(Please note: I am not a food expert or toxicologist. Please do your own research or consult an expert before making a decision about reheating spinach. Nitrates caused by reheating spinach should be avoided by infants of up to 6 months!)

When my parents were visiting us here in Illinois last week, we had made some spinach-artichoke dip and were about to put the leftovers in the fridge when my mom told me that you can never ever keep spinach leftovers as reheating spinach is dangerous and causes cancer. I vaguely remembered something about this from my Dutch youth, but my American wife and her parents had never heard of such a thing. To be safe we threw the spinach away, but it did make me curious. More »

In this video from ScienCentral, chef Elliot Prag of the Natural Gourmet Institute shows how easy it is to make your own vegetarian bacon. Just add some salt and olive oil to shitake mushrooms, put them in the oven and voilà: pig-friendly bacon! Great to toss in a salad for some extra taste. We recently tried the Veggie Bacon Strips from Morningstar in a BLT and were pleasantly surprised by its strong bacon taste. I am going to have to try these mushrooms too, it looks so simple.

So bad that the United States FDA (Food and Drug Administration) website has made an embeddable search widget. You can search for which peanut butter products are included in the salmonella outbreak. OMG, really?

Yep, really.

French grocery stores are full of delicious single-serving desserts and puddings. The other day we picked up these lemon meringue desserts and they are so yummy! Each one is like a little single-serving pie.

I think we will bring home a cooler-full.

As we plan to move from the Netherlands to the U.S., I have been thinking about what I will miss the most once we are settled in our new place. Besides our dear family, I am sure I will miss a few other things.
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Last month we visited Disneyland Resort Paris (DLP) for two days. The park is celebrating its 15-year anniversary with new shows, new attractions and new decorations. Unfortunately they did not take the opportunity to improve the dining experience at the parks, which remains dismal. More »

An article on the BBC website last Friday revealed that British households waste over 3 million tons of food per year. That amounts to just under a third of all food bought, although half of that is inedible matter such as packaging. Wasting food has been a pet peeve of mine for some time, so it’s nice to hear that someone is taking notice. More »

Yesterday we found an unusually large selection of American grocery products at a regular supermarket in the Hague, here in the Netherlands. The store is Coop Van Dijk on Ursulaland 80-82 (see on Google map). There used to be an American school nearby, which is now gone, but the owner still likes to keep importing the American products, which fill an entire aisle in the store. More »

I didn’t realize this, but many food products like Pop-Tarts, M&M’s, Cupcakes, Snicker bars, etc. have beef or pork gelatin in them. More »

The average supermarket in the Netherlands is the smallest in Europe, and the selection of food and drink here at grocery stores is also very limited compared to stores in Germany, France, UK, USA and even Belgium. Here is a list of several food products that I like to bring back when shopping abroad — stuff that they really should sell here in Holland. More »