Better Home Cooking Basics: #65 Choose the Watermelon With a Yellow Spot

When picking your watermelons out this summer look for ones with a yellow or deep cream ground spot. This yellow spot marks where the melon sat on the ground & grew! It shows that it’s ripe. Spots that are light green or white are signs of under ripe melons.

After you’ve picked your melons make yourself a refreshing glass of juice or this salad.

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Better Home Cooking Basics: #59 Don’t Throw Away Sprouted Garlic, Remove the Green Part Instead.

Have you ever found little green sprouts coming out of your garlic? I have & I've made the mistake of tossing it thinking it was bad. Turns out - it's not bad! Keep that garlic. Simply remove any green parts & then use it as you normally would. The green part is evidently super bitter.  Or if you have a green thumb, I think you can plant the garlic in the ground once it's sprouted.

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PS: happy birthday to my sweet friend Hely! 

Better Home Cooking Basics: #39 Choose Eggplants that are Firm & have Fresh Green Stems.

Chris & I spent a glorious week in the NY Finger Lakes last week. On our sad (sad because the end of vacation is always sad) trek home we stopped at this uber farmers market to pick up some local produce for Chris' parents & ourselves. Eggplant was one of the veggies we scored. We got to talking about eggplants with our family & realized that besides that we like to eat them we didn't really know a lot about them. So I took to the innerwebs to find this super basic tip on how to pick the best eggplant at the stand: Choose firm, even hard eggplants. You don't want them to be mushy or have any soft spots.  Then look at the stem. If it's fresh & green looking you've found your plant - if not keep searching because those shriveled & dried leaves are not the ones to bring home to mom!

Now that you have your fresh eggplant try this or this recipe!

 Get more of my better home cooking basics here. 

Better Home Cooking Basics: #9 Eat & Cook What's in Season

I was recently reading this article titled, "Why your grandparents don't have food allergies". One of the main things that our grandparents did was to eat what was in season.  Today we have so many ways to manufacture conditions that our food is produced in that it doesn't really equate to the same food - it becomes manufactured food.  So if you eat what is actually in season you are taking one large step towards bettering yourself.  How do you know if it's in season? One of the main clues for me (because I'm not a farmer - & I'm very far from having a green thumb) is that there will be a lot of that item & it will be on sale. Win. Win.  So if there is an abundance of tomatoes & they're not $15 a pound, chances are they're not only the best tasting tomatoes you'll eat & can cook with all year but they're also really good for you & your wallet. If you can buy locally produced food - bonus points for you.

What are you eating this season?

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