• In honor of the recent holiday, some Easter-themed baking and cooking failures (thanks to my brother J for the link!) I think the deviled eggs are my favorite.

• A slideshow of cooking tricks and tips from Bon Appétit. Brown rice takes at least 45 minutes to cook in our rice cooker — we’re curious to find out whether soaking it in water first will really speed up the process.

• We’re thinking about getting one of these tools for “spiralizing” our spring/summer vegetable bounty from the farmer’s market. Here’s a more fancy version with additional size/spiral options.

• Anybody following the latest food trend of completely giving up sugar? This family cut out all added sugar for a year and wrote a memoir about their experience. A chef who eliminated sugar from her diet shared a couple of dessert recipes on the Today Show recently, and talked about using brown rice syrup instead of sugar because it adds natural sweet flavor, but has no fructose. We don’t often eat dessert or have much sweet stuff around the house, but reading articles and lists concerning the surprising sugar content of foods you don’t typically think of as “sweet” has me checking food labels much more than I have in the past.