Plenty of traditional foods pack an emotional whallop, but few of them back it up with a sensory punch as strong as horseradish's. The pungent root is a key part of a Passover Seder plate (along with salt water-dipped vegetables, a shank bone, a hard boiled egg, a sweet paste of apples and nuts called charoset, and a bitter vegetable - often lettuce) and symbolizes the harsh lives of the Israelites before they were delivered from slavery in Egypt.
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Ray Isle (@islewine on Twitter) is Food & Wine's executive wine editor. We trust his every cork pop and decant – and the man can sniff out a bargain to boot. Take it away, Ray.

If there’s one kind of wine in the whole world of wine that’s misunderstood, it’s probably kosher wine. The basic misnomer is that it is somehow different - that the process of making kosher wine differs in some radical way from the process of making regular, un-kosher wine. This idea, mostly, isn’t true.

The short version is this: Grapes are kosher, and there’s nothing about the nature of the winemaking process that makes them not so. What matters is more the who than the how.
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T+L contributing editors Matt Lee and Ted Lee’s latest cookbook, "The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen" (Clarkson Potter), is in bookstores now. Follow them on Twitter @TheLeeBros.

When we were 11 and 13 years old, our parents dressed us in neckties and blazers and marched us to a French restaurant in our hometown, Charleston, South Carolina. We sulked through dinner until dessert arrived: crème caramel. And in that instant of magical custard, its essence of burnt marshmallow skin made silken-smooth (and grown-up-approved), everything changed. We’d never been to France, but we knew this crème caramel was a journey unto itself, to another place.

Walking home, we conspired to re-create this trip ourselves. We waited until a day when our parents were out of the house, took down Mom’s dusty, stained "Joy of Cooking" from the cabinet above the telephone table in the kitchen, and went to work.
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While you're frying up some eggs and bacon, we're cooking up something else: a way to celebrate today's food holiday.

Hit the hydration station - March 22 is World Water Day.

Water: It makes up 60% of our bodies, and yet most of us don’t get enough of it on a daily basis.

However, not everyone has access to clean, fresh, readily available drinking water. The United Nations estimates that as many as 783 million people lack clean water. Access to clean water is important for sanitation and farming, but it’s also integral to a healthy way of life.

Natural sources of water, like rivers, know no boundaries and often wind their way through multiple countries; controlling the flow of those rivers can cause serious political conflict. To help raise awareness to these problems and more, the UN has designated 2013 as the International Year of Water Cooperation. With 85% of the world’s population living in the driest half of the globe, it’s important not to take water for granted on this World Water Day.
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Not so long ago, if you ordered a cup of coffee in South Africa you needed to specify "filter" to avoid getting instant.

A decade ago, there was no cafe culture, nowhere to go for a flat white and certainly no expectation of locally roasted beans.

Those days are gone. Specialist coffee shops did nearly four times the business here in 2012 as in 2007.
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