Someone on reddit recently described the root source as the “best food and cooking newsletter on the web.” To which we say: thanks dogisdad, whoever you are. (We’ve checked with immediate family and no one has claimed responsibility.) Thursday’s Hass avocado edition was our most widely read yet.

We started the root source because we wanted to receive at least one regular food and cooking email (blog updates excluded) that was nice to look at and useful, and — to our ears at least — sounded like it had been written by an actual human. We’ve since discovered other beautiful contributions to the genre, notably the stunning monthly newsletter from Cravings.

Do you have a favorite food and cooking newsletter? Let us know in the comments. And if you’re not yet receiving the root source, we’d love for you to sign up and let us know what you think.

Asparagus is one of the easier vegetables to prep. Still, there are a few good tricks to know. Here’s my usual approach for just about every asparagus dish:

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(Please welcome guest blogger Elizabeth Hughey, a.k.a. Chip’s wife.)

For the past 1000 days, I have eaten the same breakfast almost every morning: veggie sausage, egg white and melted cheese sandwiched in an English muffin. It is called, creatively, the “breakfast sandwich,” and while substitutions and experiments are allowed (just this morning, Chip said he was going to put leftover lasagna on his), I prefer to stick to the original recipe.

Normally when I wake up, I immediately look forward to the breakfast sandwich. I feel satisfied and fueled (but not weighed down) after eating it. I feel a little “off” when I opt for fruit and cereal instead. For three years, it was the most regular thing in my life.

And then I became pregnant. Almost immediately, the breakfast sandwich was out, along with most of the staples in my diet that made me feel really happy and good. Five weeks into my pregnancy, on a Saturday afternoon, I bought two chocolate chip cookies from one of my favorite bakers in town. While everything I’ve known about cookies told me to finish them off, something wasn’t right. There was a chalky, aspirin-like aftertaste. That night, my turkey burger at the local pub had a hint of rubber and smelled a little bit like a basketball. For a few days, suspicious tastes and smells accompanied familiar foods.

Then the casualties began. I couldn’t consume, think about, or even look at the following: coffee, vegetables, beans, rice, chocolate, butter, most cheeses, garlic, herbs and eggs. Even innocuous toast and tummy-settling sparkling water made me gag.

I made it through the day chain-eating saltines, lemon drops, graham crackers, Nilla wafers and popsicles — basically refined flour and sugar (a big “no-no” in What to Eat When You Are Expecting) — with maybe an apple choked down for fiber. I could get through the day on refined carbs, but by nighttime, feeling weak and ravenous (and bloated and queasy), I needed something substantial. Usually, I felt that there was one meal (and one meal only) that I could eat. What that meal was changed daily and would come to me minutes before I wanted Chip to make it.

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The recipes with which we’ll launch the main Cookthink site will be a starting point. We’ll have Cookthink interpretations of some classic recipes. We’ll have recipes we’ve put together over the past six months that are based on what’s been in the fridge. And we’ll have recipes that we’ve written based on the Cookthink recipe map.

What is the Cookthink recipe map exactly?

We started by compiling a list of the most commonly available (in the U.S. and Canada, at least) ingredients — accessible cuts of meat, vegetables, grains, herbs, spices and so on.

Next, we went through each ingredient and chose a few different ways to prepare each one, simply. What are three good ways to cook broccoli? What are our favorite techniques for boneless, skinless chicken breasts? After single ingredients, we mixed and matched. Which chicken-broccoli dish most excites us?

In creating recipes, we varied the tastes and flavors of dishes by focusing on different cuisines. What would make that marinade Asian instead of Italian? What spices would make that stew Moroccan instead of Indian? What makes one salad Provencal and another Alsatian? And so on.

It’s a lot of terrain to cover and we’ve barely started. We’re finishing the foundation now and can’t wait to keep building with our users, each of whom will bring individual quirks and moods to the Cookthink community.

Anyway, speaking of the recipe map, here’s a basic dish I’ve been testing — sautéed chicken breasts with a vegetable-heavy pan sauce — that we’ll vary in many different ways. This is a southern Italian take.

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Both Brys and I talk about how we wish we had more green in us. We do both work from home and other than the kitchen and the computer, we use very little electricity.

And we are both pretty curious about food production and policy, and try to know as much as we can about where what we eat comes from. But in general, when we think about food, we think first about flavor, about the immediate experience of eating.

To compensate, we count on blogs like the Ethicurean, a group effort whose daily digest is the first thing I read in the morning.

Another daily green read for me: Ideal Bite. Like tens of thousands of others, I’ve been getting their Daily Tip emails for the past year or so and have especially enjoyed their Wednesday food tips. (Ideal Bite’s daily tip was a big inspiration for the root source.) The Ideal Bite crew is suggestive, playful and charmingly unpushy (and just plain charming — Brys was deflated to hear that Jen has been “kindling a new friendship with a certain gentleman” that’s not him) — like a teacher who makes you want to get an A+.

