Printed M&M’s—also, clearly, a brilliant idea for which I [...]

We don’t consume very much carbonated liquid in this household, at least not compared to most Americans. The two of us might go through a 2-liter bottle in a week; more if we’re trying to meet deadlines (and looking for a nice cold source of caffeine), less if we’re being more relaxed, or paying more [...]

When Morgen and I were on vacation in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, we knew it would wreak havoc with our ongoing attempt to follow the South Beach Diet. Of course, we already make exceptions for things like parties, testing Thanksgiving dinner recipes, and whatnot—and then, as necessary, go back to the stricter [...]