Flavor

Sometimes it's the simplest things that are the most confounding. Last year, right before Easter, I blogged about how to make a perfect hard-boiled egg. Basic? Yes. Popular? Very. This seemingly simple task received tens of thousands of page views. And, it seemed, almost as many complaints: "But how do you peel them?" Mea culpa. while my method ensures that hard-boiled eggs are never overdone (at last: the cure for the dreaded copper-green ring!), it also can make them harder to shell, because perfectly cooked eggs turn out to be stickier than ones that have been overcooked.

When Jaime Martin del Campo and Ramiro Arvizu opened their Bell restaurant 15 years ago, some customers wondered if they knew how to cook. Accustomed to Mexican food laden with sour cream, melted cheddar cheese and mild salsa that has long been served up in the Los Angeles area, patrons balked at eating La Casita Mexicana's enchiladas covered in pumpkin seed mole, cotija cheese and red onions. Many of the doubters, to the restaurateurs' surprise, were Mexican American. Regional Mexican cooking isn't a tough sell anymore.

Heard of cola chicken? China has. It's a popular dish in the huge nation, where Pepsi soda and Lay's potato chips have introduced Pepsi-chicken chips. That's right -- chips made to taste like Pepsi and chicken. Together. Cola chicken is chicken wings stir-fried in a wok with a caramelized sauce of cola, soy sauce and other seasonings. In L.A., you can find the dish at dim sum palace Elite.  PepsiCo came up with the idea during a brainstorming session among its marketing and R&D teams and its Shanghai ad agency, according to AdAge.

Who doesn't love a cucumber? Picklers, slicers, green or yellow, smooth or bumpy, thin- or thick-skinned, chubby Kirbys, little cornichons, English, Japanese, Persian. Good thing then that with the impending heat comes cucumber season. They peak with the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and those other cucurbits, squashes and melons, but among all these, cucumbers are the most like Johnny Depp -- very, very cool. With their refreshing herbaceous flavor and their snappy crunch, cucumbers are exactly what we want to eat right now -- still (they've been cultivated for more than 3,000 years)

Leave it to Italy --- a country where food and tradition go hand in hand — to be home to the first university dedicated to the art of making gelato. In fact, the Carpigiani Gelato University, located outside Bologna, is doing its all to ensure that the future of ice cream's closest relative, gelato, will continue to be that of a fresh product made from all-natural ingredients for local consumption. Carpigiani, which has sold gelato-making equipment since 1945, started teaching the classes in 2003.

When you go to the market and buy a raw apple, you expect -- and get -- an apple. Not a fruitlike product injected with liquid that makes it weigh more but that softens the natural crispness and dilutes the flavor to the point where it has to be infused with caramel-apple concentrate to restore some tastiness. Fortunately, Fujis are still Fujis. If only the same could be said of chicken. In the past few years, it has become common for chicken producers to inject fresh chicken with saltwater as a way to keep it juicy and flavorful in the hands of indifferent cooks, a process called "enhancing" or "plumping."

In Italy's Piedmont region, where polenta may be better loved than anywhere else on Earth, the cornmeal mush is a food of the fall. When the air turns crisp with the first frost and people await the arrival of snow, housewives labor over their cooking pots, stirring, stirring as coarse cornmeal slurried in water gradually thickens and becomes sticky and delicious. To serve, it's poured out onto a wooden board in a rich golden puddle like a harvest moon. Cesare Pavese wrote about it in "The Moon and the Bonfires," a nostalgic novel about a Piedmontese expatriate's return home: "These are the best days of the year.

If pickles were currency, it would take 100 of Pat Fairhurst's kosher sours to buy a buttery smooth leather wallet in the chic shop nearby, more than 200 to snag a dress off one of the neighboring boutiques' racks, and a whopping 1,000 to book a luxury suite at the Blue Moon Hotel across the street. That helps explain why Fairhurst's tiny store, Guss', an institution since 1920 in Manhattan's Lower East Side, is moving its red barrels of 50-cent pickles to Brooklyn. No longer the exclusive domain of scrappy immigrants or Jewish aficionados of Fairhurst's briny treats, the old neighborhood has morphed into one of New York's trendier districts, an evolution that is vexing to those nostalgic for the past but who admit that change can be good.

The sad news is that after seven seasons on the air, "30 Rock" is finally leaving us. The good news is that it will live on in our hearts, our minds ... and our guts? On Thursday, the one-hour series finale will bring to a close the story of Liz Lemon, Jack Donaghy and the cast and writers of "TGS. " At the series finale after-party to be held Thursday night in New York City, near the real Rockefeller Center, Ben & Jerry's co-founder Jerry Greenfield, is to introduce a new flavor of ice cream inspired by the NBC comedy.

Colatura, the traditional anchovy sauce of Cetara on the Sorrento Peninsula, is a powerful condiment -- just a few drops will give a dish a rich savor. That's fortunate, because this handmade product is in limited supply. It's mostly sold in one-tenth-liter (3.38-ounce) bottles. Two of the four brands recognized by the Friends of the Anchovy (Amici delle Alici) in Cetara are available online. Nettuno di Giordano is $22 a bottle at www.amazon.com, $25 at www.gustiamo.

