Kate Krader (@kkrader on Twitter) is Food & Wine's restaurant editor. When she tells us where to find our culinary heart's desire, we listen up.

At Food & Wine magazine, where I work, we keep an ongoing list of apps that we love. They include the Seafood Watch App from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which helps you choose sustainable seafood. We also shamelessly love our F&W Cocktails App, which has hundreds of great drink recipes and a guide to top bars. Both are free.

I’m also a fan of More Pizza, the app that lets me make virtual pizzas. I found it after I downloaded More Toast, which turns my phone into a virtual toaster. Each of those apps cost me 99 cents, which is fine since I’m now expert at toast and pizza making on the subway.

But I love free things, which is why I’d like to go back to great food- and chef-related apps that happen to cost nothing for you to download.
FULL POST

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.

Among various mundane considerations, such as being Tuesday, today also happens to be Winston Churchill Day. Admittedly, W. C. Day isn’t exactly the most well-known commemorative day. It’s definitely way below Earth Day, for instance, which is coming up on the April 22. But I do like to think that it’s got more legs - as it were - than National Dance Like a Chicken Day (May 14). One can only hope.

Regardless, April 9 marks the day that Churchill was made an honorary U.S. citizen. There have been only seven, ever, and only two of those managed to still be alive when they received the honor - our man Winston, and Mother Teresa. Churchill definitely wins over Mother T. when it comes to loving wine. He was particularly known for his fondness for Champagne, hence the famous quote, “Remember, gentlemen, it’s not just France we are fighting for, it’s Champagne!” He also loved good Bordeaux and port.
FULL POST

Kate Krader (@kkrader on Twitter) is Food & Wine's restaurant editor. When she tells us where to find our culinary heart's desire, we listen up.

I can already tell it’s going to be a great year for baseball. Not just for teams like the Los Angeles Angels, Washington Nationals and Detroit Tigers (models that I don’t understand predict they’ll be the best). It’s also going to be a terrific year for hungry baseball fans.

Stadium food isn’t necessarily cheap. Eatocracy recently asked, “Would you pay $16.50 for ballpark crab salad?” which is sold at the San Francisco Giants’ AT&T Park. (My answer would depend a lot on how many 14-ounce, $6.75 cups of stadium beer I’d drunk.)

But assuming I had a lot of money and a ticket to get into every ballpark across the nation, here are some of the new places around the country where I’d want to chow down.
FULL POST

Kate Krader (@kkrader on Twitter) is Food & Wine's restaurant editor. When she tells us where to find our culinary heart's desire, we listen up.

Let’s crunch some numbers on America’s Easter candy consumption. The National Confectioners Association offers the following stats:
 

  
I’m a loyal fan of classic Easter candy; you’d have to measure all the Cadbury eggs and jelly beans I’ve consumed by the metric ton. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to try new things, especially on a major candy holiday. Here are some suggestions of artisans doing interesting things in one of my favorite mediums, chocolate.
FULL POST

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.

You’ve got your ham, or you’ve got your lamb. When it comes to Easter dinner, at least in the U.S., these are the main courses people gravitate toward. But there’s also one other inescapable Easter food: the egg. When the kids amble home from the annual Easter egg hunt and suddenly you’ve got 15 hard-boiled eggs on hand, who cares if they’re covered in colorful stripes and spots? You still have to eat the things, right?

So, looking at it that way, the ideal all-purpose Easter wine should be good with ham and good with lamb and good with eggs. Moreover, it should be festive. And, ideally, not too pricey. That’s a tall order. It’s like looking for fat-free pork belly, or a modest politician.

But for me, there is one answer out there, and it’s sparkling rosé. Sparkling wines tend to work well with salty foods like ham. The richer fruit of a rosé will give it enough substance to go with lamb, and the wine’s acidity (plus the light rasp of the bubbles) makes it one of the few types of wine that go well with eggs.

Rosé sparkling wines are made all over the world these days, or at least all over the winemaking world, and they’ve become increasingly popular in recent years. Here are a few excellent possibilities.
FULL POST

Kate Krader (@kkrader on Twitter) is Food & Wine's restaurant editor. When she tells us where to find our culinary heart's desire, we listen up.

As much as I try to have an invincible bracket, I’ve never even placed high enough to win any cash. (Thanks a lot, Gonzaga.)

So, I’m resigned to my fate again this year. Still, I have devised a plan that’s win-win, or at least win-while-losing. I’m going to support a random bunch of my picks by consuming some of the awesome food and drinks they might be associated with - and name check some places that do a particularly good job of serving them.

On to the tourney. Go Louisville!

FULL POST

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.
FULL POST

Alessandra Bulow (@abulow on Twitter) is Food & Wine's associate digital editor.

If foraging for shamrocks and downing marshmallow-filled cereal endorsed by a cartoon leprechaun hasn’t brought you the luck of the Irish by now, then it may be time to rethink your strategy on St. Patrick’s Day. From traditional dishes like noodles that symbolize longevity to a simple ham sandwich, superstitious chefs share their picks for good fortune.
FULL POST

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.

Consider the Shamrock Shake. It’s green, it’s creamy, you can get it during the month of March, and since McDonald’s introduced the thing in 1970, they’ve sold more than 60 million of them - the equivalent of 39 gallons of Shamrock Shake for every single person currently alive in Ireland. That’s a whole lot of shake goin’ on.

But of course there are other things you can drink for St. Patrick’s Day. Green beer, well, yeah. I think we can safely move on from that addled inspiration. Ditto the giant foam leprechaun hats. So how about a green cocktail, then?
FULL POST

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.

Not too long ago, on a dark day for Scotsmen everywhere, workers at the Chivas Brothers distillery in Dumbarton, Scotland, inadvertently flushed about 6,000 gallons of whisky into the plant’s wastewater system. For Scotch lovers with a pessimistic cast of mind, this event immediately brings to mind the possibility of a worldwide whisky shortage, with riots in the streets, hoodlums setting fire to trash cans and feeble cries of “Please, help me, just a wee dram…” from one-time high-living single malt fanatics now reduced to drinking Natty Light from cans.

For less apocalyptically minded folks, the loss of several thousand gallons of high-end whisky is merely a fine excuse for pouring oneself a drop of the good stuff. Raise a glass in honor of their loss, and whatnot. Conveniently, several good whiskies of various sorts have recently hit the market; here are a few highlights.
FULL POST