The taco renaissance taking the nation by storm is spurred partly by innovative chefs. But Americans seem to have recently realized that just about anything tastes better and is more fun to eat when it’s nestled in a folded tortilla.

By Christopher Koetke, CEC, CCE, HAAC

At the Kendall College School of Culinary Arts in Chicago, we keep our finger on the pulse of emerging food trends. What’s on the horizon in the taco realm? Fish tacos.

While fish tacos aren’t new, they’re not yet everywhere. After first tasting a Baja fish taco in Mexico, Ralph Rubio returned to San Diego to hand-craft his own recipe and introduced America to the fish taco in 1983. Now with dozens of restaurants in California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado, Rubio’s still menus The Original Fish Taco® that started it all: sustainable wild Alaska pollock hand-dipped in seasoned beer batter and cooked to crispy perfection, then topped with Rubio’s white sauce, mild salsa and fresh cabbage and served on a warm stone-ground corn tortilla and garnished with a slice of lime.

A Washburne Culinary Institute instructor wins second prize, and students from Wisconsin and Indiana cook their way to cash awards in the 2012 Discover Duck Chef Recipe Contest.

Duck, a natural fit for today’s global cooking culture, was very evident in the 2012 Maple Leaf Farms Chef Recipe Contest. This year’s contest challenged entrants in two categories—professional chef and culinary student—to produce an original small-plate recipe showcasing Maple Leaf Farms duck. More than 250 entries from across the country were submitted in competition for the cash prizes.

Based on Mintel research, as age increases, so does the likelihood that adults are maintaining a mostly healthy diet.

Healthy eating has come to the forefront of many minds over the past several years with help from First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move program and TV shows like “The Biggest Loser,” not to mention the extensive media coverage regarding the country’s growing obesity problem. Indeed, this increased interest in healthy eating is highlighted by new research from Chicago-based Mintel that reveals that just over two-thirds (67%) of Americans choose healthier foods to stay well.

Measuring digestibility, researchers find almonds provide 20% fewer calories than labels state. The results might have implications for other foods, as well.

A study conducted by scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and released in the August issue of American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) provides a new understanding of almonds’ calorie count, showing that whole almonds provide about 20% fewer calories than originally thought.

At first glance, the study results beg the question: How can a food’s calorie count suddenly change when the composition of the food itself hasn’t?

The answer is that David Baer, PhD, and his team from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) used a new method of measuring the calories in almonds, which built on traditional methods and allowed the researchers to determine the number of calories actually digested and absorbed from almonds. Resulting data showed a 1 ounce serving of almonds (about 23 almonds) has 129 calories versus the 160 calories currently listed on the Nutrition Facts Panel. The results might have implications for certain other foods, as well.

So Americans don’t cook anymore? That used to be true. The current economic climate has wrought good news for publishers of consumer cookbooks as U.S. households eat more meals at home, reports NPD.

U.S. families are more likely to be eating meals at home today, and the use of recipes is growing as a result, according to Port Washington, N.Y.-based The NPD Group, a leading market research company. A recently released NPD recipe-usage report finds the use of a recipe(s) once a week or more has increased from 37% of households in 2005 to 42% in 2011.

Two-thirds of all homemakers (67%) have used a recipe within the past month, and two in five (42%) use recipes even more often, according to the NPD report, entitled “Recipes are Cooking!” Dinner is the dominant recipe-using occasion. Nearly 38 million U.S. households have used a recipe while preparing dinner in the past week, and on a typical evening, 11 million households used a recipe to cook dinner.