You may know your cardamom from your cinnamon but what about your asafoetida from your amchoor? Read on to discover some lesser-known spices to add new flavors to your table.

Ajowan Seed (photo at right), also known as ajwain seed, carom and Bishop’s weed, is popular in southern-Indian-style cooking. It has a flavor reminiscent of thyme due to the presence of the essential oil thymol in both. The seeds are used in breads, biscuits, savory pastries, and in bean dishes. This spice closely resembles the lovage seed (celery seed).

Amchoor is a powder made from dried unripe green mangoes. It has a delicious honey-like fragrance and a sour fruity flavor. Amchoor is used in curries, chutneys, pickles and stir-fries, both with vegetables and with meats. It has a slight tenderizing effect in meat dishes. Use this powder to add a fruit flavor without adding moisture, or as a souring agent.

Dine daily on a full serving of fresh news every morning.  Why?  Because it’s cheaper than your morning latte and more informative than your average nutritional label.

The Talk of Tuesday

• Ever think of buying up that pork whole-hog or purchasing your steak by the bovine?  According to Civil Eats, this CSA-style approach to shopping for beef may not only be an awesome way to meet your meat's maker, but it can end up being a way more affordable way of ensuring that your animal is fresh and hormone and antibiotic-free.

• What to do with your leftover coffee grounds: make smokeable free-base caffeine.  Ammonia + coffee grounds = caffeine rush with a side o cancer.  Black Magic.  Could this be the crystal meth of Whole Foods junkies?
  

• By now, most know that peanut butter's the latest to face a contamination scare.  Dude, after melamine milk, ecoli spinach, sick tomatoes and Irish pork, can we get a break here?  Anyway, here's a helpful list of confirmed peanut butter products that have been recalled.

• 19-year-old man-child assaults mother with taco after she unplugs his X-Box.  Hey now, what did that taco ever do to you other than try to assault you with its deliciousness?

• As a land that is not unfamiliar with corn dogs and deep fried Snickers, it isn't much of a stretch to add a South-Korean-inspired treat to our food festival circuit: French Fry Coated Hot Dog on a Stick.  Anyway, here's how to make one in your own home.

• 321 Water Bottle - a stylish, BPA-free way of filtering and purifying your water on the go.

Photo courtesy of Book of Joe

-Alice Shin

For a sampling of yesterday's warmed over leftovers, click here.

We've contacted restaurant reviewers from across the country to learn more about different cities' food scenes, as well as what it is like to review restaurants for a living. Hope you enjoy!

This week: Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Gold, LA Weekly

What path did you take to get into food journalism and restaurant reviewing?
I'm not sure that anyone who intentionally sets out to be a restaurant critic has actually been that good at it. I was a failed composer and the classical music writer at the L.A. Weekly a thousand years ago when the owner asked me if I wanted to take a shot at editing the paper's restaurant guide. As it turned out, I liked hanging out in restaurants even better than seeing operas. Plus, I got to take all my friends out to eat. I subsequently was critic at California, Los Angeles, the L.A. Times and Gourmet before I returned to the Weekly. I've written an awful lot of reviews.

What do you enjoy most about your profession? Least?
I have always loved the thrill of the hunt: the quest for a quintessential bowl of noodles, homemade lardo or quenelles de brochet. Sometimes, I can hardly believe that somebody is actually paying me for this. The worst of it is probably the two dozen mediocre plates of lamb barbacoa I sometimes end up working through before I find one worth writing about. But even then, I'm still eating lamb barbacoa—how bad could it be?
 

Dine daily on a full serving of fresh news every morning.  Why?  Because it’s cheaper than your morning latte and more informative than your average nutritional label.

The Monday Munchies

• Leaping lizards!  Maggots.  I mean maggots.  For apparently there is an illegal Sardinian cheese that is FILLED WITH WRITHING MAGGOTS THAT JUMP FOR YOUR EYEBALLS WHEN YOU TRY TO EAT IT.  No joke.  

• This may be just the most elaborate Lord of the Rings themed cake I've ever laid my maggot-free eyes on.  

• Stop by your local Krispy Kreme donut factory to pick up a dozen hot, glazed ABORTION DONUTS.  I don't know why, but I'm getting the strangest feeling that pro-lifers and PETA members would make such great bar buddies.

• Meet Tofu, MIT's newest, quirkiest creation.  Part muppet, part... part... ::scratches head::  part... non-soy?  

• Armageddon's genetically modified chickens may have finally come to roost.  Check out Food Inc. when it rolls into your local independent theaters if you'd so like to take a gander.

• Crock pots receive their first celebrity endorsement for the new year from The Office's Jenna Fischer.  Apparently they may help your sex life.

• Man in China stabbed in head by father with kitchen knife.  Survives.

 Photo courtesy of Cake Wrecks

-Alice Shin

Click here for last week's leftovers.  Mmmm... leftovers...

Sore about the European Union’s ban on American mutant hormone-treated beef (and apparently still riding high on the “freedom fries” bandwagon), the United States government has decided to impose a 300% import duty on Roquefort cheese effective March 23rd. Imported EU delicacies were originally hit with a 100% levy in 1999 after the enhanced-bovine ban began, but oddly enough, those divine rounds à la the caves of Roquefort-sur-Slouzon are the only victims of this three-fold increase. [New Yorker]

Elisabeth Norton

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