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 [...]

  Chris Christensen wanted to delay getting “a real job” with a suit and a cubicle. At least that’s the joke version of why the Cedar Rapids native became a winemaker in California. In truth, it’s the combination of craftsmanship and science — two things Christensen loves — that piqued his interest. “I’ve built furniture [...]

  It was almost a year ago that Lily Herrmeyer came home from school with some atypical homework — a cabbage plant. Carol Young, Lily’s third grade teacher at West Cedar Elementary in Waverly, and West Cedar’s other third grade teacher have distributed the cabbage plants to their students for years as part of the [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — The Norton family — Mark, Josie and their two boys, Cooper, 5, and Jackson — love a good parade. “We go to parades all summer long, it’s our thing,” Josie Norton says. “I love parades. The boys love the fire trucks and the candy doesn’t hurt, either.” It was at the Great [...]

CEDAR RAPIDS — Rich Patterson ate a lot of salmon in the early 1970s. A fishery biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Patterson said there wasn’t a lot of other food available while stationed at a counting tower, counting migrating salmon. Not that he’s complaining. “There are times I really miss that,” [...]

Cake or pie? Choose your side. The war starts now. The words scribbled in blue chalk, scrawled on the cement parking lot of Iowa City’s Bread Garden Market, caught my eye last summer. I never found out who declared the cake-pie war, but the Gazette features department had no trouble taking sides in this delicious [...]

  IOWA CITY — Hanna Rosman never had to embrace the “eat local” movement. The daughter of a farmer, eating local was her childhood. “I was raised with that knowledge and understanding of food,” says Rosman, a University of Iowa senior majoring in anthropology. So when she moved out of the dorms and into an [...]

It turns out the next best thing since sliced bread is more bread. Not preservative laden white slices, though. It’s specialty bread, from your grandmother’s homemade honey wheat to classic sourdough and beyond, that’s getting it’s due. “People have always liked bread in some fashion, but now they are becoming more aware that there is other [...]

The new year has barely begun, yet experts already have shared lists of the movies to watch, books to read and the clothes to wear in 2013. Even the food we eat is on the table. Research analysts, marketing groups and food experts have released their culinary predictions for 2013. As expected, the “eat local” [...]

The holidays are winding down, but we still have one more opportunity to eat, drink and be merry. What better way to celebrate New Year’s Eve than by combining alcohol and sweet snacks? We hear that boozy desserts will be one of the hot food trends of 2013. So, be a trendsetter. Your diet can [...]