Make your own Chocolate Hazelnut Spread

By Ben Mims
For Cooking Newbie, a blog for beginner cooks

As I said in my Special Fork debut post, I love breakfast. It’s the best meal of the day and has the best dishes to choose from: biscuits with sausage gravy, chilaquiles; corned beef hash!

But more often than not, I always choose something sweet, whether it’s a simple scone or a rich slab of cake. One of my favorite things is Nutella, and for years, I spread it liberally, rotating it with peanut butter, jelly, or cinnamon-sugar butter, on my 7-grain toast.

I got the idea one day to try and make my own “Nutella” for a dessert I was developing, and it came out better than I expected. It retained small chunks of hazelnut, and I could control the sweetness and quality of chocolate.

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Learning to Love Granola

By Ben Mims
For Cooking Newbie, a blog for beginner cooks

Since moving to San Francisco a few months ago, I’ve learned several truths already: the hills are torture on my Converse-loving feet, it will always get cold at night so bring a hoodie, and people here LOVE granola.

Granola has always been tied to hippies and nature-loving enthusiasts as their snack or breakfast of choice, so many would not be surprised that San Franciscans love it. But I was shocked at just HOW much they love it.

Everyone I know here makes it, or has their favorite brand. Being a Southerner, I never ate granola growing up, or even as a young adult, because I was nursed on biscuits with ham or sausage and covered in gravy, quite the complete opposite of everything granola stands for.

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A Valentine’s Day Dessert for Cooking Newbies

By Ben Mims
For Cooking Newbie, a blog for beginner cooks

Most holidays can be daunting for the beginning cook, with many courses to serve to large groups of people. Valentine’s Day is the best time for a beginning cook to shine since he or she will be cooking for just two.

I find the best way to approach this day is to see it as a normal weeknight meal, but with the quality and care turned up a few notches.

Serve meatloaf, if that’s what you and your significant other go for, but make it with the best ground beef, pork or lamb you can find and maybe some homemade ketchup slathered on top.

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Making Perfect Hard-Boiled Eggs

By Ben Mims
For Cooking Newbie, a blog for beginner cooks

Hi, Cooking Newbie readers. I’m so happy to be joining the Special Fork team with this first blog post. In each post, I will aim to teach you an invaluable technique, along with a killer recipe, so that you not only can make my recipes easily, but you can become a better cook, in general.

With this first post, I only thought it best to begin with the most basic, yet delicious technique and recipe I know: making perfect hard-boiled eggs. I literally make these once a week on my days off for a fantastic and virtually hands-free, no-mess meal, which is my favorite kind.

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Six-second Videos and Other Newsy Tidbits

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

Twitter introduced Vine just over a week ago and at Special Fork, we couldn’t wait to try this truncated video format – limited to just six seconds long! The video is ephemeral; once you post it to Twitter, it’s not readily findable again.

In order to share our Vine videos with you, I’ve captured the original links from Twitter. Since Special Fork is about solving the dinnertime dilemma, we didn’t want to just video six random seconds of cooking or eating. We wanted our Vine posts to be a teachable moment.

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