Leeks are one of the oldest Irish vegetables, and they combine well with other foods of the Emerald Isle, including cheese, potatoes and fish.

Order rice pilaf and you’ll probably get the rice but not the pilaf. There’s a lot of confusion about this. Pilaf is not simply cooked rice, although we often think it is. It’s a cooking method that adds centuries of flavor to our common rice. Any cooked grain can be a pilaf.

I don't drink bourbon, but I love beers fermented and aged in wooden bourbon barrels. The best example is Goose Island's Bourbon County Stout.

Did you know that we recently celebrated National Blueberry Popover Day, Oatmeal Nut Waffles Day and National Crabmeat Day? Just about every type of food has a commemorative day, week or month.

For Sally Schierer, baking is no different than sewing a purse, by hand, from scrap material, growing a lemon tree from seed or stroking paint on a canvas. "I'm a creative person. I like to take something and make something else out of it," she says. "I do it all through the house, the garden and the yard."

Weekly food rail, with tips on soaking dry beans, an easy recipe for Dorito casserole, the latest from The Beer Nut, and more.

Erik Piantedosi, owner of Piantedosi Butcher Shop in Plymouth, says shoppers are “better off going to an independently owned (shop), so you can see the meat when we cut it.”

On one side, a collection of health-conscious renegades say aspartame is bad and should be banned. They blame it for causing leukemias, lymphomas and other cancers. They claim it exacerbates problems with lupus, multiple sclerosis and diabetes and may even be responsible for the epidemic of diabetes. That's just the beginning. Web sites with names like sweetpoison.com and aspartamekills.com leave no doubt about their position.

One of the easiest ways to add flavor is with marinades. With a marinade, a simple piece of meat, poultry or fish goes from plain to tantalizing. Suddenly, you are having dinner in Europe, or Asia, or the Caribbean, depending on the individual components.

Breakfast scrapple in German communities can be as common as pancakes and waffles. It’s hearty under maple syrup, but that’s hardly its main reason for being.

Old-fashioned tea kettles boil water and that’s it. Electric cooking kettles expand that to include cooking food. They also boil a liter of water in less than 5 minutes.

“What should I eat?” asks Michael Pollan in his book, “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.” He answers parenthetically. “(Eat food.)”

Kitchen pantries often are one of the coldest places in the house. That’s on purpose — the cold helps preserve foods. This is especially true in older houses from the era of expensive refrigeration.

Vicki Tomashot Bauer of North Canton, Ohio, first tasted Dorito casserole when she was in her teens. Now a mom, Vicki tweaks the recipe for her family.

You may feel guilty about serving your family steak, but it’s impossible to satisfy beef appetites on a budget. This has happened before, in depressions, in meat rationing during wars, and on and on. One of the things we must cut is the food budget, and beef goes first.