There are some foods you must often be born into loving. Vegemite, haggis, lutefisk and durian immediately come to mind. My Pennsylvania-born husband will not stop defending scrapple, though my Seattle-native stomach still can’t churn geoduck. It is within this smorgasbord of locally loved, widely hated bites that okra lives and thrives. To everyone I know born and/or raised in …

According to the Tortilla Industry Association (sign up now for the annual conference at Caesar’s Palace!), Americans eat 85 million tortillas per year. In my house, we go through more tortillas than slices of bread. My husband tries to convert any meal he can into a burrito, rolling up everything from yakisoba stir fry to Hamburger Helper—Cheeseburger Edition. I drew …

D.C. Shit Truck @Shit_Truck @SpectrumCulture We have a really tough time with nougat! Thanks, Twitter. All of a sudden you’re an 80-year-old great aunt suffering from dementia, sending me boxes of nougat candy that you’ve been hoarding in your basement since the Carter administration. That’s right. I’ve been Twitter challenged to take on nougat. A terrible idea dating back to …

@ugliyucca posed to us, in the simplest of terms: What to do with romanesco? Here’s the problem with that @ugliyucca, I cannot find romanesco, a kind of cauliflower-slash-broccoli-ish vegetable, anywhere. Not in the local supermarkets, not in the high end grocers in the Hamptons where my day job is and nowhere else in between. There are some fairly diverse purveyors …

@fredspins asks: Do you want difficult or impossible? The former: olive loaf, the latter: bitter melon. This reminds me of the scene in The Godfather Part Two when Michael admonishes his henchman for thinking it impossible to kill Hyman Roth in the airport. Nothing is impossible, @fredspins. Difficult yes, but not impossible. Thankfully we had someone else on staff willing …

This crunchy, rich curry is a great vegan accompaniment to another Indian mainstay. Karela is a common ingredient in Asian cooking, but due to its lack of availability and bitter taste, not an incredibly popular ingredient in America’s Asian restaurants. “I’ll have the bitter melon, the chicken’s feet and the pig intestine,” is probably not what you’d normally hear ordered …

([^-^]) badjedi @badjedi @SpectrumCulture basil Basil? Really, basil? Such a common herb, so many possibilities. The peppery, parsley-ish with a potent punch herb grows like crazy on my kitchen counter during the summer, and the real challenge is deciding which recipe to share with you. Basil, and its slightly different varieties, is commonly associated here as an Italian cuisine staple. …

@A_schulz asked @SpectrumCulture Eggplant! I want to like it but have never found a method of preparing it or a recipe that has been good. Help? We want you to like eggplant too, April. As it happens, I’ve been giving eggplant a lot of thought lately. About a year ago, I found out I was allergic to red meat because …

A béchamel sauce request—how very Betty Draper of you, Twitter followers. When it comes to old school standards, this classic white French “mother sauce” is a far more tasty and usable recipe than many of the lost arts lurking in my grandmother’s 1969 Betty Crocker cookbook (aspic, anyone?). Béchamel is essentially cream (or, in most modern incarnations, milk) warmed and …

Someone with a sense of humor in the twitter-verse challenged us to get a handle on duck gizzards by issuing the following statement: I don’t get Gesiers du Canard, I don’t understand why, as anything else is in my mental menu. Well random twitter follower, let me get this straight: Nothing else escapes your mental menu except duck gizzards? Really? …