Cooking with Beer: Beef Stew

By Ben Mims
For Cooking Newbie, a blog for beginner cooks

I’m an avid beer drinker, so I always have more than a few brands and styles hanging around my house at any given time. This sometimes becomes problematic when I have a lot available to drink but don’t have the time or desire to drink them all before they go bad.

My solution is one of my favorite recipes: a beef stew cooked in beer. Beer adds dimension and depth to the beef and fits perfectly in this time of year. Plus, it gets rid of some of that extra beer.

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Mildred’s Fried Walnuts are Irresistible

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

The first time I had dinner in New York City with Mildred Ying, who was then Food Director of Good Housekeeping magazine, we began our dinner conversation with small talk about family.

We found both of our husbands are named Steve – what a coincidence. Then I asked about her children and discovered that, like me, she has two sons. Their names (surprise!) are Christopher and David, just like my boys. The only difference is that her Christopher is the older and in my family, he’s the younger.

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The Boys’ Gougères

By Andrew Hunter
For The Family Table, a blog for busy families

One fateful day a few months ago, we walked into a newly opened French bakery around the corner from our house. It was fateful because the boys discovered gougères that had just come hot out of the oven.

If you’re not familiar, gougères are like savory cream puffs. Delicious little pastries with cheese and herbs mixed into the dough before baking. So now gougères are the bread of choice in the Hunter household. The boys like them in the morning with scrambled eggs, at lunch stuffed with turkey and cherry tomatoes, and at dinner as slider buns.

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The Right Time to Stew…

By Lori Powell
For One or Two Bites, a blog for singles and couples

…Or so I thought when the first chill of the fall season was in the air and I purchased a two-pound piece of chuck steak. Then the weather changed and it turned into murky, swampy, allergy- producing air that surrounded the Lehigh Valley where I live.

With it, my feeling for cooking a big pot of stew went out the window. However, my taste memories were already activated and stew it had to be! Plus I had already bought the rest of the ingredients and there is nothing like the aroma of good stew to fill the air, no matter how hot and steamy that air might be.

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Goodbye, Summer; Hello, Fall

By Ben Mims
For Cooking Newbie, a blog for beginner cooks

It’s wonderful when the last waning days of summer are interspersed with cold days that snap you out of your warm weather stupor. I look forward to autumn so much that I welcome as quick an end to summer as possible. And during this season, it’s great to begin cooking slightly heartier fare than fruit-topped salads.

As with most meals I make, I took inspiration from random ingredients in my pantry that I wanted to use in some way before they went bad. This week it was sour cream, and since we also had some egg pasta lingering in the back of the pantry, the idea of making a warm and satisfying meal of stroganoff practically slapped me in the face.

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