Kate Middleton made headlines on Saturday when she wore a cream-colored Alexander McQueen coat dress to the royal wedding. Some scolds wagged their fingers at the Duchess of Cambridge, claiming that she was trying upstage her new sister-in-law by wearing white.
You get home from work and there they are, the new pants you ordered. When you try them on though, happy anticipation turns to empty disappointment. The flowing cut that looked beachy and easy online appears downright dowdy in your bathroom mirror. Even though you ordered two different sizes, neither quite works. Back they go.
To chop or not to chop? At some New York City salad concerns that is no longer the question. When Just Salad, a Manhattan lunch hot spot, announced this week that it was doing away with its chopped-on-demand option—joining several other lettuce-dependent chains—salad eaters across the city raised their forks in protest. As they see it, with unchopped greens it’s impossible to get every component of the salad into a single bite. Some diners, at least.
The Magic Pill, a new documentary on Netflix, argues that a ketogenic diet—a way of eating that is very high in fat and very low in carbohydrates—is the healthiest and best way to eat. It strongly implies that eating like this can cure cancer and vastly improve autism in a way that is outrageous—if not breathtakingly reckless.
Jonathan Van Ness, Queer Eye’s queen of positivity, and Nancy Birtwhistle, the Great British Baking Show’s duchess of dessert, are Instagram besties. Can you believe?
Mother’s Day is Sunday and if you haven’t yet purchased an expensive candle or bath salts or bought the ingredients for brunch, relax. There’s a perfect gift you can give that won’t cost anything, doesn’t need any time to arrive, and will keep giving all year long. It has the added benefit of making you seem woke AF. It might even make you woke AF.
In November of 2017, Amanda Cohen the chef of Dirt Candy wrote a brilliantly scathing piece in Esquire titled, “I’ve Worked in Food for 20 Years. Now You Finally Care About Female Chefs?” Her chief beef was that women in the food world had largely been ignored by critics and food writers. But now in the wake of #metoo, suddenly the same outlets that had previously shown little interest in female chefs women were eager to hear about how they had been victimized by men.
Humans love flavor. Archeologists have found evidence that hunter-gatherers in Stone Age Europe used garlic mustard seeds (a broccoli relative with a mustardy, peppery kick) to season stews 6,000 years ago. For almost as long as we’ve been cooking, we’ve been adding ingredients to our pots that contributed flavor, not just calories. Salt, herbs, and strongly scented seeds all have nutritious properties, but if you consider the time it would take to gather the seeds from garlic mustard plants, when you could be digging tubers or fishing, then it’s clear that the drive for deliciousness is ingrained and powerful.
The Kentucky Derby and Cinco de Mayo are this weekend, two holidays that inspire spirited drinking, even among those with tenuous-at-best connections to the actual festivities. The margarita and the mint julep, the two signature cocktails of the weekend, are both very straightforward, in terms of technique and composition. You’ll need just five ingredients to make the two, assuming there’s sugar and kosher salt in your cupboard. Add lemons and you also have the makings for whiskey sours. Add just a few more items and—voila!—you’ve stocked your bar for the summer.
It all started with a post on Chowhound that a colleague sent my way. The food site has long served as a message board where the culinary-minded can ask one another where to find the best takeaway curry, or what to do with, say, the quince they bought on a whim. A Chowhound poster wanted to know, did Häagen-Dazs change their vanilla ice cream recipe?
Whether an entree at a White House state dinner or chocolate barbed wire for a pre-Olympics gala, it’s not unusual to promote a political agenda through food. What’s less common is for a nation that wasn’t even invited to the table to send a dish back.
Koreans, from both the South and the North, care a great deal about food. Yes, that sounds simplistic, and arguably is true of all cultures—but consider for a moment the attention to detail given to the menu for the meeting between South Korean president Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader, Kim Jung-un, which will take place on April 27.
Donald and Melania Trump are hosting their first state dinner tonight, honoring French president Emmanuel Macron, and the menu that the White House has released is not what you might expect from a teetotalling president who has sung the praises of well-done steak, ketchup, fast food (paywall), and chocolate cake.
A croissant’s only job in this world is to be delicious. But some chefs just can’t leave it alone to perform this singular task.
It took Edna Holmgren three tries to become a Pillsbury Bake-Off finalist. She started out with a novel idea—a marshmallow, wrapped in pastry dough—and stuck with it, entering the contest three years in row, each time modifying her recipe just a bit. When she finally won in 1969 with her Magic Marshmallow Crescent Puffs, Holmgren—who later became Edna Walker—emerged as an instant Bake-Off legend. That’s just the beginning of the story that Laura Shapiro, food historian, weaves in episode one of Ox Tales, the new food podcast from the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, the oldest and most distinguished conference dedicated to investigating the culture and history of food.
Grilled cheese, is it ever really the wrong choice? No, it is not. Is your version the best it can be? Are you sure? A swipe of mayonnaise is a surefire way to up your grilled cheese game.
Almond, soy, rice, hemp, macadamia, hazelnut, pea, flax, coconut, cashew, peanut, walnut—there’s been a recent explosion in the varieties of plant-based milks. It’s a crowded market, and the non-dairy cream of the crop right now is oat milk. It’s vegan, gluten-free, nut-free, and GMO-free.
Wine clubs were once a stodgy expression of middle class taste. Subscribers were sufficiently interested in wine to buy and drink it on a regular basis, but not confident enough to make their own selections at the wine store. Now that we get meal kits, beauty supplies, wardrobe staples, and boxes of snacks through subscriptions, wine clubs are back—expanding into a market they were pioneers in creating. Blue Apron and Hello Fresh, two of the biggest names in meal kits, have their own wine clubs, as does professional start-up bro, Gary Vaynerchuk. And what, after all, are services like BirchBox but millennial iterations of what wine clubs invented.
I write about food for a living. My bookshelves are lined with cookbooks. And yet, I never know what to make for dinner. ckbk a new online service that that bills itself as Spotify for cookbooks, intends to change all that.
On Monday, April 16 a new Kit Kat made with ruby chocolate will be available in the UK. I’ll admit it, my curiosity is piqued and I will try it, but I also know that it’s a lie. Deciphering the buzz around ruby chocolate is a lesson in how not to fall for modern food industry marketing magic—and fake food news.
There were only three uses for the blue and white Pfaltzgraf bowls that filled my family’s kitchen cabinets when I was growing up—soup, breakfast cereal, and ice cream. Okay, maybe the occasional chili night. Everything else—pasta, casseroles, roast chicken—we ate off of large dinner plates, offset by smaller salad plates. Today, however, when I serve dinner to my own children the table looks much different. There are no small plates, and more often than not everyone simply eats out of a bowl.
Last week Julia Turshen, author of Feed the Resistance, announced that she had created a database of women in food, with a focus on women of color and LGBTQ-identified folks, called Equity at the Table. But more than just creating a list Turshen has potentially upended the entire way that food stories are reported and panels at festivals and conferences are booked.
If you live in the northern hemisphere, it’s either rhubarb season or about to be rhubarb season. On Instagram though, it’s always rhubarb season.
When Evan Bloom decided to open Tokyo’s first Jewish deli, he didn’t realize he’d become a pastrami smuggler in the process.
