Editor's Choice: Cahoot's House Rub

  We get a lot of BBQ sauce and other spice mixes at the Fancy Food offices. Most of them are...special, the way the French mean special. I am always delighted to find a diamond in the rough. Cahoots Catering's House Rub is a great product. Despite the misleadingly pastoral label and dilettante design, this is a rub that works, and keeps working.

I have used it at home on the grill, in the crock pot and in the oven. It adds warmth and flavor to meats and veggies without over-powering the natural tastes. There is no sugar added, just natural spices, so it is like an original blend you would buy at a fancy spice shop.

My favorite use of the House Rub is on a whole chicken. As I have mentioned before, we eat a lot of chicken from the grill at my house. I just lightly coat a whole chicken in olive oil and then with a sprinkle coating of House Rub over that, and some in the cavity, and pop it over a beer can and onto the grill for an hour (last week I used "retro" 7-Up with real sugar and it was amazing). What you get is perfectly seasoned and browned chicken with a crispy skin and flavorful meat without too much salt or overpowering spices. Perfect. When it is monsieur's turn to cook, he is always looking for, "That good spice, the one you used last time." I can't wait to try it on a roast this winter.

-Elizabeth Dugan

Editor's Choice: Fire & Flavor Ice Box Dill Pickling Seasoning

I don't can. It smacks of effort and I don't have any counter space. But my best friend does. So, when I went to visit her in her lovely Arlington, MA home, I brought some canning stuff along, because what else are two girls who have been besties for 20+ years going to do? She swore to me that she had the right stuff for pickles, but it turned out the cucumbers had other ideas and grew a fuzzy green winter coat. Ah well. We rolled with it and decided to make Dilly Beans instead, with the Fire & Flavor Crispy Icebox Dill spices for canning. It was a rousing success.

This little packet of spices needs you have on hand: FRESH dill (there is dried dill included), garlic cloves (we used the cheater garlic, already diced and in the jar), vinegar, water and of course the veggies you are pickling.  Luckily my friend had all this stuff in her home because we started our canning adventure 1/2 a bottle of wine in at 11 p.m. Replacing the cucumbers with fresh green beans from the local organic farm was the wild card. We had both green beans and white green beans (stay with me here) which made for very attractive jars of canned stuff, which is not something you can count on. Home-canned vegetables can look like a science experiment at times, though they usually taste delicious. These were both attractive AND tasty.

The spice packet included is flavorful and aromatic. As soon as we opened it and put it in the hot water and vinegar, we knew this was going to go well. We made two double pints instead of the four pints the package calls for. I didn't get to taste the dilly beans, myself but the next week, my nephews consumed both jars of dilly beans in 34.59 seconds, I am told, and they asked for more. No greater endorsement than that.

-Elizabeth Dugan