In the pink

During Breast Cancer Awareness Month, food manufacturers dress many of their products in pink. But you may do a double take when you spot these: Campbell's Tomato and Chicken Noodle soup cans sporting very pink and white labels instead of the familiar red and white. Seven million cans will wear the pink label.

TRENDS DU JOUR

Coffee Talk: Flavor & The Menu magazine reports that espresso, latte and ground coffee beans are hot, hot, hot as ingredients. Don't take the mag's word for it? New Caribou Coffee Bars are chewy granola bars in Vanilla Latte and Chocolate Mocha, made with finely ground coffee. Yoplait Whips! has just introduced Creamy Latte flavor. Make mine a grande.

Choco-lot: It's fashionable for premium chocolate bars to give you the percentage of cacao (the ingredients that come from the cacao bean) on the labels. Ghirardelli spread the trend to the masses, so really, could Nestle's and Hershey's be far behind? Of course not. Nestle's is labelling its baking bars. Hershey's has introduced Cacao Reserve, its own line of premium bars, and will follow up with "single origin" (the beans are from one country) chocolate bars in December. And Hershey's isn't hedging any bets. Hershey's has also tapped into the other chocolate-y trend - upscale cocoa powders - with its Cacao Reserve Mildly Spiced Aztec Blend and Classic Mayan blends. Nestle - quick!

COOKBOOK NOOK

The 150 Best American Recipes

Edited by Fran McCullough & Molly Stevens, Houghton Mifflin Co.; $30

What makes a "best" recipe - and who gets to decide the best? A recently released book gives its take: The 150 Best American Recipes is filled with an outstanding collection culled from more than 1,000 contenders from various sources - famous chefs, newspapers, magazines and so forth. This twosome has been chronicling the best recipes in an annual book for almost a decade. I enjoy perusing the selections each year (and trying some of them), and this volume is no exception.

- Natalie Haughton, Los Angeles Daily News

ASK FOOD NETWORK

Q: I like the flavor of kosher poultry. Should I brine a kosher turkey? - Susan T, Dayton, Md. A: -Brining a kosher turkey would be a little like smoking a smoked sausage - you're wasting your time. The koshering process, which involves soaking meat in brine and then rubbing it with coarse salt, designed to draw out blood and impurities, has already done the brining for you. This brining and salting accounts for what many consider the superior flavor and juiciness of kosher chicken and turkey. It also raises salt content, which cooks should take into account when they are seasoning kosher meats.

Food Network Kitchens

JENNIFER ROSEN'S WEEKLY WINE PICK

• Yalumba Viognier "Y Series" 2005 (Australia) $11 Think of this fragrant, round white, full of bright, tropical fruit, as the last of the summer sun, bottled. Then stop thinking and enjoy it.