Weekly food rail, with tips on soaking dry beans, an easy recipe for Dorito casserole, the latest from The Beer Nut, and more.

Erik Piantedosi, owner of Piantedosi Butcher Shop in Plymouth, says shoppers are “better off going to an independently owned (shop), so you can see the meat when we cut it.”

On one side, a collection of health-conscious renegades say aspartame is bad and should be banned. They blame it for causing leukemias, lymphomas and other cancers. They claim it exacerbates problems with lupus, multiple sclerosis and diabetes and may even be responsible for the epidemic of diabetes. That's just the beginning. Web sites with names like sweetpoison.com and aspartamekills.com leave no doubt about their position.

One of the easiest ways to add flavor is with marinades. With a marinade, a simple piece of meat, poultry or fish goes from plain to tantalizing. Suddenly, you are having dinner in Europe, or Asia, or the Caribbean, depending on the individual components.

Breakfast scrapple in German communities can be as common as pancakes and waffles. It’s hearty under maple syrup, but that’s hardly its main reason for being.

Old-fashioned tea kettles boil water and that’s it. Electric cooking kettles expand that to include cooking food. They also boil a liter of water in less than 5 minutes.

“What should I eat?” asks Michael Pollan in his book, “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.” He answers parenthetically. “(Eat food.)”

Kitchen pantries often are one of the coldest places in the house. That’s on purpose — the cold helps preserve foods. This is especially true in older houses from the era of expensive refrigeration.

Vicki Tomashot Bauer of North Canton, Ohio, first tasted Dorito casserole when she was in her teens. Now a mom, Vicki tweaks the recipe for her family.

You may feel guilty about serving your family steak, but it’s impossible to satisfy beef appetites on a budget. This has happened before, in depressions, in meat rationing during wars, and on and on. One of the things we must cut is the food budget, and beef goes first.

The little girl with the umbrella has competition. Pink rocks mined in the Himalayan mountains, black flakes from the Hawaiian shores and gray Celtic sea salt are cropping up in restaurants and on supermarket shelves that were once dominated by Morton’s iconic youngster.

Home cooks are discovering the flavors of meatless cooking.

The key to making bread, beer and wine is yeast, a microorganism that expels alcohol and carbon dioxide as it grows.

Testing Nestle Chocolate Caramel Hot Cocoa Mix.

It’s March, and if you’re Italian, you know St. Joseph’s Day is right around the corner. Delicious zeppole is the traditional St. Joseph’s day treat. It is a fried "pate a choux" doughnut topped with vanilla pastry cream and amarena cherries. The doughnut is buttery and airy, and when topped with the sweet vanilla cream and tangy fruit, it is truly a piece of heaven.