S’mores whoopie pies.

My only complaint is that they look a little small. A whoopie pie needs to be a good 4 or 5 inches in diameter, like the size of a burger. Those look more like the size of a macaron. I do note with approval, though, that the creme filling is the proper Marshmallow Fluff variety and not that hopeless whipped cream. I’ll have to be making a batch of these…for research purposes, you understand.

Talk about your bad timing…the one time of year when everybody trots out their recipes for egg nog, Christmas cookies, and other holiday treats, and the FDA has issued a recall on ground nutmeg. Luckily, it only affects two specific brands, but one of those brands is Whole Foods’ 365 label. The other is a bulk product from Frontier Natural Products; less likely to be something in a home kitchen, but probably an issue for commercial kitchens.

I really don’t see the point, but apparently an English company that sells chile peppers has cross-bred several of the super-hot species to create a hybrid 30% hotter than the world’s hottest pepper, the so-called “ghost pepper” bhut jolokia. The new pepper, called the Naga Viper (as seen above), registers 1.35 MILLION Scoville Units as compared to the already-insane 1 million Scovilles for the bhut jolokia. To put that into context, here’s a chart of how various peppers and capsaicin extracts rate on that scale. Jalapeño peppers are a measly 5000 Scovilles, cayenne scores 50,000 Scovilles, and habañeros 350,000. The absolute hottest thing on that chart, though, is pure capsaicin at an unbelievable 16 million. Pretty much everything above a million Scovilles is some sort of extract, with the exception of these several new hybrids, so they’ve probably hit the limit for how hot a fruit can go.

This Bobulate post addresses something that most experienced cooks know: that recipe times are generally bullshit. The author quotes no less an authority on the subject that Cook’s Illustrated publisher Christopher Kimball, who acknowledges that cooking times in recipes are approximate at best, often ginned up out of thin air, and are more a function of marketing than cooking. He even goes so far to say that there is no such thing as a 30-minute recipe, even though he publishes a cookbook that purports to feature exactly that. But, then again, maybe that’s his whole point. (NOTE: as of the time of this post, the Bobulate link is unavailable due to some downtime at tumblr.com)

Monsanto’s full-court press to get the world hooked on its genetically modified foods hit a snag recently when a federal judge ordered their GMO sugar beets physically removed from fields after the USDA violated an earlier ruling forbidding the planting of the Roundup-ready sugar beet seeds. The problem, though, according to this Fast Company story, is that use of Monsanto’s seeds among sugar beet growers is so common that it accounts for 20% of the entire sugar production in the United States and the ban may well lead to a sugar shortage over the next two years. Considering that we’re on our way to being a nation of diabetics, it might not be a bad thing for sugar to be scarce for a while.

Hey kids, your old pal Mr. Greenjeans says if you want to be healthy, you’ve gotta eat your leafy green veggies. Spinach was always Popeye’s favorite, but there are all sorts of greens to choose from, and most of them actually taste pretty good once you know how to cook ‘em and season ‘em. This post at Epicurious is a great guide to all the different types of greens you can find in the supermarket and even has links to recipes for each kind. Here in the Northeast, we get fresh local greens in the late part of the growing season, but they’re grown as winter crops in the South, so they’re available in supermarkets even now.

Here’s a recipe I like for kale:

Braised Kale with Onions and Pine Nuts

Ingredients
• 1 cup pine nuts
• 1 tablespoons butter
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1 cup minced onions
• 1 bunch kale, stemmed and sliced thin
• 1/2 cup vegetable broth
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cracked black pepper

Directions
In a large saute pan over low heat, toast pine nuts for 3 to 4 minutes until lightly browned. Add butter and allow to brown. Add garlic and onions. Cook for 3 minutes until slightly caramelized. Add kale and toss lightly. Add broth, cook kale for 5 to 6 minutes until tender and liquid has evaporated. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Kathryn Hill, contributor to the food blog “The Kitchn”, Mutual Friend of Torrez, and occasional beneficiary of the odd link here (most recently this one about making vinegar) was nice enough to share the linky-love in this post about slow-roasted tomato sauce last week.

Back when I had my own food blog, I featured this recipe as one of my favorite ways to make use of fresh tomatoes when they are abundant at summer’s end. I certainly cannot take credit for inventing the recipe, it was a find from somewhere else in the world. Nevertheless, it is both simple and incredibly delicious. I tend to only make it when the local tomato crop is available, so it’s sort of a once-a-year event for me, but that’s certainly not necessary; all of the ingredients are available year-round, and even if the supermarket gets its tomatoes from Chile or Israel or wherever during the winter, they’re adequate to the task.

