Bok Choy and Pineapple Salad with Peanut Dressing

Tomato, Tomatillo, and Corn Salad with Avocado Dressing

Radish and Wax Bean Salad with Crème Fraîche Dressing

Kale-Apple Coleslaw with Poppy Seed Dressing

Moroccan Zucchini, Grape, and Bell Pepper Salad

28 fast breakfast recipes to start the day with, from scrambles, omelets, and hash to tacos, grilled sandwiches, and smoothies. BROWSE RECIPE SLIDESHOW

CHOW.com Copy Chief Deborah Lewis learned this ecofriendly CHOW Tip the hard way.

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This CHOW Tip was originally published in October 2010.

CHOW Tips are the shared wisdom of our community. If you’ve figured out some piece of food, drink, or cooking wisdom that you’d like to share on video (and you can be in San Francisco), email Jenny Stewart and tell us what you’ve got in mind.

In the premiere episode of My Food Thing, CHOW.com’s new video series showcasing fun culinary encounters with celebrities, Mob Wives star Renee Graziano takes a break from filming the hit VH1 reality series to make meatballs with her sisters and nephew.

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The season 2 finale of “Mob Wives” airs Sunday, May 13, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on VH1, but die-hard fans of the show can catch additional reunion episodes May 20 and May 27.

Devotees of sweet, spreadable Marshmallow Fluff can rejoice. Shauna Sever, author of Marshmallow Madness!: Dozens of Puffalicious Recipes, demonstrates how to make your own marshmallow crème for Fluffernutters, cookie sandwiches, and other treats. Click here for her recipe.

CHOW Tips are the shared wisdom of our community. If you’ve figured out some piece of food, drink, or cooking wisdom that you’d like to share on video (and you can be in San Francisco), email Jenny Stewart and tell us what you’ve got in mind.

On July 1, California becomes a zero–foie gras state. Senate Bill 1520, which Arnold Schwarzenegger signed in 2004, outlawed the force-feeding of birds to enlarge their livers, and what’s more, prohibited the selling of those livers—in short, a total ban on foie gras in the state that gave the world Stars (Jeremiah Tower's now-defunct restaurant) and the French Laundry. But the law came with a grace period expiring at the end of June 2012, to allow producers time to engineer alternatives to the feeding tube. They didn’t. And late last month, a star brigade of California chefs—putting faces to the recently formed Coalition for Humane and Ethical Farming Standards—fired off a Hail Mary pass to lawmakers in Sacramento, trying to score a stay after proposing a list of new ethical standards for foie production. So far, it looks like a fumble.

Meanwhile, whether defiant or resigned, chefs have mounted protest dinners, mournful farewells, $150-a-plate denials—Californians with the means to afford it have probably eaten more foie gras this year than at any time since the days of San Francisco’s robber barons. But now, fans of fatty livers are being forced to swallow what had seemed unthinkable even after SB 1520 became law: the French Laundry without foie.

But Thomas Keller, Vinny Dotolo, Michael Chiarello, Chris Cosentino: As much as I admire you guys, it’s time to face reality. Let the foie go, chefs. Just let it go.

THE ULTIMATE NOVELTY
Just so you know where I’m starting from, I’ll cop to my own biases. I have no particular love for foie gras, nor do I hate it. I feel slightly uncomfortable in high places—maybe it’s the memory of my union-member dad, a grocery clerk who had a distrust of wealthy people and expensive things and yet aspired to culture. Maybe I just naturally prefer cheap food over fancy.

The times I’ve eaten foie gras, I’ve felt ambivalent: It’s almost always been seared, garnished with something sweet—onion jam or quince mostarda or preserved cherries—and I pretty much hate eating sugary stuff before dessert comes. But I've also eaten a $15 takeout foie sandwich whose main purpose seemed to be novelty, and foie ice cream (subtle-tasting, triple the novelty value). The best I ever had was a $50 foie appetizer (for one) at L'Atelier de Jöel Robuchon in Vegas, all gorgeous sear, caramelized meat sugars, and shocking smoothness. I'm glad I tried it—once.

Still, I appreciate the idea of foie gras, the culture of traditional animal husbandry that created it, farmers who patiently grew and harvested bird livers in some picture-book idyll of the Languedoc. It makes foie gras seem like a world cultural legacy, like bird’s nest or huitlacoche.

But that’s not the world we live in, the one where old French guys in sabots and charmingly worn-out tweeds patiently massage the necks of prized geese in a dirt farmyard. Anybody been to Paris in the last decade? The restaurant food most French people eat is as industrialized as anywhere else in the modern world, with heavy doses of Burger King and cornstarch-shiny Chinese. And anyway, marrying 14-year-old girls is a cultural legacy, too, but thankfully, we've evolved.

