You’ll find two families of head lettuce on the produce counter — the Crisphead and the Butterhead.

You may find this French word for “house” describing menu offerings.

The Chef’n garlic cutter tackles the nasty chore of mincing garlic in a new way. A piston with a knife on the end crushes the cloves with a few twists of the handle. Your fingers will never touch the clove.

Weekly food rail, with items on bacteria-inhibiting molecules in coffee, an easy recipe for Spanish Rice, tips for making safe, tasty burgers, and more.

Chef shows how to make grilled Scottish salmon with smoked tomato jam and lentils with asparagus vinaigrette

Recently a young couple asked me to cook a special occasion dinner featuring one of their favorites, penne alla vodka. They explained that they felt this particular dish honors both their Italian-American backgrounds and also celebrates their love story, meeting during one frozen winter in Russia.

Carol and Ed Stoudt already ran a popular restaurant in Adamstown, Pa., the Black Angus, but a trip to Germany inspired them. They fell in love with the German lagers - beers with much more flavor than American lagers. So the couple decided to turn their restaurant into a brewpub in 1987. Now, more than 20 years later, Stoudt's Brewing Company is one of the most established breweries on the East Coast.

Summertime gatherings often require bringing along a dessert to share. Mary Cook of Louisville, Ohio, can recommend a recipe that goes together without much fuss. It’s her Peaches and Cream Dessert, made with vanilla pudding and canned peaches.

Must rice always be white or brown? Spanish rice solves that one in a neat casserole.

Dates and codes on fresh, canned and packaged goods can be confusing to figure out, but there are ways to detect whether that can of green beans or carton of milk has been in the cupboard or refrigerator too long.

Pastry scrapers are designed to cut dough and for cleaning flour and bits of dough from pastry boards. Cooks are creating more uses for this handy tool, often for prep jobs once reserved for knives.

Bob’s Big Boy, Big Mac, Whopper, Wendy’s Triple Stack. In the hamburger biz, big is huge, including the customers.

Malt liquor, malt vinegar and malted milk all share a slightly sweet powder made from grain.

Weekly food rail, with items on identifying fresh fish, an easy recipe for Papaya Boats, news about milk and weight loss, and more.

There is a new recipe for homemade bread sweeping the Internet. The recipe turns up in varying forms. Some of the recipes have “artisan” in the title and some have “five minutes,” but they all have one thing in common: a method for preparing no-fail homemade bread that doesn’t require any kneading or waiting around for hours of rising time.