I am always looking for ways to make use of what some may consider scraps. So when the blue-eyed boy at the farmers market asks if I want the greens cut off my leeks or spring onions, I always wince at the thought that those flavorful green bits will come to naught.

A pang of self-congratulation always washes over me when I find uses for parmesan rinds, parsley stems and other overlooked culinary real estate. But it never even occurred to me to wonder if those lovely wasted radish leaves were edible until I stumbled on Clotilde’s recipe for radish leaf pesto the other day.

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Congratulations to Jennifer McLagan, whose Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes, won the James Beard media award for cookbook of the year.

You can find recipes from that book — including homemade country-style butter and duck confit — on Cookthink.com.

To mark Obama’s 100 days in office, we’re making this bold, complex and nutritious One Hundred Almond Curry with chicken from Niloufer Ichaporia King’s My Bombay Kitchen.

Get a glimpse of our own Soup Kitchen columnist Domenica Marchetti at work in her kitchen whipping up a simple and delicious-looking pork ragu with this audio slideshow in the Washington Post Food Section.

Domenica Marchetti is a food writer, recipe developer and cooking teacher who specializes in seasonal Italian home cooking and the author of The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy (Chronicle Books, 2006). Visit her web site at www.domenicacooks.com. You can find more of her recipes here.

The crock pots — there were 15 of them — were arranged around a makeshift buffet table set up in the clubhouse of the Severn Sailing Association. Behind the table, long windows framed a winter view of the Annapolis, Maryland harbor. Across the room, a fire blazed in a large brick fireplace.

The beautiful view and the inviting fire were mere perks, however; I was here for what was in those crock pots: chowder. I had been invited to be a judge in the Sixth Annual Chowder Competition hosted by Association member Sean Smith. How did I land this plum assignment?
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In today’s NYT, Bittman praises the savory, whole grain breakfast. Best accompanying recipe: wheat berries with sesame, soy sauce and scallions.

As you may have noticed, 2009 is both the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species.

Having read a lot of and about Darwin over the past couple of years while researching my book about pluots, I’m sort of Darwined out at the moment. Still, I was interested to read that a couple of authors have compiled a book of recipes based on the notebooks of Emma Darwin.

While the food Emma cooked for her family seems to have been pretty straightforward — roasted mushrooms, beef collops, baked apple pudding — Charles is known to have been an adventurous eater elsewhere.

As Chloe Diski observed in the Guardian a few years ago, Darwin led the Glutton Club while a student at Cambridge. The group met weekly to eat “strange flesh” — hawk, bittern, owl — and discuss its relative merits. Later in life, while sailing on the Beagle, he ate, among other odd things, armadillos and “a 20-lb, chocolate-coloured rodent.” Take that, Zimmern!

The WSJ reports on the more than 40 Facebook groups dedicated to the hatred of cilantro.

You won’t find much cilantro hate around here. We love it in burritos, in salads, in soups and in just about anything else.

Related: 10 Ways To Use Up Leftover Fresh Herbs (Cookthink blog)
Recipe: My Favorite Herb Salad (Kalyn’s Kitchen)

Here are some food stories that caught our eye this week:

1. The salmonella-driven peanut butter recall continues to expand. Keep track of the outbreak’s scope with the FDA’s recall Twitter feed.

2. Some good old-fashioned olfactory forensics got to the bottom of the sweet mystery scent that has occasionally descended upon Manhattan. The culprit: fenugreek.

3. The Alice Waters backlash prattles on.

4. One of the Bush Administration’s last actions was to raise prohibitive tariffs on Roquefort cheese. Nice knowing you, blue.

5. In the UK, some hospitals are promoting meat-free meals in an effort to reduce their carbon footprint. To the same end, some like-minded folks are ditching their fridges.

6. Remember Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s? This disgruntled Virgin Airline passenger’s tirade against his in-flight meal (”a bloody crime against cooking”) could be the opening shot of Letters to Sir Richard.

My favorite food blog these days is The Fruit Blog, written by “Evil Fruit Lord”, a berry breeder in California. You won’t find recipes here, but if you love fruit or fruit breeding (better still, both), then read this blog.