Thanksgiving Tips from Mom, with Love

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

Congrats to Stephanie H. from Dallas Texas who won our Logitech wireless speaker sweepstakes!

All this week, Special Fork bloggers will highlight Thanksgiving with tips, tricks and recipes for your holiday, culminating on Video Friday with a stuffed delicata squash demo, the perfect Thanksgiving main dish for vegetarians and a wonderful side for everyone else. For more recipes, visit our Special Fork database of recipes. Use the keyword, “Thanksgiving,” for your search.

When Dave made his first Thanksgiving dinner while at grad school in Massachusetts, I was prepared to be his personal Thanksgiving hotline until the meal was done. Actually, my son seemed to have survived his first major entertaining experience unscathed. As he pointed out with a chuckle, since many guests were international students, they had no great expectations.

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Roasted Herb Chicken with Pistachio Salsa

By Zoe McLaughlin
A new video for Video Friday

Roasted chicken thighs are easy to make, but ordinary. Dress them up by rubbing an herb paste under the skin to season the meat and create a ton of flavor without a lot of work. It’s important to use fresh herbs when making the paste because fresh herbs have a brighter, cleaner flavor than dried ones.

Use a mortar and pestle or finely chop the herbs together to release the oils, intensifying the fragrance. This recipe uses chicken thighs but you could use skin-on chicken breast or even a whole chicken. The key is to separate the chicken skin from the flesh, leaving the sides of the skin attached, creating a pocket for the herbs, to seal in the flavor.

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Imagining a Sustainable World

By Andrew Hunter
For The Family Table, a blog for busy families

Teaching children to think and live sustainably is an obligation we have to our children, ourselves and to our planet. Sustainability can be fun and it certainly should be delicious. Children are passionately curious. Digging hands into dirt, planting seeds and harvesting is an experiential way for them to learn about food from its source.

A recent day with Dan and Nanette Bercu at Sunset Ranch showed the fifth grade class from our boys’ school the cycle of life, from planting and harvesting to eating healthy and delicious food while it’s still warm from the sunshine. For city kids in Los Angeles, it’s not every day that they get to pick dry-farmed tomatoes, fetch warm eggs from a chicken coop, carve home-cured prosciutto, pluck squash blossoms, wild basil and pungent red onions, and eat the fruits of their labor on wood-fired pizza on a mountaintop farm in Malibu.

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Kalbi in a Slow Cooker

By Katie Barreira
For Cooking Newbie, a blog for beginner cooks

Traditionally, kalbi, Korean bbq’d short ribs, is prepared on the grill with a foot-long strip of rib beef that has been sliced across the bone, leaving the tips of the rib bones along the top. It’s not the most accessible cut of meat, so when I get a kalbi craving, I like to use the classic sweet and savory Korean marinade as a braising liquid for individual beef short ribs, a cut that is widely available and perfect for the slow cooker.

Slow Cooker Kalbi
Think of this dish as the Korean version of tacos. Meltingly tender rib meat stands in for ground beef, white rice replaces beans, and instead of corn shells, lettuce leaves are the vehicle for getting all that goodness from plate to mouth. The fixins are distinctly Asian, but use them just as you would salsa, shredded cheese and sour cream.

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A Good Date Meal

By Jess Ziman
A new video for Video Friday

A few months ago, a friend of mine told me a story of a near disastrous first date she went on. The whole date sounded dreamy – a dashing man had invited her to his home to cook her a romantic candlelit meal for two. She was all smiles and ready to be swept away by his gesture.

However, her face quickly fell when she found out what the meal was: boiled vegetables (from a frozen packet) and quinoa. His humdrum fare frankly muffled any mojo that may have been between them that night.

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