The Recipe: Healthy Italian sausages from Trader Joe's onions and grapes (or cherries! or blackberries!) glazed with balsamic vinegar. A couple of times a summer, we hit the sausage counter at Whole Foods, we love their house-made sausages! Zap! onto the grill they go, tucked into a bun with a zigzag of mustard and some pickled onions. But nutritionally? I don't wanna know, I really don't. Trader Joe's, though, has a good selection of sausages. They're smaller in size – cool, cuz we all know portion size matters. They have nutrition labels – extra-cool, cuz if I'm gonna go bad, I'd like to know kinda how bad, y'know? And they taste great – and that's from someone who loves Trader Joe's but bypasses the meat refrigerator Every.Single.Time. The real test, though? The ingredient list! Here goes. Skinless chicken meat. Red and green peppers. Water. Seasoning. Yeah, I can live with that! (For the record, this is not a sponsored recipe. ...

Recipe for homemade buttered pecan ice cream, old-fashioned and delicious. Plus, to pair with the ice cream, a simple recipe for Meringue Cookies, sweet and studded with pecans. Plus, an introduction to native Missouri pecans, smaller and sweeter than pecans from other regions. It’s time for the Show-Me State to show off its culinary gold: fingertip-tiny, syrup-sweet, native Missouri pecans. Missouri is the northernmost reach of pecan country. Our shorter season and colder climate produce nuts that are smaller, sweeter and richer than the southern brethren. The trees grow alongside fields and rivers, mostly in farm country near Brunswick, 50 crow-miles northwest of Columbia, and Nevada, 90 miles south of Kansas City. Many trees are 200 years old. These days, farm entrepreneurs plant groves. “For the grandchildren,” they laugh, since trees don’t produce nuts for 15 or 20 years. Tree by tree, the nuts are painstakingly harvested in November. Missouri pecans are Show-Me s...

Fresh salmon marinated in sweet-salty maple-syrup and soy sauce, then dusted with pepper and baked. Simple enough for a weeknight, special enough for company. ~ Skip Straight to the Recipe ~ COMPLIMENTS! "Our dinner was extra-special, thanks to you!" ~ Manisha "Wowwwwwwww. Talk about easy and really good." ~ Lesley BEST RECIPES! Maple-Glazed Salmon Made the List! Best Recipes of 2006 Every week, another story emerges about the miracles worked by salmon. If the claims are to be believed, it’s the cancer-curing, figure-fending, wrinkle-ravaging, memory-mothering, clock-stopping, energy-saving, chocolate-tasting (okay, not that last one) food of the decade. Whether the claims prove true hardly matters since salmon is so readily available, tastes so great and gets to the table so fast. My recipe box includes a dozen great ways to cook salmon but this maple syrup-glazed treatment trumps them all. It’s a reincarnation of the French-classic...