Buying fish used to be easy. You'd go to the seafood store, look in the case, select your fish, and go home to cook. Nowadays, it's a lot more complicated. If you're pregnant, you need to avoid mercury-rich fish; farm-raised fish are good, except for when they're bad; some species which are endangered still show up on the menus of restaurants. All of this leads to confusion and often frustration on the part of many consumers.
What should you do? Visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch website. The Seafood Watch program "helps consumers and businesses make healthy choices for healthy oceans" by guiding you through these murky waters.
The folks at Seafood Watch share their "seafood recommendations" which are organized by geographic region, teach you about pressing ocean issues, provide sustainable seafood recipes, and even show you how to get involved in the cause. Best of all, you can acquire an app that will help you when you're in the market shopping for fish.
Stories
Stories
I Am Pro-Tina Fey's "Bossypants"
To say “Bossypants
Naked Mannequin Bares All
Every time I see a naked mannequin, I just want to stick one finger out, point, and yell “NAKED MANNEQUIN!”
I can’t be the only one, and I certainly can’t be the only one who has wanted to dress that naked mannequin up in a summer outfit just so I could invite him or her—or it—out for tea time in Central Park.
Yes, certainly, we’d have a tea party as lovely as the Mad Hatter’s on a blanket spread out on the Great Lawn. Although, I’d leave the invite for the Red Queen behind, because she’d surely be too delighted with how easy it would be to “be off with it’s head—that is, if the mannequin I window shopped for on 5th Avenue had a head at all!
But we’d sit for hours in the sun…me the Mad Hatter, and the mannequin, the Alice to my imaginary Wonderland-ah yes, it’d be the perfect tea party for two. Both of us, pale, and in serious need of SPF 50, we’d sprawl out across my blanket, and we’d laugh about the kids swinging and missing in their game of wiffle ball, and we’d compliment the jazz performers we could hear off in the distance, and above all, we’d share stories.
Umami and the Italian Nonna
We all know there are four tastes - salty, sweet, sour and bitter. But researchers have identified a fifth taste and that is umami - the rich, savory taste of some foods. This taste is found naturally in certain foods - very ripe tomatoes, anchovies, parmesan cheese and mushrooms to name a few. It's why fish sauce and soy sauce make fried rice so savory.
Cooks have known for ages that these foods enhance the taste of savory dishes. It's because these foods naturally contain glutamate. It is why MSG (monosodium glutamate) makes foods taste better. If you like the way adding a chicken or beef bouillion cube (which has MSG in it) enhances the flavor of a sauce or a stew, why not try adding a food that naturally contains glutamate?
It's why Italian cooks often add an anchovy in the beginning when cooking a sauce. Even if you don't like the taste of anchovies, you will never know it is there. It completely dissolves but it adds a depth of flavor you would not have otherwise. Don't say, "Ew! I don't like anchovies!" Take advantage of the glutamate in this food and enhance your cooking - your umami!
The Best Books We Read This Summer
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The greatest books are the ones you fall into - that create their own world; that live, extant of anything else you’re doing; and beckon you to come back to their pages. That book for me this summer was HALF BROKE HORSES I’m also reading VANITY FAIR
Please let us know what you’re reading or if any of the below were your picks or inspired you. Editors’ Note: “Wild” is definitely trending. - Amy Ephron |
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THE ART OF LIVING WITH MR. B
- Katherine Vaz |
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It's shockingly funny and Maria moves at a breakneck clip as she tells a story that is centered in Seattle, but moves around the world. This is an episolary novel, allowing the reader to follow the action in a very immediate and somewhat sneaky way. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and Maria's book literally made me happy. Dining suggestions: Read her book and drink (of course) a good cup of coffee. Have a piece of wild salmon served with a green salad. And a slice of wild blackberry pie for dessert. Wear comfortable shoes. And download a TED Talk when you are finished. - Holly Goldberg Sloan |
I fell in love with Cheryl and her story. I never tired of her trek hiking the 1,100 mile Pacific Crest Trail alone or her personal journey of self-realization and discovery. This is an uplifting story, and, as Dwight Garner from the NY Times summarized so well, "is as loose and sexy and dark as an early Lucinda Williams song." - Betsy Sherman |
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We had an extraordinary response to this. Many of our contributors and readers weighed in:
JUST KIDS I belatedly read Stephen King's 11/22/63 I just finished ALIF THE UNSEEN GILIAD WE'RE FLYING GONE GIRL I'm loving THE MIDDLE MAN |
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We thought it would be really fun to do a summer reading piece and asked some of our contributors what they’ve read this summer and what they recommend.
). It’s an extraordinary, textured look at an American family, multi-generations of women and how they influenced their children and generations to come. Written in pitch-perfect prose, it’s just great!
by Willliam Makepeace Thackery but don’t take this very seriously because I read “Vanity Fair” every summer and never manage to get through it... Except that Becky Sharp is one of the great characters ever written – it always loses me (or I lose the book) somewhere along the way... I know my friends at the 
I’m also riveted by Stuart Firestein’s new book 
The rhythm of everyday life enters in: George chops tomatoes at their country house in Weston, and roasted chicken and dessert orange jelly are served to guests. Tanny, in the novel, mentions the kitchen as “the site of continual commotion…it looked forlorn to me tidy.”In The Ballet Cookbook, published in 1966, she collected the recipes of almost every famous dancer or choreographer of the time, including Jerry Robbins, Suzanne Farrell, Margot Fonteyn, and Rudy Nureyev, whose winter borscht is one of the crowd-pleasers. The cookbook has a cult following and, a la Julie and Julia, “Dinner with Mr. B.” events and the like have sprung up, with participants fording the shrimp bisque, blinis, banana sweets, and fish dinners that melted off the frames of the supremely lithe. The Master’s Muse comforts the reader with the assurance that a love of life can fortify a love affair that refuses to perish.
My favorite book this summer is Maria Semple's 
The book that stole my heart and soul this summer was 
(Amy's too shy to mention this but the paperback version of her latest book 
by Patti Smith. Loved. - Christina Wayne
which is stunning. Now reading, 
, a real eye opener. And finished 
, on which I am ambivalent. - Linda Deutsch
, a first novel by G. Willow Willows. Really interesting mix of modern Cairo and mystical jinns. I couldn't put it down. - Allison Thomas
by Marilynne Robinson. I wept at the end just for extraordinary ordinariness of it all. - Pam Felcher
- short stories by Peter Stamm - an internationally-acclaimed Swiss author - stories of people who are lonely and unhappy in their everyday lives (characters with whom we can identify). - Christina Zawadiwsky
and both other Gillian Flynn books - 
and 
. - Kate Guinzburg
by Coburn Hawk. And yes, Maria Semple's Where'd You Go Bernadette is next on my list. - Roni KellerMore Articles ...
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