Food Guys

To a novice cook, making pasta from scratch sounds like a daunting task, and it does take some time and patience. Still, if you've got a food processor, a hand-cranked pasta machine and a pot of boiling water, it's mainly a process of flattening out a dough made of flour and eggs.

For Montanans, the 2017 summer of wildfires led to a 2018 bonanza of morel mushrooms. Food Guy Greg Patent found some for sale and put them to use in morel mushroom lasagna, a delicious and light alternative to meat lasagna.

Looking to cut down on processed sugar when baking and cooking? "Food Guys" Greg and Jon recommend substituting dates, a naturally sweet little fruit from the Middle East that's packed with health benefits.

Grocery store shelves and website search engines groan under the weight of "superfoods" guaranteed to help you weight less, ache less, and generally perk up. From Food Guys Jon and Greg, here's a list of real superfoods, lurking in un-hyped peripheries of supermarkets and farmers' market tables. They're rich in bioavaiable forms of antioxidants, vitamins, minerals and omega-3 fatty acids.

“It’s refreshing, in some curious way, to know that you can have failures, even though you ARE one of the Food Guys,” says Jon Jackson, after "Baking Wizard" Greg Patent explains why there were "dangerous-looking" pieces of pecan pie strewn around the Patent kitchen recently.

The Food Guys, Jon Jackson and Greg Patent, want you to consider eating less meat and dairy. They've been looking at a meta-analysis of food's environmental impacts , published in Science in June 2018, titled "Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers." The study asks not only how food producers can reduce their environmental footprint, but what role consumers play. The answer to the latter: a big one, if we are willing to change our diets.

From his travels in China, Food Guy Greg Patent reports that scientists there have for decades been perfecting the art of fake meat . Not only can they duplicate the flavor of duck, pork, chicken and fish - all from soy protein - they also create authentic color and texture, down to which direction the fake meat fibers run.

What makes cottage fries irresistible? It's the caramelization. Whenever you bake or sauté carrots, onions or potatoes in oil or butter, you're caramelizing - or oxidizing - the vegetables' own sugars, giving them a sweet nutty flavor and brown color. Thin potato pancakes, cooked in olive oil, covered, for 5-8 minutes on each side over medium heat, are the crunchy, delicious outcome of caramelization.

Traditional meals across Europe feature some sort of long-lasting pickled cabbage salad; there's krautsalat in Germany, insalata capricciosa in Italy, kapusta provansal in Russia and Ukraine, and veckosallad in Sweden. Traditional American coleslaw features finely-sliced green or red cabbage, sliced carrots, whole milk, vinegar, sugar, mayonnaise and buttermilk. It's a staple of summer picnics and barbecues and can be made far in advance.

When Food Guy Greg Patent went to the grocery store recently, the beets he intended to buy looked tired, so his eyes began wandering over other produce possibilities. They stopped at green cabbage - crisp, fresh and glistening with droplets of water. Cabbage rolls were what he'd make.