Kids and Veggies Don’t Mix

By Andrew Hunter

Kids and veggies don’t mix…or do they? Marilyn and I recently discovered that Ben’s third grade classmates, all professing their distaste for everything green, will actually gobble down more veggies than they realize when stir-fried with rice, ginger, garlic and soy sauce. Yes, fried rice loaded with broccoli, carrots, mushrooms and snow peas was a big hit with eight-year-old boys and girls alike!

A couple of weeks after our fried rice demo in Mrs. Touhey’s class, Ben nonchalantly handed me a dog-eared envelope that had evidently been in his backpack for several days. “Oh here, dad. Some notes about the rice,” he said in his typical dry tone. We read each and every one of them aloud as a family and were thrilled.

Perhaps this quote from one of Ben’s buddies says it best, “I can tell you put lots ‘o’ love into it! It was tres, tres bon!” So the next time you have leftover rice, stir-fry it with a bunch of veggies, soy sauce and “lots ‘o’ love.” Dinner is sure to be delicious!

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At the Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco

By Sandy Hu

Many shows ago, I gave up on trying to make trend sense out of what I saw and tasted at the Winter Fancy Food Show. A trade show for gourmet retailers, the show covers 196.000 square feet at Moscone Center in San Francisco, embracing 1,300 exhibiting companies and attracting more than 17,000 attendees.

There’s simply too much real estate and too many disparate offerings to conveniently pigeonhole. So instead of trying, I just walk the show, see what I see, taste what I taste, and refuse to be overly ambitious in what I take away from the experience. Yesterday, I enjoyed the company of @JustinMcNeil of Delin8ted as I walked the show. He’s a new friend I met on Twitter, tweeting about #NASFT and #FancyFoodShow over the weekend.

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A Spa Day for Your Wok

By Katie Barreira

This week in the test kitchen, we were working on recipes that required a wok. Even in professional kitchens, less frequented equipment have a way of hiding best when you need it most. A fly on the wall that day would have heard,

“Do we have a wok?”
“Yeah, I know I’ve used it before, but I haven’t seen it recently.”
“Do you remember packing it? Maybe it got lost in the move.”
“How do you lose a wok?!”

Once unearthed and inspected for quality assurance we concluded that our carbon steel wok had received no love. But that was about to change. A bit of research in our cookbook library uncovered an excellent wok priming primer by Chinese cookbook author and wok connoisseur, Grace Young. Armed with good counsel and some steel wool, we undertook a transformation on par with Michael Caine’s makeover of Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality. Our wok has never looked, or cooked, better.

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