Food

Right about now farmers' market devotees start coming home with more than they know what to do with, simply because it's all so beautiful.

But an unusually good crop of produce-centered cookbooks offers inventive ways to use the bounty to its best advantage.

Susie Middleton's "Fast, Fresh and Green" injects your cooking with a little "Huah!!" and offers a strategy for decoding and deploying a greater variety of vegetables.

We recently returned from a trip to Pittsburgh for a close friend's wedding. It takes about four hours to drive there, which meant that we were bound to get hungry on the road. This was a great chance to flex our frugal muscles!

Most of the meals out there were paid for but we still had to feed ourselves on the drive out and back, and we like to have snacks and drinks on hand. How can you save money on the road this travel season? By planning ahead, of course.

Meals on the go

When it comes to ground meat (or most any meats for that matter), it's a simple equation: fat equals flavor and moisture.

It would follow then that a low-fat burger should be dry and tasteless, right? Not necessarily.

While it may be tempting to go for 90 or 95 percent lean ground beef or turkey when crafting a leaner burger, the results will be disappointing. A better choice is to use a juicier 85 percent lean meat and find other ways to cut the fat.

The idea behind this pork version of the sloppy joe sandwich wasn't just to come up with an alternative to ground beef.

I wanted something with a totally different – dare I say, meaty – texture.

Because face it, sloppy joes may be tasty, but the flavor and texture of whatever meat goes into them usually gets lost beneath a heavy sauce.

So rather than use ground meat, I opted for chopped. About 10 seconds in the food processor was all it took to get meaty chunks perfect for piling onto a bun.