Photo: Thinkstock

One afternoon shortly after I had moved to New York City I witnessed a scene that seemed to be a short, one-man play about the ill affects of graffiti: It was a blazingly hot day, and an elderly man stood in his shirtsleeves scrubbing away at an ugly tag on his bodega's window. Frustrated, he threw his wet rag to the ground and uttered a sound something like a damaged car motor. Poor man! It is for his sake that I am glad that the DIY, anti-establishment spirit of street art has been channeled in less damaging, more lovely ways lately. Delicate books sculptures, for example, or cozy displays of knit-bombing.

Or guerrilla fruit grafting. As the Huffington Post reports, "For the past year, the renegade group has been secretly splicing San Francisco's strictly decorative apple and pear trees with fruit-bearing grafts, causing the city's previously barren trees to become heavy with fresh apples and pears. The group aims to use the city's preexisting trees to provide 'delicious, nutritious fruit for urban residents,' and basically feed anyone who is hungry in the process."  The group's open source code site offers advice on finding graftable trees and tracks how the grafts are going. Okay, so some San Francisco city officials may be symbolically throwing their wet rags to the ground ("The City considers vandalism a serious offense,"  Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru told the Examiner). But really, how upset can anyone be over beautiful, delicious fruit?

Art is Everywhere:
Food Art
Lunch Bag Art
Tree Art

Photo: Alan Richardson and Karen Tack

Embrace the freedom of January cooking (no overnight guests with picky palates, no cookie swaps, no big dinners to host) by experimenting with these four foods.

Rainbow Trout Cupcakes
This month, Karen Tack and Alan Richardson, the color-obsessed food stylists whose previous books include Hello, Cupcake! and What's New, Cupcake?, return with a third guide to turning ingredients like JELL-O and Fruit Roll-Ups into amazing cupcake decorations. Cupcakes, Cookies, and Pie, Oh My! includes instructions for making these cupcakes, which are decorated with M&Ms and spice drops.

Chinese Scallion Pancakes
Celebrate the Year of the Dragon when Chinese New Year begins on January 23 with these savory pancakes. They're crisp, golden and filled with scallions and sesame seeds. Fold them into wedges and dip into a ginger-chili sauce.

Spiced-Up Oatmeal
If you're stuck in an apples-and-cinnamon rut, break out with new mix-ins. To make Blackberry Pie Oatmeal, stir in 1/3 cup blackberries near the end of cooking, then top with chopped walnuts, a few more blackberries, and a crushed graham cracker. Or try Pumpkin–Cottage Cheese Oatmeal by adding 1/4 cup canned pumpkin and 1/4 cup cottage cheese when the oatmeal's almost cooked. Sprinkle toasted sliced almonds and a dash of cinnamon and nutmeg on top. Here are even more ideas for jazzing up your oatmeal.

Grapefruit
While Florida and Texas have been shipping these classic winter treats since October, two other big growing states--Arizona and California--have just started to hit their stride this month, so you shouldn't have trouble tracking the citrus fruit down. Look for ones with brightly-colored skin and no bruises. They should be be firm and springy to touch. And the heavier the grapefruit, the more juice it'll have. Not just for breakfast, grapefruits are excellent in salads, too, such as this fennel and arugula mix.

Keep Reading
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A citrus salad for dessert
An entire meal celebrating oranges

Photo: Travis Rathbone

As if the nearly 6-week-long meat-fest between Thanksgiving and New Year's weren't daunting enough to recover from, January is hardly the easiest month to add more vegetables to your diet. And there are only so many ways to eat roasted winter vegetables.

Which is why these 4 dishes are just what you need this week: They're meatless, yes. But they're also savory, warm, filling, and a lot easier to make than a big, meaty dinner.

