Blog Posts by Epicurious.com

Anna Fixsen


Treat your favorite food lover to one of these culinary-themed Easter gifts, including chocolates, cheese, and luxurious pantry essentials

he hunt for the perfect Easter basket is on, but it needn't make a basket case out of you. We turned to some of our favorite culinary talents-an award-winning chef, several top chocolatiers, and a niche cheesemonger-for Easter gift ideas to satisfy a wide range of palates and wallets. For chocoholics, we selected a menagerie of adorable hand-decorated chocolate bunnies, decadent dark chocolate eggs, and an oversize chocolate mushroom. For the more savory-inclined, we recommend a selection of farmstead cheeses, homemade scone ingredients, and pantry staples straight from the Mediterranean.

This year, swap cellophane grass and plastic eggs for one or more of these sweets and savories. They're guaranteed to give the Easter Bunny a run for his money.

See more from Epicurious:
Make a Better Roast Chicken
Easy Family Dinners
25 Read More »from Easter Baskets and Gifts

Julie Scelfo


Encourage children to help with meal prep while keeping hassles to a minimum with tips, equipment, and layout advice from designers and clever moms.

Create a View

An essential feature of a kid-friendly kitchen is that the adults using it have clear sight lines to watch their offspring. Meg Rogers says that when she's planning a kid-friendly kitchen, she thinks about all the different places where Mom and Dad might need to keep an eye on the children, whether in the same room or down the hall. Are you building your house from the ground up? If so, consider putting the kitchen where windows will allow you to simultaneously cook and keep an eye on kids playing in the yard.

Make It Welcoming
Consider decorative elements that appeal to the whole family. For a family in Manhattan with five children, Celerie Kemble wallpapered the back wall with a gigantic map of the world. "They can pin into it current-event issues or where they're traveling," she says.

Also don't

Read More »from Kid-Friendly Kitchens: Tips and Tricks

Kendra Vizcaino-Lico


Our extreme matzoh makeover is the ultimate family craft for Passover

Move that matzoh! Don't pass up the opportunity to use your extra matzoh for more than snacking. Charoset may be the traditional representation of mortar at Passover, but you can build this festive abode using other edible construction materials like kosher candies, chocolates, and peanut butter. This craft is fun for the whole family and makes a beautiful decoration for your hametz-free home.

Ingredients & Equipment

• A rectangular piece of cardboard (about 12 by 14 inches)
• Aluminum foil
• Kitchen scissors
• 5 sheets of matzoh
• Matzoh crackers
• 2 cups peanut butter (see Editor's Note)
• A pastry bag or resealable plastic bag
• 1 cup matzoh meal
• Toothpicks
• Assorted kosher-for-Passover candies and chocolates, such as fruit slices, marshmallow twists, and jelly rings

Editor's Note: Some denominations of Judaism forbid consuming peanuts and peanut products during Passover. Feel free to

Read More »from Make Your Own Matzoh House

Megan O. Steintrager

Our current Doable Challenge encourages upping dietary antioxidants for health and longevity, so when I read the headline "Antioxidants: Friend or foe?" on the cover of the April issue of Consumer Reports onHealth, I got a bit nervous. The article explains that it's not always advisable, and can even be unhealthy, to down tons of antioxidants in supplement form. Fortunately, the take-away message lines up nicely with our challenge: "Focus on food instead." Here's the nugget of wisdom from the article that I circled as a reminder to eat my greens, and purples, and reds, and yellows, and blues: "As scientists continue to explore how antioxidants work in the body, the best health advice remains the simplest: Make sure your diet contains plenty of varieties of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes."

Do you take antioxidant supplements or eat packaged foods fortified with antioxidants?


See more from Epicurious:
Make a Better Roast

Read More »from Can You Overdose on Antioxidants?

Carolina Santos-Neves


We tried eight varieties of kosher-for-Passover matzoh and found three that are delicious straight out of the box.

Matzoh, the unleavened bread made of water and flour, is consumed during Passover to commemorate the Israelites' hasty departure from Egypt. Before we delve into the eight varieties of matzoh we tasted while preparing our Passover guide, let's start with a quick primer on the subject.

Matzoh varies in shape and style, but all matzoh must, by Jewish law, be prepared in less than 18 minutes from the moment water comes into contact with flour to the point where the fully baked matzoh emerges from the oven. Store-bought matzoh is generally square and machine-made. Shmurah, the traditional handmade matzoh, is round and tends to be available only during Passover. Rabbis must oversee the harvesting and milling of the wheat as well as the baking process to ensure that it is kosher and that no fermentation, or leavening, has taken place. Matzoh sold

Read More »from Matzoh Taste Test

Kemp Minifie


Americans are crazy for kale. So crazy, in fact, that we might as well be singing "Kale to The Chief!" All kidding aside, it's taken a while, but kale is now solidly entrenched in our vegetable lexicon. Whether raw or cooked, it has firmly planted itself on restaurant menus. Bushy bunches of it crowd the produce aisles of supermarkets. And the farmers' market? Forgettaboutit. When kale's in season, there are so many different varieties piled high on tables, it's hard to choose.

Earthbound Farm Organic, the greens and produce company, recently added a baby kale mix to their growing variety of prewashed salad greens, and I'm smitten. So are a lot of other customers where I shop, because the store can't keep it in stock for more than a few hours. I now know what day and approximately what time the baby kale shipment arrives each week, and whenever I can, I stock up. It comes in 5-ounce plastic clamshell containers, and one package provides enough salad for four people,

Read More »from The Kale Craze Continues

Make the most of leftover hard boiled eggs with creative recipes that make delicious use of both yolks and whites. Fold eggs into a tangy, pickle-laced potato salad for a tasty spring side dish, make them the finishing touch in a hearty Provencal Salad, or try a new take on the old standby, deviled eggs. They're so versatile, filling, and nutritious, there's no such thing as too many leftover eggs.

More from Epicurious:
Healthy Comfort Recipes for Any Day
Easy Family Dinners
18 Chicken Salad Recipes
The Best Mexican Dips and Salsas

Read More »from Leftover Eggs Recipes

by Kemp Minifie


Kemp MinifieWould you believe that the loaf of bread pictured above has been sitting on my kitchen counter at room temperature for five months? I have the receipt showing I bought the loaf--a well-known brand--on October 12, 2012 to test a recipe for Turkish Spiced Meatballs for Gourmet.com. It looks about as fresh as the day I purchased it.

I'm not one to waste food, but because I prefer the artisanal bread from bakers at the Union Square Greenmarket in New York City--I'd planned to give what remained of the loaf to a neighbor. Unfortunately, the loaf got lost amid the clutter of my very small New York City kitchen, and before I knew it, several weeks had passed. By then I assumed the bread had become a fuzzy green mass of mold--the supermarket bread I ate as a kid would have been--and I was about to throw it away, when I decided to check to see just how gross a science experiment I'd accidentally been growing in my kitchen. To my complete shock the bread was

Read More »from How Fresh is Five-Month-Old Bread?