NORTH LIBERTY — Summer and ice cream go together like peanut butter and jelly, or, well, ice cream and cones. To satisfy summer’s sweet tooth with a cool creamy cone (or bowl), head to the local ice cream shop, hit up the grocery freezer aisle or make your own. Sound complicated? It’s not. And you [...]

Great Harvest Bread Company will open its first bakery in Iowa this August in Cedar Rapids. Cedar Rapids residents Dion and Laurel Williams will own and operate the store, at 5070 Lindale Drive NE, across the street from Lindale Mall. Laurel Williams said the space will be about 2,500 square feet, most of which will [...]

  CEDAR RAPIDS — It was a busy week for Craig Hazelbaker. On Wednesday, his girlfriend of 15 years moved into his house. On Saturday, the couple completed the kitchen remodel that was first sketched on a cocktail napkin a year ago. “We finished at 10:30 a.m.,” Hazelbaker said. Thirty minutes later, a film crew [...]

WATERLOO — In every family, there’s that one dish everybody loves. In the Hines family, it’s my grandmother’s beef and noodles. Maxine Hines was never one for baking cookies or knitting. Instead, she’d plan a road trip just to try authentic vanilla Coke, take me to visit a psychic or fill a piñata with candy [...]

  The summer grilling season just got easier — at least that’s what the National Pork Board and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association hope. The two organizations recently announced new names for more than 350 cuts of pork and beef. The change comes on the heels of nearly two years of consumer research in which [...]

Salsas, jams, vegetables – choose a canning category and its likely Diane Roupe has at least one blue ribbon from the Iowa State Fair in it, if not more. Not too shabby for a woman who once had very little canning experience. “My mother and my grandmother both canned, but I actually never canned myself [...]

Yara Shoemaker worried her husband the first time she experimented with shot glass salads. “My husband came home and he saw all those shot glasses on the counter,” Shoemaker says with a laugh during a recent phone interview. “He said, ‘Are you OK?’” A former model, aesthetician and boutique owner, Shoemaker grew up in Syria [...]

IOWA CITY — When students at the Regina Catholic Education Center finish the school year May 31, they will have composted more than 11,000 pounds of food waste from their cafeteria since August. That waste once went to the landfill, where it took up space and generated methane, a potent greenhouse gas. But since August [...]

The demand for food that’s fresh and local just keeps growing. That’s just as true in retirement communities as anywhere else. “We used to serve what you would consider ‘industrial food’ — thaw it out, cook it, serve it,” says Laurie Fish, dietary services manager at the Hiawatha Care Center, a 95-bed skilled nursing facility [...]