Its the end of the year and time to celebrate summer. Congratulate your graduating friends with these summery icy treats from around the web!

**SKC Picks**

These strawberry balsamic ice cream and salted caramel ice cream recipes are from the greatest ice cream shop in San Francisco, which has a permanent line around the block. You will, however, need an ice cream maker to make these.

For a summer picnic, make your portable frozen treats easier to eat by making ice cream sandwiches, or popsicles.

If you are looking for a lower-calorie option (or just an easier one), check out …

After moving into my first apartment this September, I was overly excited to start all of my domestic DIY projects that I couldn’t do in the dorms—brewing kombucha and beer, canning fruit, baking bread, and growing herbs. I eagerly biked to the Union Square farmer’s market and filled my basket full of baby basil, cilantro, and parsley plants. I brought them home and placed all of my new plants next to my roommate’s sage and rosemary on the windowsill. For the rest of Fall, we had a happy herb garden in our kitchen, using the herbs daily to flavor …

Snack: Spiced Coffee
Brain Booster Rating: 9 out of 10, the coffee will surely kickstart your brain functioning.
Equipment: Mug, coffee-making setup (I have a percolator)
Ingredients: Coffee, milk, brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg

I must admit, my coffee routine has gotten a bit boring. Every morning since high school, the first thing I do when I wake up is brew a cup of coffee. Even though over the years I have experimented with different methods of brewing-drip, French press, and now finally a stovetop espresso percolator-the taste of the coffee has remained relatively the same.

If your coffee routine has gotten a bit …

Dish: Samosa, Vegan Drumstick, Mango Drink
Restaurant: NY Dosas
Price Tag: $4 (in total)

Besides the occasional bagel and coffee on my way to class, I almost never get food from food carts in New York, mainly because I find having nowhere to sit inconvenient, especially when it’s cold. New York food cart dishes are also pretty standard, and aside from the hotdogs, overpriced. (Why would I pay $4 for a falafel sandwich when I could go to Cheeps on St. Marks and get a $2 falafel with seating?) Trendy food trucks rarely offer dishes so exciting that I sacrifice …

Photo Credit: Isabella Cucchi

I have been waiting for winter since the school year started to make lentil soup, one of my favorite dishes for cold weather. Trader Joe’s canned lentil soup is a staple in my pantry for quick weeknight meals. But I really wanted to make the soup from scratch, and I thought this meal would be the perfect One Pot Stop meal for Small Kitchen College.

So, this week, I splurged and went to Whole Foods (I usually shop at TJs) to get some special green French lentils for the soup. I came home and started cooking. …

Last week I went on a mini-road trip with my friend to Los Angeles to escape the gloomy overcast Northern California weather. In Los Angeles, we were greeted with eighty degree full sunny clear skies and totally forgot it was, in fact, January.

After six hours of road trippin’, Los Angeles’ street fruit was the perfect snack. For $5 on the side of many of Los Angeles’s busy boulevards, you can buy a large plastic bag of fruit salad made with mango, watermelon, orange, pineapple, and cantaloupe, and sometimes even coconut, jicama, or cucumber. As you tell the vendor what …

Risotto is my favorite winter comfort food, great for a quiet night at home with a glass of wine. I love this recipe because of its distinct yet simple flavors—the sharp taste of the pecorino cheese nicely balances the subtle sea-flavor of the saffron—tastes to certainly satisfy any umami cravings. This recipe exemplifies Italian cooking at its finest, letting the ingredients speak for themselves with minimal preparation. This risotto would make a great accompianment to a fish dish, or on its own with some Italian bread.

**Recipe**

Risotto Milanese
Adapted from Life’s Ambrosia
Serves 2

3/4 teaspoon crushed …

For my birthday last week, a good friend gave me a silver flask filled with clear rum. I decided to make hot buttered rum as a birthday nightcap for myself, but hot buttered rum is also a perfect drink for any cold wintery night. The buttery, creamy, and comforting flavor of this drink warms any heart. Hot buttered rum is a great for holiday parties and can be made in large batches easily. To take a sweet photograph for this post, I used a clear cup, but hot buttered rum tastes better sipped out of a hearty mug.

Sometimes when shopping for meat at the supermarket, the terms on the packaging can be confusing or vague — “organic” or “free-range” sound great, but what does that really mean? Here is a short glossary of labels that you may encounter in the meat aisle at your local supermarket.

**Glossary of Common Meat Labels**

Cage-Free: Cage-free means the animals were not raised in cages, however, this does not guarantee the livestock was raised on pasture or had access to the outdoors. There is no legal definition for this term.

Free-Range: The FDA defines free-range as animals that have “been …

Don’t be fooled by the “hard” in the name, this Granny Smith Hard Cider is not very strong. It tastes more like Martinelli’s than any hard cider I have had in the past. Since one bottle sets you back $2.50 with only 5% alc/vol, this cider is not for those looking to get wasted on a chilly fall evening. I would recommend drinking Granny Smith Hard Cider at lunch after you finish your last midterm as a relaxing treat, or casually with friends on a school night dinner party. Personally though, due to the sober flavor of this “hard” cider, I would just opt for beer instead.