Happy Groundhog’s Day. Feel like your life is the same, boring day over and over again? Change it.

Warm and fuzzies. Let the sky never be just blue again. Winter be damned forever. Gratitude and grace abound.

The chef prepares seared foie gras under glass. Warning: this video will make you so, so hungry.

“I accept my duty to be an Official KCBS Certified Judge, so that truth, justice, excellence in Barbecue and the American Way of Life may be strengthened and preserved forever.”

If you don’t get out and enjoy yourself this weekend then we can’t help you. We just… can’t.

AltDaily is a lighthouse in Norfolk’s sea of journalism, and a major seaport without a lighthouse is very dangerous proposition.

I didn’t cut and burn my fingers on countless kitchen hazards to scoop out giant sandwiches and give a camera a come-hither stare that seems to say, “Hey there, Tiger, this big sandwich? It’s all yours.”

There’s just something about it. Something addictive almost, and it’s not the caffeine. Plus, a Norfolk coffee shop guide.

“There are so many reasons to buy local. Imagine Ghent with big-box stores on every corner, replacing the businesses that know their customers by name with businesses that are only concerned with the bottom line and stripping this historic area of its character.” – Charlie’s Cafe owner Ted Warren

“It’s something you can put your heart and soul into. And when you taste that, it totally comes out, and that’s one of the best parts about it.” – Jimmy Walsh, head brewer

Get out before everyone else is out shoving their Christmas spirit down your throat.

If you’re into Japanese Punk Rock, cake, puppies, women, anime, the 1960s, art, guns, easy money, festivals, bikes, photography, pottery, women, movies, drinks, great food, dancing, or even fairy tales, then there’s a good chance the perfect activity awaits you this weekend.

They say it’s going to rain this weekend, but I refuse to be locked inside. No t-storm or puddle is going to keep me from having fun. And it shouldn’t stop you either.

We are changing our format at AltDaily Food, publishing more discerning (and intense) criticism, and featuring a team of food bloggers, each focused on a different genre of dining.

I could taste the fresh tomatoes, and the garlic balanced it out perfectly. All of the ingredients were from either the Five Points Farm Market or the gardens out back.

I say witty things when I drink this wine. I think deep thoughts.

“What’s ‘Organic’ About Organic” takes an in-depth look at the organic food movement and the players involved. Catch it at the Chrysler Museum on Wednesday.

Betsy DiJulio shares a special recipe from her new cookbook The Blooming Platter Cookbook: A Harvest of Seasonal Vegan Recipes to jumpstart the season’s flavorful collection of meals.

Videographer Mike Frazier attended Farm to Fork, ready to record the dishes being made, talk with local farmers, and to capture visitors’ reactions to the food they sampled.

The incomparable, irrefutable, undeniable Todd Rosenlieb teaches AltDaily Food editor Dana Staves how to make his famous artichoke dip and baked brie.

“Due to some crazy events that occurred during taping, the show we’re featured in has been saved for the season’s grand finale,” Cupcakery owner Dawn Eskins told us.

A view from inside the culture and community of the greater Norfolk metro, with AltDaily editor-in-chief Jesse Scaccia.

Proper preparation for someone with food allergies must be above and beyond what anyone without them would need to do.

I can almost smell it in the air, and I’m not talking about the Dismal Swamp fire. I’m talking about football season.

In order to ward off the addition of any more weight to my body and to keep as many pennies in my wallet as possible, I have put together a nice set of guidelines to help get through the semester.

I admit it: I’m a shrimp-aholic.

Josh is creating a bar flow chart, a guide for local bars to fit everyone’s preferences. He needs your input on the Norfolk version.

I’ve been called a peach more than enough times to feel it is somehow tied to my identity.

34 million tons of food waste into our landfills every year is unacceptable. Bring on the worms!

We playfully knocked on the restaurant’s speakeasy door as if its barred panel would slide back and someone in a fedora would ask us to whisper a password.

AltDaily Food was all a-buzz over Norfolk Restaurant Week, and we’ve got a brief recap of the highlights.

To help you spend your money wisely, I’ve compiled a few suggestions for where to go and what to order if it is plant-based protein that you seek.

I can trust in red clay, and family, in cold beer and greasy food that I don’t have to cook.

I liked corn-related products: popcorn, kettle corn, candy corn.

One of the only instances that “sucking the head” does not mean what you think it means, you freak.

Got beat up at school? Here’s a cookie and a kiss on the cheek. That bully will be sorry when you take over the media. Have another cookie.

