Dinosaur Bar-B-Que’s Garlic Dill Pickles

Our annual visit to Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Syracuse has become a must. In between trips we talk about the good food and tell anyone who will listen about the restaurant and dream of slow cooked meats, chili, cornbread, and pickles. Yes, their pickles are very good. They make their own refrigerator garlic dills and they go perfectly with any of the sandwiches.

We found the recipe in our copy of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que: An American Roadhouse, the official cookbook by John Stage (one of the restaurant founders) and Nancy Radke. If you are a fan of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que but don’t live close enough to easily get your fix, this book is well worth adding to your collection. Read more

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Hoover FloorMate Hard Floor Cleaner

I’m sure some of you—ok, many—may wonder why in the world I would review a floor cleaner. Honestly I had to think about it for a little while when they contacted me about taking a Hoover FloorMate Hard Floor Cleaner for a test drive, but it came down to this: I have three boys that make some really unbelievable messes all over our house every single day, unless they are asleep or not at home. I spend loads of time sweeping, vacuuming, scraping, spot cleaning, mopping. Some days I look under the table and think we live at one of those restaurants where they let you throw peanut shells on the floor. Crunch, crunch, crunch. We once had to clean an entire quart of tortilla soup off the floor, cabinets, refrigerator, and under the refrigerator when Builder Guy pulled a container off the counter. He was only three at the time, and I remember shuddering at the thought of all the messes to come. I’m here to say that everyday I learn about some new way the boys can create a mess for me to clean up. Thankfully they are growing up and I can sometimes say, “Please clean that up,” like this week when Builder Guy knocked a nearly full salad bowl into the floor, sending vegetables and vinaigrette flying to the far corners of the kitchen.

So yes, I feel highly qualified to give my opinion on cleaning products. Read more

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Substituting Ingredients: The A to Z Kitchen Reference

The classic question for any home cook is what to substitute for ingredients you don’t have on hand, can’t find, don’t like, or are outside the budget. That tin of baking powder in the pantry is well past the expiration date and probably won’t rise your cake, so what can you use instead if you can’t make a mad dash to the store? What if a recipe calls for a spice, cheese, or sauce you’ve never heard of and can’t find? Read more

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Silver Diner's New Healthy Menu

When I think of diner food, the first thought that comes to my mind is greasy spoon, traditional diner food that’s great for comfort but not healthy, and that’s what I said to Robert Giaimo, Founder and President and CEO of Silver Diner, Inc. I have eaten at Silver Diner, but it’s been a while and it’s not a restaurant that comes to mind when thinking about a place to get a healthy meal. Happily, Giaimo and his partner Ype (Ee-pah) Von Hengst have set out to change that. Read more

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The Cook's Garden Gift Certificate Giveaway

This year’s unusually cold winter and several feet of snow kept the ground frozen and prevented us from doing our typical winter prep, though we can see grass now on most of the yard and in some of the garden, a hopeful sign of a warm spring to come. And of course that turns our thoughts to what we want to plant this year.

If you are like me, you’ve been pouring over seed catalogs since they hit mailboxes in January. We have several places we like to order form, and The Cook’s Garden is one of our favorites. They carry a wonderful variety of vegetable and herb seeds and plants as well as cottage flowers and some garden supplies. We’ve especially enjoyed their year-round lettuce collection, which contains a variety of lettuce seeds to plant throughout the year.

To celebrate the coming of spring and to help you prepare your garden, I’m giving away one $50 gift certificate to The Cook’s Garden, which should help you purchase all the seeds you need and maybe some tools as well. And if you are growing your own food (or farming, hunting, foraging), we hope you will join us for Grow Your Own this year!

Rules

1. The Cook’s Garden only ships to the 48 contiguous United States and Canada. Apologies to my readers in Hawaii, Alaska, as well as other countries.
2. To enter the giveaway, please leave a comment below telling us about what you want to plant in your garden this year. Any kind of garden is fine, whether indoor, outdoor, containers, hydroponic, etc.
3. You must leave a correct email address in the email field so I can contact you if you win. Please don’t put your email address in the comment field unless you want a bunch of spammers to find you.
4. You can earn extra entries by mentioning this contest on your blog or Twitter. Please come back and add additional comments with links to your blog post and/or Twitter status. So that’s three possible entries per person. Three entries = three comments. I will check out the links to verify.
5. The giveaway ends at 8 p.m. EST on Friday March 26, 2010. Random.org will select the winner and I will post an announcement soon after.

Thanks for reading and have fun planning your gardens!

[DISCLOSURE: This giveaway is not sponsored by The Cook’s Garden or affiliated with The Cook’s Garden in any way. I just happen to like them.]

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The Art of Eating In Book Giveaway

Cathy Erway gave up eating out in New York and started cooking for herself, a two-year experiment she chronicled on her blog, Not Eating Out in New York. Restaurants, take out, and street carts were out, cooking for herself, foraging, and freeganism was in. Cathy’s story is interesting for anyone trying to live frugally by cooking at home more and eating out less, and she shares it in more detail in her book The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove, scheduled for release on February 18.

You can win my review copy of The Art of Eating In, just leave a comment in this post about how you have changed or plan to change your/your family’s eating out habits. Please make sure your email address is correct in the email field so I can contact you if you are the lucky winner. (Please don’t put your email address in the comment field unless you want a bunch of spammers to find you.) You can get an extra entry if you mention the contest on Twitter, just leave an additional comment with a link to your Twitter status.

Apologies to my international readers, but the prize can only be shipped within the continental U.S. The contest closes at 9 P.M. EST on Thursday February 18, and Random.org will select the winner. Look for the announcement of the winner in this post soon after.

Update February 19, 2010: Congratulations to Carol, comment #10, for winning the book!

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