Here in California we love to brag about our abundance of wonderful seasonal ingredients and how that makes good food easy. That's more or less true, but I have to confess that I've also always had a sneaking admiration for those cooks who can whip up something from nothing. Sure, it's wonderful to be able to just pick up a sack of Ojai Pixie mandarins and a box of medjool dates and call it dessert. But you've really got to admire someone who can take a couple of wilted zucchinis, a sprouting onion and some canned tomatoes and turn that into something delicious - the real-life equivalent of the proverbial stone soup.

Funny how the chicken has become our most beloved bird. My neighbor is raising some exotic chicks, but even those of us who don't go to that extreme have our own favorite named chickens to buy - Rosie, Rocky, Mary or the more exotically named Jidori. Roast chicken is the go-to dish for every chef I can name. And chicken is a perennial favorite on most restaurant menus - fried, pan-fried, rotisserie-roasted, in tagine , salad, soup, pot pie, curry and every which way. Here are three of my favorite chicken dishes in L.A. Bouchon Bouchon may be famous for its lusty fried chicken, and that is one of the great fried chickens of the world, but my heart is firmly fixed on Thomas Keller's roast chicken grand-mère , which may be the prettiest chicken dish in L.A. It arrives tall and proud, the breast stacked on top of the leg and thigh, with dainty pearl onions, demure fingerling potatoes, button mushrooms and bacon lardons strewn around the plate in the bird's winter savory-infused juices.

Sometimes the smallest thing can arouse the most passion. Last month I wrote a Daily Dish post about my fava bean harvest. I measured how many pods I harvested and what that worked out to in double-peeled beans (8 pounds turned into 3 cups). I thought it was kind of interesting, so I posted a link on Facebook. And boy did I hear about it. Good cooks from Italy and Spain chewed me out in terms as diverse as gently corrective and “How Dare You!” It seems double-peeling favas (removing them from their pods and then taking off the skin as well)

Exchange-traded funds have taken Wall Street by storm in the last few years. But the boom in ETFs may leave some investors confused about how to make the best use of the portfolios, which come in a dizzying array of flavors. Here's a practical tipsheet on investing in ETFs versus their main rivals, traditional mutual funds: Going with ETFs is going with the market flow. The vast majority of ETFs were created to track sectors of financial markets. So using them means you are betting on specific parts of the market, and expect to earn whatever average returns those sectors generate - or suffer whatever losses they incur.

With strawberries showing up in the market now, how do you know what to look for? Here are some tips on choosing, storing and using berries, courtesy of Food Editor Russ Parsons: Choose the best berries by aroma, not color or size. The flavor of strawberries is complex; only by sniffing around will you be able to get the best. Once you've found the ones that smell the sweetest, check the underside of the box to make sure there's no spoilage. Store strawberries at room temperature for as long as possible.

Locally raised pork is rare in Southern California, but in a hilly grapefruit grove north of San Diego, fenced to exclude mountain lions, 14 tasty piglets luxuriate, fattening for sale at the Santa Monica farmers market. They're the dream or folly of Oliver Woolley, who raises heritage pigs. Oliver, 30, was born in Kentucky. He grew up in Colorado and moved with his family in 2003 to a 25-acre farm in Valley Center that grows flowers and organic grapefruit. He studied business at the University of San Diego and worked briefly as a trader for Morgan Stanley but "hated it," he said.

When you want to add a little extra depth to a recipe, consider toasting the nuts or spices before adding them to a dish. Toasting helps to release the flavor and oils in the spices and nuts, lending depth and wonderfully rich flavor to a dish. Toast whole spices on the stove top using a heavy-bottomed saute pan over moderate heat. Toast the spices, stirring them or shaking the pan frequently, so they toast evenly. Watch the pan closely, so the spices don't burn. A few minutes is all it should take to bring out the flavors; you'll know they're ready when you can smell them.

Table grapes are readily available year-round at supermarkets, and if you're just looking for a juicy, healthy snack, you can do perfectly well there. But if you're looking for grapes with flavor, the best source is farmers markets, where the season for table grapes from the earliest part of the main growing area, the southern San Joaquin Valley, has just started, and vendors increasingly are offering specialty varieties to appeal to diverse tastes. PHOTOS: At the farmers market.

Happy National Peanut Butter Lover's Day! To celebrate, we've compiled 11 of our favorite recipes. From massive peanut butter cookies to cream pie and peanut dipping sauce. VIDEO: How to make homemade nut butters Oh, and would you like to know how to make homemade peanut butter? It's easy. Check out the video above and read the steps below for tips. Enjoy! ALSO: Food photography 101 Go behind the scenes at the Test Kitchen Browse hundreds of recipes from the L.A. Times Test Kitchen You can find Noelle Carter on Facebook , Google+ , Twitter and Pinterest . Email Noelle at noelle.carter@latimes.com.

The latest batch of Stone Brewing's "devastatingly fresh" Enjoy By 4.01.13 IPA hits shelves this week, and the brewers are so serious about the freshness of their beer that they've built an April 1 deadline into the beer's name. But why is it so important for this beer to be consumed within the 35-day freshness window?  Stone packs so much hops into their Enjoy By beer that they will pull it from retailer's shelves 35 days after the beer was bottled to prevent anyone from buying a past-its-prime bottle.