Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I'd say yes, the specks make a difference. They make the ice cream more rustic, but not necessarily better. Some people like it that way, and some people don't. I like 'em all, and am glad there's more than one style.

Pretty cool! Except ... the organism most often used to ferment sugars to alcohol -- saccharomyces cerevisiae -- is not a bacterium, but a yeast, a member of the Fungi kingdom, biologically speaking.

Isn't "tomacco" the hybrid tomato/tobacco from The Simpsons?

Mine would be a strain of wheat that doesn't have the protein that causes celiac disease. It would be awesome, but isn't amusing, sorry.

We use a gas grill for two reasons. One, it's really easy to stop by the store on the way home, fire it up, go inside to season the meat and prep the veggies, then grill it all. Presto, tasty dinner. When we want wood smoke, a steel box with soaked chips laid on the "grate" does the trick.

Two, my wife has celiac disease and commercial charcoal uses wheat straw as a binder (verified with a call to Kingsford), so we're playing it safe.

This sounds very good, but I have two questions: How is this "grilled" when there's nothing about a grill in the recipe, and why does it matter that the sauté pan is straight-sided?

One of the most outrageously misrepresented dishes I've seen recently was "Spaghetti Carbonara" made with béchamel sauce and baco-bits. Not an egg to be seen. Properly made Spaghetti Carbonara is one of the sublime peasant-foods I can eat for days, but this monstrosity wasn't even edible.

Oh, yeah! I've liked that so-simple salad of a wedge of iceberg lettuce with blue-cheese dressing ever since I first had it in the first-class dining room of the SS United States in 1963.

And Point Reyes cheese rocks! My wife has celiac disease and (oversimplified) cannot eat wheat or wheat-derived products becaus of the gluten proteins. When we called Maytag to ask if their blue cheese was gluten-free they refused to say for sure.

When we called Point Reyes, the switchboard connected us to Monte McIntyre, the master cheesemaker, who said that while the mold culture was indeed grown on bread, they had had their cheese tested in independent labs and found no detectable gluten.

We've been happily eating their cheeses ever since.

I like to just make a simple vinaigrette with black pepper and blue cheese instead of mustard as the emulsifier. It breaks faster, but is sure tasty.