Buy cheesecloth, dance new dances, cook new recipes, be blindly ambitious.

Each revelation of our bodies’ secrets, each new story of humiliation and embarrassment, not only bonds us to our women friends, it tries to outdo them.

What do you get when you take a Southern chef with ties to Alabama and a compulsion to help the victims of the tornadoes that ripped through Tuscaloosa in April, and give him Granby Theater for a night?

A complicated mix of success and failure colors my notions of self-worth, and it’s clear to me from interviews with other women that I am not alone in my struggle to be okay with who I am and what I look like.

This beautiful mélange of fresh spring vegetables, herbs, and tofu is light, refreshing, and pairs wonderfully with a deep red dipping sauce.

AltDaily food editor, Dana Staves, and publisher, Hannah Serrano, chow down at HarborFeast.

In a rare moment of culinary serendipity, the stars aligned, butter and wine emulsified, and the result was everything I needed—a creamy sauce, satisfaction, and the promise that things would get better.

San Antonio Sam’s is being replaced by Chipotle. This means I’m losing my favorite bar, and Colley is losing some of its greatness.

I could buy peas in a can, yes. I could buy them frozen in a creamy butter sauce that would melt after three minutes in the microwave. I can get them year round. But they wouldn’t be May peas from a farm in my region.

Give me your foodies, your locavores, your culinarily conscious!

When one knows they will eat a food they hate, they take comfort in the small things they do like. I really like garlic.

Making stock is the easiest thing to do. I now know this.

This past fall Jesse and I spent three months collecting, splitting, pondering, cooking and eating our CSA. And helping to grow a new community.

In the spring, I love nothing more than to cook as Southern as possible. Of all my back issues of Southern Living magazine, the ones with the most wear and tears are the spring and summer issues.

Those are the recipes that highlight the flavor of the ingredients, that have the most defined structure of tastes, and are, quite simply, the most comforting at the end of a long work day.

Comfort food like this isn’t about counting carbs; it’s about pure enjoyment.

I have a certain affection for cookbooks that come out of nowhere – books I find in my Granny’s shed or in used bookstores; because I’m never sure what’s in those pages and I’ve usually never heard of the authors, it’s sort of like stumbling onto a treasure chest.

Excel sheets… long hours… showing respect for your fellow Girl Scouts… It all matters if you want to be great.

When the home is a powerful place, domesticity is empowering.

No one would force us to eat tomatoes. As God was our witness, we would never buckle under the pressure, weaken our resolve, and eat that dastardly vegetable.

“I sense a voice of the 35th Street corridor wanting to breathe new life into its cultural veins. The potential has always been there, and may have been dormant for years, but it can become a creative incubator…”

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That’s what it costs to eat healthy on $30 a week: time.

What to do with all those root veggies and kale that came in your winter CSA batches.

We all know a little better than to gorge ourselves on sugar, but come to face the unfortunate fact that we’re programmed to want it.

A warm, filling, and delicious meal for two for approximately fifty cents. How could we have ever been tricked into thinking that the dollar menu was ever a good deal?

Right on for better health, a healthier local economy and for a feeling of pride in what you see on and eat from, your plate.

I couldn’t figure out why we at Five Points Farm Market couldn’t fill the numerous requests we get for local honey. Coming from a farm, it never occurred to me that someone could regulate honeybees, let alone make them illegal!

How to manage eating off of 30 dollars a week… Impressive? We think so.

The premise: Jake and I spend $30 total on our food per week for a month. We won’t be eating any fast food or Ramen. We want to show that it is possible to eat well, even if you aren’t getting paid well.

A study by Virginia Cooperative Extension found that if each Virginia Household spent only $10 on local food and farm products weekly, it would annually generate $1.65 billion in direct economic impact for the Virginia economy.

It’s unfortunate that Hampton Roads Magazine doesn’t take the judging and subsequent awards more seriously. Our area has so many wonderful restaurants, and they deserve to be properly reviewed and ranked.

They tasted like sweet, buttery goodness. And they also still tasted like turnips, and that was good too. (Plus, a Wild Alaskan Salmon recipe.)

I’m a Southern girl, but greens have never really been my thing. I was prejudiced. And I was wrong.

For me, cooking is so often about comfort: comforting others, finding comfort for myself, recalling some memory of a meal or a dish that has meant something to me.

You won’t find Bud Light, Miller Light, or Coors Light at The Birch. They intend to stock American Craft Beers and Craft Beers from around the world.