Take these Brown Rice and Lentil Burgers, for one. Shiitake and cremini mushrooms add a steak-like flavor; topped with some Bibb lettuce and, okay, a slice of aged white Cheddar, they make for decadent meal you can feel good about eating. This Healthy Mac and Cheese recipe has a creamy sauce that relies on an unlikely ingredient: that cold-weather superstar, pureed butternut squash (it adds sweetness and heft). And Lisa Oz's Cornmeal-Crusted Tofu with Mashed Sweet Potatoes and Lemony Kale Salad highlight more winter workhorses...while keeping you on the light track.

Keep Reading
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Dining at the Oz family's house
A vegan starter kit

We all had a favorite food when we were little, whether it was just-right buttered cinnamon toast or after-school English muffin pizzas.

You can find recipes for those (and more) in Loukoumi's Celebrity Cookbook, a new collection of more than 50 celebrities' favorite childhood recipes (the book also benefits a Chefs for Humanity and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital). Beyonce contributes Easy Guacamole with Corn Chip Scoops, Katie Couric offers Brownies and Lemon Squares, Jennifer Aniston contributes a recipe for Quinoa Salad (clearly, she was a sophisticated child) and Oprah Winfrey gives us her recipe for crispy Corn Fritters.

 It's a fun, nostalgic cookbook--and it even has a few surprises. For instance, who knew Ellen DeGeneres could eat 12 Vegan Sliders?

Keep Reading
Dinner at Jennifer Aniston's
Paula Deen's Sour Cream Pound Cake recipe
20 favorite childhood meals with adult twists

Photo: Cristina Ferrare

My family celebrates Christmas Day all day, starting with opening gifts then sitting down together to enjoy a great breakfast! These Sweet Potato Pancakes with Berry Good Syrup are always a huge hit. My husband will slather some room-temperature butter on them and watch it slowly melt and drip down the sides of the pancakes. (It’s okay; it’s Christmas, so he gets a pass.) I love to watch his face as he dips his fork into the Berry Good Syrup and takes his first mouthful. His expression looks like a little kid's! It always makes me smile.

Photo: Hannah Whitaker

The best thing about going to a cookie exchange (aside from the 6 dozen cookies you cart home) is the often amazing recipes they help unearth. How else would I have come across my mom's friend Rita's pistachio-cranberry icebox cookies, or our neighbor Linda's Italian almond crescents, other than at Aunt Betty's annual bash? So when an editor at The Food Network invited me to a virtual cookie swap, I knew I had to join in. It works like this: on one day (today!), food magazines, blogs and other websites each "bring" a different cookie recipe to the table. Instead of sorting through your cookbooks or the millions of recipes online, you can scroll through this best-of-the-best list: Since each site is only allowed to share a single recipe in the swap, you know every one of them is going to be a winner.

Life Lift's contribution to the exchange is a butter cookie recipe from the December issue of O. The dough is beyond simple; what makes these sweets unique is that you use a glass with a design in the bottom (it could be a vintage water tumbler, a vase, a Ball jar or anything else you find in your kitchen cabinets) to stamp each circle of dough. Even something that’s just a basic ring looks beautiful when it’s sprinkled with colored sugar.

Photo: Thinkstock

You're looking at a bowl full of bread dough, left to rise under a towel in a warm place in your kitchen. It's been two hours and nothing seems to be happening. You could throw it in the oven and hope for the best (maybe it will rise once it's in there? Is that even possible?), or you could call a professional. Yes, there are actually pro bakers standing by at various hotlines around the country, just waiting for you to call. They'll talk you off the ledge and give you some tricks to turn that flat ball of dough into a puffed-up masterpiece. It's like tech support for holiday baking.

Crisco's Pie Hotline
1-877-FOR PIE TIPS
Monday to Friday: 8 AM to 8 PM EST

Fleischmann's Yeast Baker's Help Line
800-777-4959
Monday to Friday: 9 AM to 4 PM, CST

King Arthur Flour Baking Hotline
802-649-3717
Monday to Friday: 8 AM to 9 PM EST
Saturday and Sunday: 9 AM to 5 PM EST

Nestle Toll House Live Chat
Monday to Friday: 8 AM to 8 PM EST
Saturday: 8 AM to 4 PM EST

Hershey's Consumer Hot Line
800-468-1714
Monday to Friday: 9 AM to 4 PM, EST

Keep Reading
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5 common cake and cookie pitfalls

Photo: Thinkstock

In my mind I am a scrappy urban pioneer who raises chickens on my fire escape and bakes everything from scratch, but I must stress that this is strictly in my own mind. In reality I have a real city-dweller’s squeamishness about food. My meat comes bloodless and entombed in cellophane; I get a little skeeved out when my mushrooms are dirty; I buy my bread pre-sliced whenever possible. I live, like many of us, entirely disconnected from the life cycle of what I eat.

