Batch of links

- Have you ever wondered where Bon Appétit recipes come from? If so, you’ll like this article.

- Had you heard of Food Pickle? This gem of a name is the Food 52 board which basically serves as a cooking hotline: you can ask questions (such as how to convert units in a recipe, what to do with leftover ingredients, which ingredient to substitute, how to gut a fish, etc.) and get answers relatively quickly from the community. It’s been online for a while, but I now notice it’s very active, and as I write this, the top posts had new answers every few minutes. This is great if time is of the essence!

- Also, 60 of the most common cooking mistakes, illustrated.

- The difference between cherry and grape tomatoes (I tend to prefer grape tomatoes myself).

- Do you need to dimple burger patties so they stay flat once cooked? The answer is here.

- How the weird art of food photography went mainstream.

- My life as a Magnolia cupcake bouncer. Admittedly, this isn’t most people’s idea of a fulfilling career, but wouldn’t that look great on a business card?

- A neat, albeit cluttered, infographic of how food moves from one state to another within the US.

- I had blogged about a packaging-free grocery store in Austin, called in.gredients. There’s now an equivalent in Berlin, Original Unverpackt (and here’s a subtitled video that explains the concept, along with an article). The more I think about it, the more I wish all grocery stores would apply some of the same principles. I don’t think the average family could go 100% packaging-free, but there are certainly ways to greatly reduce how much packaging we use! Part of that can be done by the average consumer, but stores should also offer more packaging-free options. And, well, so should the 10 companies that make almost everything we eat.

- Speaking of grocery stores, now that I’ve seen an Aldi grocery store, I really want to go to Wegmans. I imagine that doing a weekly order there must take half the day, but as an experience, it looks like such an awesome store!