According to a recent article in Men's Health Magazine, the masculinity of salads has always been suspect. I suppose it's true that if real men don't eat quiche, they probably shun salads as well. Especially to the extent that salad may conjure dainty lunches for ladies. There's nothing dainty about pasta salads, those robust combinations of noodles, vegetables, and often cheese and meat, bound together by a distinctively flavored dressing. When it comes to one of these, making do with a salad

The comedian Buddy Hackett used to tell the story about a man who didn't know anything about farming but who bought a farm anyway. A friend asked him what he was going to plant. "Razor blades and cabbages," the would-be farmer told him. "What could you possibly get out of that?" his friend asked. The landowner replied, "Coleslaw." You can't blame that man for experimenting with "cutting-edge" agricultural methods. After all, coleslaw is the perfect accompaniment to grilled meats, chicken, and

Not long ago the Hungarian government banned the sale of paprika marketed by three local companies because it was found to have been adulterated with a South American strain of a spice that might prove dangerous. Subsequently, seven senior members of the three companies were indicted. The resulting scandal demonstrated that in Hungary they take their paprika seriously. Just as seriously as the Italians take their pasta, the Japanese take their rice or the English their tea. Indeed Hungarians

I enjoy baking cookies. It gives me great satisfaction to see how my family and friends enjoy the results of my efforts. But the truth is I really do it for the dough. Let’s face it. It’s hard enough to keep your hands out of the cookie jar, but what’s really difficult is keeping your fingers out of the mixing bowl. In fact, the practice of eating raw cookie dough has become so popular that many people buy packaged cookie dough from the grocery store with absolutely no intention of ever baking

Of all the culinary accidents in human history, which include the chocolate chip cookie and, if you believe Charles Lamb's account, roast pork -- surely fudge must rank among the most serendipitous. No one knows for sure just who made the first pan of fudge, but most everybody agrees it was invented by mistake -- and it's uniquely American. As Lee Edwards Benning notes in her exhaustive treatise on the subject, fudge was unknown outside this country by those who might've been expected to

Perhaps you've seen the promo on the Weather Channel in which a meteorologist presents a lesson about tornadoes. He fills a blender container with yogurt and milk and blends it on progressively higher speeds. Finally, a student in the class blurts out, "So a tornado is mother nature's way of making a smoothie!" I don't know how apt the comparison is for meteorological purposes but one thing's for sure -- smoothies have become so popular, they're popping up as frequently as tornadoes in Kansas

Every time I visit Athens I come away with a renewed appreciation for the contributions of the ancient Greeks to human civilization. No, I'm not talking about democracy, the theater or even the Olympics. I'm talking about feta cheese. To me, feta cheese -- sometimes referred to as the princess of cheeses -- is every bit as admirable as any other Greek invention, and it is surely just as ancient. It is likely as old as Greece itself. In his epic work, "The Odyssey," written thousands of years ago

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, the old adage says. That's good advice, but there's an assumption underlying it that ought to be challenged. What's wrong with lemons? A life without them -- from the culinary perspective -- would be sour indeed. I came to this deep, philosophical revelation while lounging at the backyard of some friends who live in California. Just a few feet from where I sat was their lemon tree, drooping with fist-sized fruit. It occurred to me that even those of us

Remember the Woody Allen movie "Sleeper"? In my favorite scene, set over 200 years from now, a physician can't believe how people dieted in earlier times. "You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or hot fudge?" he asks. His colleague answers, "Those were thought to be unhealthy ... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true." Allen was just trying to be funny, but he may have been more prescient than he realized. Today we know that chocolate can be good for you, we've

In his monumental work Ulysses , James Joyce suggested that God made food and the devil made seasoning. But even the Bible speaks admiringly of mustard seed, the basis for one of the world's most popular condiments. The mustard plant is fully deserving of accolades. For centuries its been used as a food, flavoring and folk remedy. In fact it was so important as a medicinal herb to the ancient Greeks that they credited their god of medicine for its creation. Over the years the plant and its seeds