What will you do to make sure eating local isn’t something that just happens 6 months a year?

The skin of the Hubbard squash is blue-gray, a sick color that calls to mind the sky before a big storm, or perhaps the face of a zombie.

I once watched a cooking show where the host suggested doing jumping jacks while the food bakes. I had a snack. To each her own.

I have to say, I still prefer the simplicity of green beans, but this edamame recipe redeemed my previous edamame humiliation.

Dana gives you some ideas on what to cook with your Five Points Community Supported Agriculture basket. This week she focuses on the beets.

For the folks on the Southside who say there’s nothing to do on the Peninsula, this event is another reminder that there are plenty of reasons to cross the HRBT.

“This is the first summer I can say ‘I suffered’”, says my husband, the hardworking organic farmer.

Moving back to HR from L.A. after a divorce… they don’t call Southern food “comfort food” for nothing.

The theme is to celebrate the specific products of, and promote the support of, local suppliers and growers of fresh produce, meats, seafood, etc.

Gone are the days when we could trust our neighborhood grocery store to provide healthy, safe foods.

Just because you’re a vegan doesn’t mean you lose your taste for meat eaters.

The flavor will keep even the most jaded hop head happy, a light caramel that is almost, but not quite, beaten into submission with a healthy dose of earth and citrus, creating a mellow bitter that lingers on the tongue.

The cult of Johnny Cupcakes gathered in front of Just Cupcakes in Virginia Beach yesterday for an event that put together music, limited-edition merch, BBQ and delicious mini-cupcakes. Photographer Anne K. documented some of the mayhem.

Scenes from the farm as Farmer and wife wait for a Spring that has not yet sprung.

If I’m at Red Dog and order the vegan pizza, I’m instantly representing my cause to my server. If I leave a bad tip and bad attitude behind, I could never be just some bitch to her, I’d automatically be “that vegan bitch.”

Let’s just say it, right up front: The craft beer scene in Hampton Roads, in a word, sucks.

“I don’t even know what was happening at Wine Fest,” my roommate Liz said. “I know I was eating somebody else’s food, and I know I was okay with it.”

HomeGrown Festival is this weekend, benefiting Five Points Community Farm Market. There will good local food, films, music, and more Skye Zentz than you could shake a stick at.

I am writing to ask that Jerome and the Cogan’s people make like NKOTB and get the band back together again.

My desire to explore the exotic world of vegan bliss (and a good buddy from Brooklyn) lured me to the Big Apple for my first real New York experience. And I must say… I was not disappointed.

I knew marketers were trying creative ways to lure customers, but this crosses some line of decency.

7-11 (This Saturday) Means Free Slurpees at 7-Eleven. Do it.

As a beer just shy of 10% alcohol, this is a pretty big beer in a pretty big bottle. Ommegang has, rather impressively, produced a world-class beer that offers delicious complexity while in our own time-zone.

My little brother is graduating from William & Mary on Sunday and I’m in charge of dinner reservations for Saturday night. The padres want to go somewhere in Newport News…. Help! Any recommendations?

Things of Note: Zoe’s in Virginia Beach re-opens this evening. In our first issue of taste, Monroe Duncan reported in “Restaurants in the Revolving Door” about Zoe’s closure; however, chef-owner Jerry Weihbrecht has since teamed up with good friend and well-known sommelier Mark Sauter, and passionate gourmands Bill and Joni Greene, who all felt it [...]

So now for those of you who have ever met me, you know that I love to eat. I love to eat a lot. I’m a big fan of food. Steaks, pork chops, rice and beans, mash potatoes, I mean I love food and I’m sure that a lot of you guys do also. Well on Sunday, the 15th, a chef named Edward Storey and a restaurant called Bardo have decided to up the ante…….if your not scared.

After a few sips of the can, the alcohol begins to hit your bloodstream, bringing that familiar feeling. Then, as you drink, you notice yourself drinking faster. With time, you become incredibly caffeinated, and drunker. As you put your can down, one realizes a fist is being made for no reason.

Chicken wings, pizza, hamburgers, cheeseburgers, potato chips, pretzels, deviled eggs, pigs in a blanket, meatballs, sub sandwiches, cheese with crackers, hot dogs, braughts, Italian sausages, hot sausages, fried cheese sticks. fried poppers, chips and salsa, 7 layer bean dips, fried chicken, French fries, potato skins, steak fries, grilled steak, meatloaf, baked ham, popcorn, fruit salad, salads, and of course, every type of dip imaginable.