Today on [Serious Eats](http://www.seriouseats.com/):

Cooking With Kids: Eat Your Veggies

> Honestly, my daughter is four now and hardly likes any vegetables, but the key to getting her to eat vegetables when she was younger was using plenty of butter, olive oil, or peanut oil. Not just because this made the vegetables taste better (this was before she developed strong taste preferences) but because fat, well, lubricates. Babies are less likely to gag on well-oiled vegetables.

> The same is true of 20-year-olds, apparently.

Be sure to read the comments, where people suggest all kinds of great-tasting vegetable dishes that Iris will probably not eat–but I will.

This month on [Culinate](http://culinate.com):

Cocoa nut: All about powdered chocolate

> As I broke off a square of Chocovic, I noticed my lone can of Hershey’s cocoa powder, and found myself wondering: Was I missing the potential of cocoa powder just because it has zero snack potential?

While writing this article, I spoke to actual people named Callebaut (Richard) and Guittard (Gary). This was totally cool. I did not speak to anyone named Hershey, Valrhona, or Dagoba.

P.S.: It was hard not to type “Gary Glitter” every time I meant “Gary Guittard.”

You know what the best food in the world is? It’s a free sample of chicken in some kind of sweet sauce, served on a toothpick, found in a food court. Iris and I were at Uwajimaya today, and she asked for a sample of orange chicken at the Thai counter, and she reported that it was awesome. But you know what I’m talking about: bourbon chicken from the cajun place, orange peel chicken from the Chinese place, doesn’t matter.

Corollary: If you order and pay for a whole serving of the chicken, it’s not very good.

Is it just me, or is “Patagonian Toothfish” a way cooler name for a fish than “Chilean Sea Bass”?

Is it just me, or is “Dr. Jekyll” a way creepier name than “Mr. Hyde”?

Is it just me, or am I supposed to be working on something else?

Last week on Gourmet.com there was an interview with the author of a book called The Jungle Effect, which is about the value of traditional diets and how we can accrue some of that value without having to actually live in the jungle. The author, Daphne Miller, wisely pitches her book as a companion volume to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: he tells you why to eat a traditional diet, she tells you specifically what to eat.

I haven’t read the book and am agnostic on its thesis, but I liked this part a lot:

> At a conference last week I was asked to help people determine what’s a healthy oil and what isn’t, because it’s so confusing. So I sat down and looked at traditional oils, which are oils that have been used for cooking for thousands of years, versus the oils that we’ve had since the Industrial Revolution (essentially for the past 100 years or so, or a little less). The way that you can make the distinction easily is to take a mortar and pestle and see if you can make that oil–if you even have a fighting chance of making that oil. Take a kernel of corn, for example, and stick it in your mortar and pestle and go at it. And you call me when you get that corn oil, okay? Versus take something like a palm fruit or an olive or a piece of coconut or something like that–you’re not going to make gallons of oil [when you grind it yourself], but you’re going to get something greasy.

As I said, I don’t know if the oils she’s talking about are the healthiest (thought if I had to bet, I would bet that they are), but they are definitely *the most delicious.* Especially if you add duck fat, butter, and lard to the list.

Using better cooking fats is one of the easiest ways for a cook to make a better dinner. Olive oil, peanut oil, lard, and butter are four of my best friends in the kitchen. And they can be your friends too!

**NOTE:** I am on a hardcore deadline for the next month and you will probably see little of me, online or in person, between now and June 15.