Not so Lucille Clarke Dumbrill of Newcastle, Wyoming, who regularly makes pancakes from scratch with her 122-year-old sourdough starter.  

As the Casper Star-Tribune reports, the sourdough starter is older than the rotary dial, airplane and modern assembly line. “Someone first stirred its ingredients together the same year the Eiffel Tower opened and Vincent van Gogh painted ‘Starry Night.’... It’s older than the state of Wyoming.” (I think I have some take-out packets of ketchup that old, but I’m not proud of them.) Anyway, 83-year-old Dumbrill, who inherited the starter from her mother (who could track it back to a 19^th-century sheepherder’s wagon), says it’s easy to keep: you just have to put it in a ceramic jar in the fridge and “not be afraid if it doesn’t look good.” (You simply must read the entire article for what she means by that, and why the starter could "make some women squeamish.")

The sourdough starter has become something of a local celebrity, the star of fundraising pancake dinners and political meet-and-greets. But what I love best about this story is Dumbrill’s “go with the flow attitude  -- “Nothing about sourdough is absolutely absolute,” she told the Tribune. A little of this, a little of that, and voila, you have a delicious meal that contains a link to history, a dash of pioneer woman spirit, and tastes great with whipped cream.

Read More:
How to get those family recipes—and why
Grandma's lemon pound cake

Photo: Thinkstock

When I think of the famous verse from Clement C. Moore's 'Twas the Night Before Christmas--"The children were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads"--the first image that comes to mind is of plums with little arms and legs, two-stepping to Jingle Bell Rock. Once I really start to think about it, though, I imagine a very sweet variety of the stone fruit.... Alas, sugar plums aren't even plums at all.

As this article explains, these treats with such lovely names are made of sugar hardened around a central seed in successive layers using a process called "panning" (think Jawbreakers). In Moore's time, they were often made with caraway or cardamom seeds, or almonds at the center; their shape resembled plums, hence the name. The essay also offers a very sweet reason for why Moore would have them dancing in children's heads.

These days, sugar plums aren't so popular, but recipes abound. Most don't even involve any cooking; they simply advise you to mix ingredients ranging from dates, walnuts, cranberries, prunes, hazelnuts, jam, sugar and spices; to almonds, honey, orange zest and apricots, roll them into a ball and coat them in sugar. Alton Brown's recipe comes with a helpful video (it's worth watching, if only for the drill sargeant fairy dancing above the food processor).


Keep Reading
7 out-of-this-world candy recipes
25 Christmas cookies to try

Photo: Thinkstock

We've just begun the darkest month, and the shortest day of the year is on its way. Time to hole up in the kitchen and take a temporary break from cookies and hot cocoa with these five foods...

Tangelos
Also called a honeybell, this citrus fruit is a hybrid of a tangerine and either a pomelo (a citrus fruit native to Southeast Asia) or a grapefruit. They're juicy, easier to peel than oranges because of their loose skin, and have a distinguishing little knob at the top.

Gingerbread
Even better than the traditional cookies, a slice of gingerbread is a moist, delicious taste of heaven. Follow this recipe, which calls for cinnamon, cloves, ginger, molasses and buttermilk, and includes instructions for making a spiced honey butter with freshly grated ginger.

Chicken Soup
Soothe sore throats with a big bowl of this classic winter elixir. This recipe includes tortellini, while this one is built on Thai flavors, and you'll never believe that Luther Vandross created this Mediterranean take.