#almond

#almond

Citrus fruits are delicious, fragrant, and packed with vitamins and nutrients, making them versatile for snacking, salads, juicing, cooking, baking, and seasoning.

One isn't necessarily more nutritious than the other. They're just different foods. Peanut butter comes from a legume and almond butter comes from a tree nut, but nutritionally they're fairly similar. Both provide mostly healthy fats along with a little protein and fiber.

While you might not consider nuts to be a food that spoils particularly quickly, those with a high fat content actually can go rancid after just a few months, which is why we think they're one of the foods you should never buy at Costco. Macadamia nuts, Brazil nuts, and pine nuts, specifically, have shorter lifespans than most due to their high fat content, and walnuts and pecans are known for spoiling faster than other varieties for the same reason.

Late-night snacking has had a bad rap for a long time. When pop culture takes a stab at this (very) human thing, it often portrays the scene as pernicious or, at best, distasteful. Combine that with regular condemnation by diet culture and accusatory media headlines that frame after-dinner eating as a moral failing, and it's easy to see why most of us want to steer clear.

California's "Real Food, Healthy Kids Act" represents the first law in the U.S. to define and ban ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) from public school lunches. As reported by CNN, the bill requires scientists and public health experts to determine which ingredients and additives are most damaging to children's health. These "foods of concern" will then be systematically phased out of school meal programs that serve over 1 billion lunches annually.

Every morning I join a group of friends for coffee and conversation at a cafe in my neighborhood. We call ourselves the "coffee klatch." This time of year, one of the key klatchers, Michael Soriano, often comes bearing a bag of Meyer lemons, picked from his tree. Last year he even did a drive-by in front of my apartment, delivering a bag of those fragrant golden orbs just for me. Such luxury! And free. It felt like a heist.

In the late 1990s, the California Prune Board set out on a quixotic mission to amend this sales-flattening reputation. It would attempt to rechristen this ancient fruit in the hopes the prune could one day be as unencumbered as an apricot, a raisin, or a fig.

It's 9:30 p.m. Snack time. A sacred fourth meal, when I pull out my handwash-only kobachi and drop in a small handful of Blue Diamond Smokehouse almonds. I've been eating them for more years than I care to admit, appreciating the mix of natural (high protein and fiber) almonds with a splash of addictive processing (mmm, hickory smoke flavor and maltodextrin) to keep them feeling dangerous.

I started working at Trader Joe's after college and my time there provided me with a graduate education in specialty foods. It was there that my palette expanded and grew up. Having lived on a diet of pizza and french fries as an undergrad, I developed a taste for so many of Trader Joe's hidden gems. These were "fancy" products I'd never considered, like olive tapenade (a discontinued item; trust me, I've asked), chevre goat cheese, and strawberry mochi.

These Middle Eastern chickpea balls are so meaty and satisfying, I feel like I could eat them every day! One of my favorite ideas for how to eat them is this falafel salad. Make a batch of my baked falafel, then layer them with crunchy veggies and top with a creamy, zingy tahini dressing. You can also use purchased frozen falafel, or even repurpose takeout leftovers! This one is a massive hit with my family.

For Staller, foraging is a "precious" and "simple" activity that one can do to connect with nature. They can experience a sense of mindfulness from gathering together, looking for food and then cooking the bounty, she said. "We are returning to the most basic part of being a human, which is eating food and celebrating it," Staller said. "It's a lost artform."

Soaked and blended, cashews become a stand-in for heavy cream, keeping stuffed shells, soups, pasta sauces, and desserts luxuriously dairy-free. Toasted and roughly chopped, they add crunch to salads, curries, stir-fries, and more. There are so many reasons to love cooking with these seeds-that's right, "cashew nut" is technically a misnomer, since they grow outside the fruit rather than inside a hard shell like true nuts.