MEAT IS MURKY
Face it, we live in a world of troubled meat, where production is constantly under pressure to scale up. The old French guy has become an underpaid worker from Mexico, and foie gras—even though it’s harvested on a small scale in the U.S., even smaller in California—isn’t from the family farmyard.

Can it be grown and harvested using more humane, more ethical methods? Of course—though sadly for foie fans, the Coalition for Humane and Ethical Farming Standards seems to have waited too long to lobby that point. In a roundup of opinion yesterday on EcoSalon, Vanessa Barrington quoted Charlie Hallowell, chef and owner of Pizzaiolo in Oakland. “It’s a cheap and easy target for animal rights activists. We should f*cking ban McDonald's!”

Yeah, Charlie, we should absolutely talk about fucking banning McDonald's, or at least its worst, most toxic, most tragically inhumane practices. But just because Big Meat, or fast food, or high-fructose corn syrup is all bad, that’s no reason not to go after something that’s bad in a different way. That’s like saying, well, bullying kids to the point of suicide is bad, but since inmate treatment in the California prison system is also heinous but happens on a massive scale, we shouldn’t worry about bullies right now. That’s a nihilist argument thrown up to distract.

WHAT'S SO BAD ABOUT BEING GOOD?
As imperfect as it is, as many issues as it will raise about black markets and lost livelihoods, the foie gras ban is based in an effort to do something good: alleviate the suffering of animals, even a handful of them. Sure, those same animals will be slaughtered for meat and enter the food system, but that’s no reason not to curb a practice that sparks even a little twinge of empathetic revulsion for many of us, maybe even most of us. Talk all you want about the lack of gag reflexes, or how some ducks have been known to gorge themselves naturally, or slippery slopes for animal activists who want to eventually outlaw all meat—I say bullshit. It’s only human to feel—to know it instinctively—that force-feeding is wrong. I’m saying this as someone who eats meat every day of my life, and not just meat that’s had a decent amount of space to move around in before it was dragged off to slaughter. I want meat to be more humane, across the board. I'm willing to accept a small step, like banning foie gras, to get there.

And chefs—I’m talking to you now, as somebody who used to be one of you—aren’t you striving, every day, to cook from the deepest part of your humanity? Isn’t your food the thing that gives you the deepest connection to the world? Isn’t cooking a constant process of evolution, of becoming more enlightened?

The fact that politicians, most of whom had probably never thought about foie gras, or had the slightest understanding of its place in culture, pulled the plug has made a lot of people cynical. Jesus, it makes me—a dude whose gay marriage is a dodgeball for politicians to nail each other with when it's expedient—cynical. But that doesn’t mean that political opportunism, or grandstanding, or taking an easy position against a luxury food with a small constituency, can’t coincide with doing the right thing. If that means Thomas Keller has to find something else to charm or seduce his guests with the way foie gras has, how can that be bad?

Photograph of the foie gras biscuit at Animal by Flickr member djjewelz under Creative Commons

These meatloaf recipes made with chicken, turkey, beef, pork, and veal cover all the bases. BROWSE RECIPE SLIDESHOW

After three weeks and thousands of votes it’s finally down to two! The final matchup in our Best Brewpub in America bracket pits two towns famous for their universities in a bare-knuckle bar brawl. Over here, it's North by Northwest, purveyor of craft ales in the hometown of the University of Texas at Austin. In the opposing corner: Cambridge Brewing Co., whose barrel-aged beers and other brews have fueled more passionate discussions than the Harvard Speech & Parliamentary Society.

Hey, it’s Texas v. Massachusetts, people, the brewpub equivalent of Bush v. Kerry! Except, unlike the 2004 presidential race, this one won’t drag on for months—you've got till May 14 to click your choice for which establishment should wear the crown as the nation’s best. Cast your ballot now, and every day until then!

Photograph by Jennifer Yin

Marinating chicken for baking or grilling is easy, and you don't need a bottle from the grocery store to do it. In this video recipe, CHOW Food Editor Amy Wisniewski uses our Asian-Marinated Baked Chicken recipe to show you how to make a great weeknight meal.

In The Easiest Way, the CHOW Test Kitchen shows the simplest way to make delicious versions of popular dishes. Minimal fuss, maximum flavor! If you’ve got a question for the CHOW Test Kitchen, email it to foodteam@cbsinteractive.com.

