Happy National Meatloaf Appreciation Day! If you haven't done so already, today is the time to take out your baking pans and your mom's (or dad's) recipe for meatloaf and put one together. Serious Eats (National Meatloaf Appreciation Day is their brainchild) is going to be posting meatloaf submissions throughout the day, so if you are looking for a little meatloaf inspiration, go check them out.

In order to get in the spirit of the holiday, I made not one, but two meatloafs. The first was a veggie-infused loaf that was close to what my mom used to serve when I was a kid. You can watch me make that one here. Another meatloaf I made strictly for Slashfood readers (and the happiness of my belly). Riffing on the traditional meatloaf recipe that calls for a variety of meats, I went with ground turkey and a Italian seasoned chicken sausage (1 pound each). Make sure to cut the sausage out of the casings and combine well with the turkey.

In a medium frying pan, I combined 1/3 chopped onion, 3 crushed cloves of garlic, 1/3 chopped green pepper, 2 chopped celery stalks (for crunch), one very finely grated potato (I used a microplane) and four large mushrooms, chopped (all chopping was done pretty finely). I cooked the veggies together just until they lost their rawness. I let them cool a little and then added them to the meat, along with a beaten egg, salt and pepper. I mashed it all together until combined and scooped it into a loaf pan. I baked it for about 50 minutes at 375 degrees. If you grate the potato finely enough, it gets really tender during baking, absorbing a lot of the juices. This one was a real winner.

I lot of our food traditions and habits we learn from our parents at an early age. Take pasta sauce. I come from a large Italian family, so we had spaghetti every single week when I was growing up. My mom made her sauce (my dad's recipe, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it was award-winning) and when we put it on the pasta, we put a lot. Not enough so it gets all watery and the pasta is swimming, but certainly enough to cover the pasta out to the edge (more than the photo above).

Now here comes Mark Bittman at The New York Times who agrees with this approach. While most cookbooks will tell you to make a lot of pasta and just add a couple of ladels of sauce in the middle of the plate, Bittman suggests you turn the amounts around and make twice as much sauce as pasta. Mario Batali, in a video from Serious Eats after the jump, disagrees.

How do you sauce your pasta?

Ever buy seasonings in those packets (not that I am particularly endorsing that behavior as they are often full of chemicals) from the grocery store but struggle with how best to store them? Then this tip from the Unclutterer might be up your alley. Get yourself one of those plastic 3x5 (or 4x6 for the larger packets) notecard boxes and pop the packets in there. Keeps them contained, orderly and bug-free (if you really want to satisfying your inner anal retentive, go ahead and alphabetize them)!

At one point I was going to actually do a little experiment and actually eat all of the foods on each day of these national food days and write about my eating. But I'm trying to eat better and exercise these days, so events like today's National Chocolate Cupcake Day would just destroy me.

But you're more than happy to go crazy! Here's a recipe from CupCakeRecipes.com, and here's one from CDKitchen. FoodAndWine.com has one for Chocolate Cheesecake Cupcakes, while RecipeZaar has one for Dark Chocolate Cupcakes.

And let's not forget a recipe for the Vegans out there.

Sometimes just the name of a recipe can make your ears (and taste buds) perk up a little bit. Earl Grey Brownies! Sounds like a nice twist to a classic recipe.

The Earl Grey flavor isn't in the actual brownies, it's in the ganache that is spread over the brownies (it includes two Earl Grey tea bags or 1 1/2 tablespoons of Earl Grey tea leaves). The recipe is from Blanche Ip, and with it she won the annual contest held at the Chocolate Bar at the Langham Hotel in Boston. Full recipe after the jump.

Back in July, I wrote about my own efforts to carry reusable bags to the grocery store. In that post, I confessed that my reusable bag purchasing habit was potentially canceling out the effectiveness of using those bags, as I kept buying new ones. I'm happy to state that I've gotten that buying bug under control and that I am now using and reusing the same bags (although the one I took to the grocery store today has a funky, spoiled milk smell going on. Scrubbing may be in order).

However I do still long for a new bag or two and happily the Green Home at Apartment Therapy has come to my rescue with a post about ways to make your own grocery bags. They've got links to bags you can knit and bags you can sew. This is very good incentive for me to dust off my Aunt Flora's long-neglected sewing machine and see if I can't make very own, unique grocery bags.

We try to keep on top of the latest food recalls around these parts, but occasionally we miss one or two. However, Consumer Union, the company that publishes Consumer Reports, has made it a whole lot easier to stay on top of current consumer recalls. They've launched a website called Not In My Cart that gathers recall notices from three federal agencies and posts them for all to see. This way we'll all be able to find out easily and quickly if we need to pull cans of soup off our shelves or toss those burgers that are in the freezer.

Via The Daily Green

Late last week, the Washington Post's Kim O'Donnel wrote a post on her blog, A Mighty Appetite, about the food that makes you cry. The food that evokes memory in a way that is bittersweet or layered and complex. She recounts a friend's tale of his mother's post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwiches and her own experience teaching a young friend to cook Joe's Special (the recipe is at the end of the post) while in Zambia.

