Homemade Somethin’ for Your Little Pumpkin

By Herb Gardener - The toughest food critic we will ever face — and the one whose taste goes unquestioned — wears a bib and a diaper. But there is help, friends, for avoiding consignment to the splat mat. Cook it with love and make it yourself. The reasons to eschew store-bought, pre-packaged baby-food products in favor of wholesome homemade baby and toddler meals — expense, nutrition, flavor, food additive control,...

When it’s chilly, cook chili

By Marsha Fottler - One of America’s favorite dishes, chili, has nothing to do with the country of Chile but everything to do with the chili pepper and lots of other hot spices too. This one-pot meal is the go-to dish for home cooks needing to feed a crowd a tasty meal that keeps ingredient costs low and flavor intensity high. Condiments such as shredded cheese, sour cream or crushed taco chips make a chili meal a...

Food To Combat Diabetes

By Marsha Fottler About 8% of the American population has diabetes and last year 1.9 million new cases were diagnosed in people aged 20 or older. This life-threatening and lifestyle-altering disease causes untold suffering and costs us all about $174 billion in direct and indirect ways of combating diabetes through research, diagnosis, preventative measures and treatment. It’s well known that one of the best weapons in an...

Windy City Cuisine Blows Hot and Cold

By Herb Gardener - Walking on the sidewalk and feeling hotter than a matchstick, Flora and I went searching for loving spoonful of representative Chicago fare. While Frontera Grill met expectations, we were burned by a legendary local dish. Deep-dish, stuffed, Chicago-style — the pizza goes by many names, but the descriptor that captured the eating experience for me is also one of the City’s two airports, Midway. As a...

Flat Out Delicious

By Chef Judi Gallagher - Cooking magazines and TV shows are full them and so are restaurant menus. What? Flatbread. The word sounds like what it is. Essentially, flatbreads are, well, flattened pieces of bread. And as we all know, bread is pretty fantastic by all by itself. In fact, it’s one of my favorite foods. But when you add toppings to that flatbread, that’s when things start to get interesting — and delicious. As...

American Meatout Month is March

By Marsha Fottler - This month we celebrate an unusual national movement, The American Meatout, which intends to focus attention on how much meat we eat in this country and how it might be good for our health and our food budgets (not to mention the environment) if we made a concerted effort to eat a bit less. National Meatout Day is March 20. The movement began in 1985 by FARM, a non profit, grassroots educational group...