Bottle or tap? When choosing a beer, I used to think: "Tap, of course. Always." Yet, in Charles Bamforth's book Beer Is Proof God Loves Us, the professor of malting and brewing sciences at UC Davis was asked by a reporter, "If there are 50 beers on tap, what do you order?" His defiant answer was, "Something out of a bottle."

Bamforth backs up his decision by citing all the things that often go wrong with beer in a tap system: staleness; bacterial infection because of unclean lines leading to things like diacetyl (a compound that causes beer to smell like butterscotch or buttered popcorn). I decided to call him to discuss.

When I asked him what, in an ideal beer world, would be his choice drink, Bamforth (who is British) told me, "My favorite style is beer on draft in England from a cask." The ideal beer, he says, requires a convergence of factors. "If you have only one or two on tap and the person knows what they're doing and at the end of the day they're cleaning the lines and then rerunning the beer through the taps to expunge any cleaning solution, at the end of the day, it has the potential to be the best."

Which perhaps explains why beer in Japan has tasted so good to me. A friend who worked in bars in Tokyo told me that it was automatic that the lines would be cleaned nightly. Bars and restaurants he knows in the States, he says, rarely bother. Likewise, it can explain why I've occasionally had transcendent pours of less heralded beers like PBR. Clean lines and a fresh keg can make a world of difference.

To get the best beer, Bamforth finds himself doing detective work every time he enters an establishment. The first question he asks: "Which is the beer you sell the most of?" This minimizes the risk of a beer having sat in the keg for a long time. "I'm always suspicious of places that have too many beers on tap," he says.

Also, he recommends, drink locally when possible. Bamforth "virtually never selects an imported beer anywhere, for the reason that there's an above-average chance that it has aged unprofitably." Even bottles that have traveled far are pretty much out of the question.

"The ironic thing," Bamforth says, "is that perhaps the best nonkeg vessel for transporting beer is a can." This explains why many microbreweries are shifting from bottles to cans for their microbrews.

So, bottle or tap? Apparently the best answer is neither.

Lay out an impressive spread on Mother's Day with these recipes for French toast, cocktails, omelets, and more. BROWSE RECIPE SLIDESHOW

No product review today. Instead, Supertaster offers two wrong ways and one correct way to reap the potential deliciousness of a roasted marshmallow while out camping.

Tom Scocca’s mini exposé in Slate wafted through food writers' Twitter feeds last week like the smell of a single rotting potato reek-bombing a kitchen pantry. The noxious charge: Recipe writers are liars.

In “Layers of Deceit,” Scocca began by calling bullshit on the New York Times food section and Melissa Clark, author of a recipe calling for taking onions from raw to soft, brown, and sweet in only 10 minutes. After taking a lot of other food writers out for making the same lie, Scocca got out the kitchen timer and proved the ridiculousness of the premise (in fact, caramelizing onions takes at least 45 minutes, if not a good, slow hour). In response, the Times garbled stuff about "unusual" secret shortcuts, the equivalent of looking down at your shoes and changing the subject.

Los Angeles Times's Russ Parsons piped up with I-told-you-people-all-along pieces, excavating stories about the true and proper way to caramelize onions. But the thing that went mostly unnoticed in the scramble to accuse or save face was Scocca's larger indictment, which is that professional recipe writers' work can seem as far removed from actual cooking as a cognitive study in the testing lab with subjects wired to electrodes is from actual thinking. Recipe writing occurs under unnatural conditions, conducted by professionals with laptops and clipboards. They pretend they're doing stuff that ordinary home cooks might do, but they're not ordinary home cooks, and many are definitely not cooking at home, under ordinary conditions.

As Scocca notes, “recipe writers approach kitchen time with a stopwatch.” For the rest of us, kitchen time is only one of the currents making up household flow. Cooking happens simultaneously with texting, unloading the drier, shooing the cat off the counter, and moving the lawn sprinkler. It’s about short periods of intense focus and long stretches of distraction, during which you hope you haven’t fucked everything up by burning the marinara.

Look, recipes have to be published, and full-time recipe testers are great—believe me, CHOW’s food team has amazing talent and discipline. It’s just that I crave the loose, imprecise, and inspirational approach of the generation that wrote cookbooks in the middle of the last century, back when James Beard wrote this:

For Steak au Poivre—Press crushed or cracked peppercorns into the steak before grilling or pan-broiling. After it is done to the right stage, flame it with a little cognac. When the steak is pan-broiled, sometimes the pan is rinsed with cognac and heavy cream, which is poured over the steak. (Delights and Prejudices, 1964)

Nobody could have busted Beard for deceiving them about anything as trivial as cooking time. Ladies and gentlemen, put your stopwatches down. It's time to pick up your senses.

Photograph by Christopher Rochelle / CHOW.com