For me, the foods that make me cry are linked to simple joyful times. During the years when I was in college, I always went home to live with my parents for the summers. On weekend mornings, my dad would often cook breakfast for us, concocting vast egg scrambles bursting with spinach, zucchini, tomatoes and basil from his garden. Having breakfast made for me always made me feel so cared for, a true sign of love through food.

What are the foods that make you cry? (Tears of joy and sadness are both welcome).

Seems like Coca-Cola is coming full circle some 120 years after its invention by druggist John Stith Pemberton.

Well, sort of.

Yesterday the soft-drink giant unveiled the Coca-Cola Research Center for Chinese Medicine in Beijing.

Coca-Cola has set up a lab to experiment with new Chinese herbal flavors for Coke and other beverage products. It's the first international company to open such a facility at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. Coca-Cola plans to have its researchers develop beverages using Chinese herbal ingredients and formulas.

A Coca-Cola spokesperson had this to say "This collaboration will ultimately help us bring the insights and benefits of traditional Chinese medicine to consumers all over the world." And it should probably give them a bit more cred than Vitamin Water. Though to be frank, I'm not quite sure I'm ready for Diet Coke with ginseng.

Apparently the pressures and rivalry that come with being one of Britain's leading chocolatiers sometimes cause men to do strange things. Witness the case of Barry Colenso, the erstwhile master chocolatier of the prestigious Thorntons who was forced to resign after a "truffle-squishing" incident at a rival store.

That's right folks. We said, gasp, "truffle squishing." Actually it's no laughing matter. The man who has been likened to Willy Wonka and who you see standing before a chocolate billboard he created last Easter went on a truffle vandalism spree at rival store Hotel Chocolat where he mangled some $130 of confections. Store staff knew something was up when they noticed him pawing at the various truffles. Hotel Chocolat issued a statement saying, "This was an extraordinary act of truffle-squishing. We can only guess at what provoked it."

I know said something about this not being a laughing matter, after all it was highly unprofessional behavior, but I can't help thinking of the scene in Tampopo where the elderly female shopper roams through a store squeezing and destroying a wide array of items. It also begs the question, did they sell the damaged goods at a lower price or remake them or what? Personally, I'm not above eating a squished truffle or two.

[via Boing Boing]

If you are one of those foodies who entertains fantasies of going on a vacation of no holds barred eating, then you must check out this article, detailing the trip that Adam Goldman took with two buddies through Spain. They ate for two weeks straight, spending more than $17,000 (for someone whose current car cost but $2,000 that amount seems heart-stopping) on food, wine and booze and gaining nearly 25 between them.

They centered the trip around three Spanish Michelin-starred restaurants, Arzak, Mugaritz and Can Fabes, that are known for their outstanding eats and unique approaches to food. The descriptions of what they ate are fairly quick, but at the end of the article I still felt a little dizzy with all they managed to squeeze in. Sounds like a food-trip of a lifetime.

Via Serious Eats

I have very strong memories of carving pumpkins when I was a kid. My parents would cover the dining room table in newspaper, bring out strong serving spoons (for scraping down the inside of the pumpkin) and put a large metal mixing bowl in the middle of the table. All the pumpkin innards would go into that bowl and while my sister, dad and I were happily carving our pumpkins into goofy, spooky faces, my mom would get the not-so-nice job of separating the pumpkin guts from the seeds.

She was meticulous about liberating every last seed from the slimy strings of pumpkin entrails. She'd rinse the seeds well and dry them in a single layer on a kitchen towel. Then she'd spread them out on a rimmed baking sheet, sprinkle them with salt and roast them in the oven until they turned golden brown. I loved taking a little container of these roasted pumpkin seeds to school with me for an after lunch treat and I was always sad when they were gone.

Yesterday I toasted up the seeds from a small baking pumpkin I had. I didn't do it quite the way my mom used to. Instead, I melted a small pat of butter in a medium non-stick skillet. When it was melted, I added the seeds and let them start to toast. When they were getting near the brown color I was going for, I added some kosher salt, cracked pepper and crushed, dried rosemary leaves. A couple last tosses in the pan to combine the seasonings and they were done. Just like childhood (if even slightly better).

I've been cutting down on carbs lately and looking for an excuse to have a big plate of spaghetti topped with sauce and grated parmesan cheese. Hello National Pasta Day!

I could spend the entire day just doing posts for pasta, it's such a versatile food, but I can't do that. Instead, here are several pasta recipes from various sites, including Epicurious, AllRecipes, RecipeZaar, Food Network, The Reluctant Gourmet and The National Pasta Association.

And don't forget the sauce! Here are several recipes from About.com and this one from MealsMatter.org for Southwestern Pasta Sauce.

Many "limited edition" candy bars are limited because they are tied specifically to some event or celebrity (Reese's Peanut Butter and Banana Elvis bars) or maybe a holiday. A lot of limited edition candy bars are also, well, just lame. But this ones sounds promising: Twix Java.

Besides being an excellent name for a video game character, Twix Java is a new limited edition candy bar that consists of coffee, caramel, and chocolate cookie covered in milk chocolate. The Candy Addict has tried it and really likes it.

Since this is a limited edition, maybe you can buy 20 or 30 bars for your favorite coffee/chocolate addict and put them in a Christmas stocking.