I made my annual batch about two weeks ago, when I finally had a day with no clients and no errands and could stay home to tend the oven. The total cooking time is on the order of 3-4 hours, so it’s something to save for a day like that. But be prepared with a snack, because the smell of the roasting tomatoes, with all that garlic and basil, will drive you wild with hunger while it’s in the oven.

My favorite use for this sauce is for homemade pizza. It has more character and depth than the usual pizza sauce. The batch I made the other day wound up being used with creamy cheesy polenta and Italian sausages. It would also be good, I think, as the base for a Bolognese sauce, which could thn be utilized in a number of hearty dishes.

Kathryn was kind enough to post the recipe pretty much as I had typed it up for the Site Which Shall Not Be Named, and I’ll invite you to click the link back to her post to get it yourself.

(the photo, by the way, is one I took back in the “Out Of The Frying Pan” days)

Last weekend we took a ride down to the monstrously huge IKEA store in Stoughton, which is just a bit south of Boston. We live north-west of the city, just far enough away from IKEA that it has to be a small adventure to go, but the reward for our intrepidness (intrepidity?) is usually working our way through the cafeteria line to sit down at a tastefully modern table to eat a big ol’ plate of Swedish Meatballs with mashed potatoes and a little dollop of lingonberry jam, have a slice of the apple cake, and wash it all down with as much lingonberry juice drink as our stomachs can hold. Thus fortified with what is undoubtedly the exact same menu that fueled the savage Viking raids that terrorized Northern Europe for centuries, we can return to ogling inexpensive DIY plywood furniture with hysterically funny Swedish names. This time through, however, we’d actually started the morning with a substantial brunch and were still digesting our omelets and pancakes when we reached the aircraft-carrier-sized building, so we skipped our usual repast and instead bought the frozen meatballs, packets of sauce mix, and jars of lingonberry jam that they so cleverly place right on your way out the door, and had it all for Sunday night dinner instead (except for the lingonberry juice beverage, which they don’t seem to sell, more’s the pity).

Reheating meaty treats has never been what I consider “cooking”, but last week there was this post at Serious Eats, where the author, site contributor Michele Humes, brought home not just the meatballs and sauce packet, but several of the other food items that you can buy in the “Bistro” section of the store, and then used them to make dishes other than Swedish Meatballs. Now, spaghetti and meatballs is a little obvious, I think, but she also came up with cocktail sausages glazed with lingonberry jam, some pinwheel hors d’oeuvres made with crab pate and lumpfish caviar on flatbread, and some unfortunate looking herring in dill mayonnaise on burnt rye bread. She even made some mashed potato puffs and floated them on a bed of Swedish Meatball gravy.

Look, there’s a reason the Vikings raped and pillaged every coastal town from Ireland to Spain and back again, and it wasn’t because they couldn’t wait to get home for the food. But this shows that a little ingenuity can go a long way, even when all you have are Kötbullar and Gräddsås.

I’m guessing that Old Man Winter is getting to a lot of people, because this morning I ran across not one, not two, but THREE soup recipes on the assorted food blogs I read.

This French garlic soup at FXCuisine looks just awesome. Roasted garlic is sweet and deep with the flavor of the caramelization, so it should make for a flavorful broth. The recipe says to use water or stock for the liquid, and in the photos it’s water, but I would go with vegetable stock and a splash of sherry. The critical thing is to get a good roux so that when you add the liquid you get a smooth but velvety broth. The next time we have guests for dinner, I am feeding them this soup, guaranteed.

At Too Many Chefs, Meg, the Paris-based half of the team, has a nice recipe for Chicken Soup With Rice. Drive all thoughts of Campbell’s Soup out of your mind once and for all with a simple recipe like this. Canned chicken soups are all far too salty and never taste like actual chicken. Home-made chicken rice soup should be a little thick and cloudy from the starch of the rice and taste like roast chicken. This recipe doesn’t include the process for making chicken stock, but using the carcass from a roasted chicken to make stock gets that deeper flavor into the liquid. If you have to use store-bought stock, don’t feel guilty, just promise yourself that another time you’ll make the stock yourself.

While pho is most commonly made with beef stock and sliced beef, it is also made with chicken and called pho ga. For pho broth, beef or chicken, you are better off making your own from scratch than trying to doctor up commercially-made broth, because the broth is light and delicate and infused with things like star anise and cinnamon. This post by Thy Tran on her food blog should convince you that ANYBODY can make authentic Vietnamese chicken broth with no trouble at all. To turn the broth into a bowl of pho, all you need are thin rice noodles and to shred the meat from the chicken you used to make the stock. Bean sprouts, basil leaves, lime wedges and sriracha are the typical garnishes, but she also threw in a recipe for vinegar-marinated onions that sounds very good. I might try to get my picky wife and child to eat this soup some Saturday night.