Translated: spaghetti with garlic, oil, and chili pepper flakes. This is the kind of meal that makes you stop and think that the simplest foods are often the most wonderful. With only a few ingredients that are staples in most pantries, you can create a beautiful, flavorful, heartwarming meal from scratch. Spaghetti aglio, olio, e peperoncino is a traditional Italian pasta dish. It's well loved Read more

We're excited to bring you a new post from mother and actress Tori Spelling! Every other week, we're bringing you the best parenting and lifestyle advice from ediTORIal by Tori Spelling, which is Tori's daily blog about everything from food and fashion to parenting and relationships. This week, Tori shares her favorite lasagna recipe. I've been making my lasagna recipe since my early 20s. When I Read more

We've got a new partnership with Padma Lakshmi! The host of the Emmy-winning Top Chef, writer, and designer started Padma Lakshmi, a social-networking site that celebrates our favorite topics including food adventures, recipes, and party planning. She'll be dishing up goodies for us here on YumSugar monthly. Today Padma offers creative ideas for cooking with pumpkin during the Winter Read more

The holidays are always a little hectic, and there's definitely some added pressure for those of us who volunteer to play host for a Hanukkah celebration, Christmas dinner, or New Year's Eve party. We caught up with entertaining expert Katie Lee as she toasted her role as Clos du Bois wine ambassador in LA, and couldn't resist asking for some advice on how to make throwing a successful seasonal Read more

All that holiday gifting is only half the merriment of the holidays. The rest of it — in our opinion, at least! — comes from the joy of making and savoring special holiday treats that only come once a year. The minute Thanksgiving passed, we move on to dreaming about all the holiday dessert possibilities, and there are simply too many on our to-make list to name. From gingerbread cookies to Read more

With the demands of the holidays, these days when I make a weeknight dinner at home, it's got to be fast. An hour won't cut it — I want something on the table within minutes. My first rule of thumb? Choosing a protein that cooks virtually instantly. Shrimp and thin fillets of fish always do the trick, but last night, I was in the mood for something heartier, like pork. The easiest way to make Read more

For the longest time, I considered porchetta, the slow-roasted Italian pork dish, an order-at-a-restaurant-only entrée; it seemed too hard to make at home. For a recent holiday dinner party, however, I wanted to serve roast pork, so I threw caution to the wind and wound up making a delicious variation of the flavorful dish. Porchetta takes a couple of hours to roast, but it's guaranteed to fill Read more

Often times recipes that call for parsley will specify which kind to use, but when they don't, how do you know whether to use flat leaf or curly leaf parsley? The general consensus among cooks and culinary enthusiasts seems to be that flat leaf (also known as Italian) parsley has more flavor and should be used in recipes that call for parsley. The curly leaf variety is less flavorful and is Read more

Chef Mario Batali is on the hunt for a new assistant! Not just any assistant, but a media production coordinator to be exact, and he's letting Monster conduct a vast and extensive search for the perfect candidate. Prospective coordinators can apply for the job from now until June 13; Batali hopes to have the person up and running with his team around July 25. This morning I spoke with the Read more

I'm not sure whether it's their versatility, their delicious flavor, or their purple glossy hue that's won me over, but whenever eggplant season rolls around I couldn't be happier. And luckily their season lasts from July to October, giving us ample time to enjoy its bounty. Eggplants have had a pretty interesting history. For centuries after their introduction to Europe — the aubergine Read more