Today’s Bite is called The Chip Tip, and in addition to being their best title yet, it’s a perfect accompaniment to tomorrow’s root source on the Hass avocado.

Our sap boiling experience this week got Elizabeth craving the Lady Killigrew’s house dressing, a soy-maple vinaigrette. They mix it into a field greens salad with finely chopped beets and carrots. (Some chopped nuts would add nice texture.)

Having asked about the dressing a long time ago, we knew the basic ingredients, but they make the stuff in huge batches at the café. Brys wrote last fall about the formula for vinaigrettes. I played around with the recipe a little and came up with something that tasted a lot like what we get down the street.

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Our neighbor Mark Lattanzi has a backyard sugar shack, and on Saturday he and his family hosted a potluck sap boil. Alejandro invited us to come along and we took drop cookies made with some of Elise Bauer’s intense Seville Orange marmalade.

While walking us through the process of boiling sap down to syrup, Mark mentioned that at the Y earlier this month, some old timer had asked him how the sap was flowing. They talked for a few and then the guy mentioned that all he cared about was having enough sap to make his boiled parsnips.

Curious, Mark decided to try his own parsnips boiled in sap. While Mark tended to the evaporator, Susan Chang took over the parsnips.

The raw sap had the texture and taste of a light sugar water. Susan got a pot of it boiling in the kitchen and roughly chopped the parsnips. They went into the pot of sap and simmered until they were tender.

While we sat around snacking on Kimberly Simmons’ venison stew and talking beer with her husband John (a cidermaker and home brewer), Susan drained the parsnips, mixed in a little butter, then seasoned to taste with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper.

The finished parsnips were tender but still had some tooth to them. They tasted a little like young carrots, pleasantly woody (Susan nailed it with “sandalwood”) and slightly sweet, though how much of that was from the sap I’m not sure. They went surprisingly well with a glass of Guiness.

Next weekend, I may drop by and see if I can scrounge enough sap from Mark to use for some glazed parsnips (recipe below). It’s my favorite way to eat them. I wonder if I could leave out the sugar? (more…)

In this week’s root source, our tenth, we fawned over asparagus. If you’ve not yet signed up for the root source, do it soon. Like love in the summer of 1967, it’s free and easy. All subscribers will be included in our upcoming closed beta testing period for the main Cookthink site. More soon about that.

Earlier this week, some of our favorite books from the past year were nominated for James Beard Foundation Awards.

In the Asian cooking category, my favorite from this year, James Oseland’s Cradle of Flavor, will compete with Andrea Nguyen’s Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodway, Modern Flavors.

In the Food of the Americas category, The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook is our favorite. But in the International category, it’s a tough call between Claudia Roden’s Arabesque, Ana Sortun’s Spice and Marcus Samuelsson’s exploration of African-fusion, The Soul of a New Cuisine.

Same trouble in the Writing on Food category. Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma will probably win (and deservedly so), but as a piece of writing, I think Bill Buford’s Heat is the best of the group, which also includes David Kamp’s very good The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation.

I was happy to see the Southern Foodway Alliance’s John T. Edge nominated in the Newspaper, Newsletter or Magazine Columns category for his “Saving Southern Food” series in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

And kudos to Sheryl Julian and the Boston Globe for the nomination in the Newspaper food section category. (Congratulations also to Joe Yonan, the Washington Post’s food editor, who came from the Globe last year.)

The JBF has a PDF of all the nominees. And thanks to Serious Eats for steering us to Snack’s look at some of the more bizarre guidelines for nominations.

Is it okay to eat asparagus with your fingers? According to Emily Post’s original Etiquette, published in 1922: yes, with reservations.

Although asparagus may be taken in the fingers, don’t take a long drooping stalk, hold it up in the air and catch the end of it in your mouth like a fish. When the stalks are thin, it is best to cut them in half with the fork, eating the tips like all fork food; the ends may then be taken in the fingers and eaten without a dropping foutain effect! Don’t squeeze the stalks, or hold your hand below the end and let the juice run down your arm.

Later versions of Etiquette uphold these rules but even less enthusiastically.

By reputation this is a finger food, but the ungraceful sight of seeing a bent stalk of asparagus dripping like a fountain into someone’s mouth, and the fact that water is also likely to drip from the end, has been the reason why most fastidious people invariably eat it — at least partially — with a fork. That is, cut the stalks with a fork to where they become harder, and then pick up the ends in the fingers if you choose. But don’t squeeze the stalks, or hold your hand below the end and let the juice run down your arm.

More recently, the Emily Post Institute gave a tepid, qualified endorsement of fingers:

While asparagus may be eaten with the fingers, this only is if the spear is crisp and has no sauce or butter on it. However, if everything else is being eaten with a fork and a knife, it is far preferable to use cutlery to eat the asparagus, too, even if it is unadorned.

So basically, you can eat asparagus with your fingers, but don’t do it unless you’re alone and there’s no one there to watch you. And you have no shame.