The Boys’ Gougères

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

One fateful day a few months ago, we walked into a newly opened French bakery around the corner from our house. It was fateful because the boys discovered gougères that had just come hot out of the oven.

If you’re not familiar, gougères are like savory cream puffs. Delicious little pastries with cheese and herbs mixed into the dough before baking. So now gougères are the bread of choice in the Hunter household. The boys like them in the morning with scrambled eggs, at lunch stuffed with turkey and cherry tomatoes, and at dinner as slider buns.

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The Right Time to Stew…

By Lori Powell
For One or Two Bites, a blog for singles and couples

…Or so I thought when the first chill of the fall season was in the air and I purchased a two-pound piece of chuck steak. Then the weather changed and it turned into murky, swampy, allergy- producing air that surrounded the Lehigh Valley where I live.

With it, my feeling for cooking a big pot of stew went out the window. However, my taste memories were already activated and stew it had to be! Plus I had already bought the rest of the ingredients and there is nothing like the aroma of good stew to fill the air, no matter how hot and steamy that air might be.

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Goodbye, Summer; Hello, Fall

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

It’s wonderful when the last waning days of summer are interspersed with cold days that snap you out of your warm weather stupor. I look forward to autumn so much that I welcome as quick an end to summer as possible. And during this season, it’s great to begin cooking slightly heartier fare than fruit-topped salads.

As with most meals I make, I took inspiration from random ingredients in my pantry that I wanted to use in some way before they went bad. This week it was sour cream, and since we also had some egg pasta lingering in the back of the pantry, the idea of making a warm and satisfying meal of stroganoff practically slapped me in the face.

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Hawai’i’s Plantation Village

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

To look at, Hawai’i is the perfect place for leisure – golden sands kissed by aquamarine waves, lush mountains and vivid tropical vegetation. But for immigrant sugar plantation laborers a century ago, it was a place of daily toil, poverty and isolation from home and family.

Back then, sugar was king and so lucrative that plantation owners imported cheap labor from around the world to build the work force they needed. Today, the cane fields are gone; labor having been priced out of the global market. The industry also suffered diminished demand as high-fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in soft drinks. Sugar plantations began to close in the 1970s and in 1995 the last operation was shuttered. Of what was a way of life for thousands of laborers, only an open-air ethnographic museum remains.

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Kale Chips

By David Hu
A new video for Video Friday

I admit I don’t like dark, leafy green veggies. So when I learned from Katie Barreira, former Special Fork cooking newbie blogger, about kale chips, I was sold! What wouldn’t taste good turned into a chip? Great taste, good nutrition and easy to boot. It’s a win-win.

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