Annaliese Griffin

Whether or not you plan to watch any of the 2018 Olympics the location in Pyeongchang, South Korea is an excellent excuse to add a few Korean dishes to your culinary repertoire. If your kitchen is fairly well stocked—and by that I mean you usually have sesame oil, garlic, and ginger close at hand and scallions are no stranger to your fridge—but you’ve never made bibimbap or kimchi stew at home, it’s time to cozy up to gochujang.

There is no reason I should like watching Phil Rosenthal travel around the world eating delicious things. He created Everybody Loves Raymond, one of my least favorite television shows. His humor lives at the intersection of Borscht Belt Avenue and Dad Jeans Street. He’s not a chef or even a passionate home cook, and he doesn’t know very much about food except for that he likes it. I was prepared to hate Somebody Feed Phil, a newish Netflix-produced version of what started out as a PBS show called I’ll Have What Phil’s Having, but instead Rosenthal won me over completely. He’s making some of the best food travel television out there right now.

Despite the fact that the Super Bowl is reliably one of the most watched television events of the year, I suspect that on Sunday night, many viewers won’t be tuning in so much for the action on the field as for the action on the table. After a long January during which the weather suggested beef stew and mashed potatoes—yet Whole30 dictated salmon and salad—most of us are ready for pretty much any excuse to eat buffalo wings and nachos.

Each time I tell a child, or her parent, that I “can’t believe” how big she’s gotten or how old she is now, I innerly cringe a bit. It’s not just that it’s boring and cliched—as a parent myself, those words are an almost painful reminder that I’m constantly seeing the trees and not the forest when it comes to my kids. Day to day I’m obsessed by minutia, by how many hours in a row my baby is sleeping at night, and how well, or not, my toddler is brushing his teeth. I can barely remember what they looked like a month ago, and I don’t notice how much they’ve grown until someone points it out to me.

Cookbooks make natural gifts. We all have to feed ourselves, and most of us who don’t subsist on merely green juice and Soylent tend to crave new ideas for what to put on the table and in our lunch bags every day. They’re also beautiful books, generally speaking, with lush layouts and glossy photos.

Art Basel Miami Beach is poised to take over more than 200 galleries and venues in South Florida from Dec. 7-10, but if it’s performance art you’re after, you may have a chance to see the Salt Bae himself in action at Nusr-Et Miami.

There are a number of important holiday cookie recipes in my family. I make Dorie Greenspan’s incomparable World Peace Cookies every year. My mom bakes jan hagels, a traditional Dutch cookie that is topped with walnuts and powdered sugar. My 90-plus-year-old grandmother still makes a multi-step, twisted candy cane cookie that requires two doughs, extensive shaping and and a final dusting of crushed candy canes. There is one recipe though, that we all make and all refer to simply as “Christmas cookies.”  If you want to keep it simple, delicious and classic, this recipe is all you need.

Last year, following the 2016 presidential election, I sent Hillary Rodham Clinton a thank you note for pounding on the glass ceiling so hard, for so long. Last week she sent me a thank you note for my thank you note and it really moved me.

Every year, it seems, there’s a new holiday tradition observable on social media and in glossy magazines that feels suspiciously like an excuse to spend even more money. Matching pajamas for the whole family? I see what you’re up to and I’m resisting, despite the Instagram bait. As someone who gets excited when the mail comes every day, sending Christmas cards is way more my holiday jam, and is money, and time, well spent, in my opinion.

What can you not do? What task or obligation can you free yourself from right now? A yoga teacher recently posed this question at the beginning of a class I was taking. I found it slightly eye-roll worthy in the moment, but I’ve been using it to guide decisions ever since.

Soup kitchens and food pantries are inundated by requests from well-meaning would-be volunteers and bags of donated groceries during the holidays. But here’s what they’d say, in the nicest possible way, if they were really asked whether they need the help:

I have a bad case of Thanksgiving menu creep. Before I could start writing this story my holiday-addled brain insisted that I compare at least two pecan pie recipes, then consider the virtues of pumpkin cheesecake versus pumpkin chiffon pie.

As a serial killer, Charles Manson, who died Nov. 19 at the age of 83, wasn’t particularly accomplished. Arguably, he wasn’t actually a serial killer. “Manson Family” members, not Manson himself, carried out the seven murders the cult was responsible for and Manson’s two other murder convictions seem to have been more for business than pleasure.

When my husband I put our toddler to bed at night, we always choose a tee that is pre-school appropriate, since our son frequently decides that changing his shirt is not a thing he would like to do in the morning. You have to pick your battles, right?

What do we do? As more women come forward with stories of powerful men behaving in ways that range from demeaning to horrifying, it’s becoming clear that we need a new templates for justice. What, for example, do we do with Al Franken? He has admitted to forcibly kissing and groping Leeann Tweeden during a USO tour in 2006. Franken didn’t break any laws, and unless more women come forward, it seems clear that he’s an ass, but it’s possible that he’s not a predator. What a relief?

You’ve probably seen amari, from big brands like Campari and Averna to artisanal bottles made in Brooklyn, prettily lining the back bar at your favorite Italian restaurant or assertively flavoring drinks on high-end cocktail menus. It seems like every bartender and lifestyle magazine, is obsessed with blending the bitter, sweet and herbal flavors that make amaro so delicious into ever more byzantine concoctions.

We’re in the middle of a sexual revolution right now, one that hinges not on the freedom to say yes to sex, but the freedom to say no. Sex without full and enthusiastic consent—it shouldn’t need to be said, but apparently it must be—is rape.

Quick, name your favorite apple. Did you say Honeycrisp?  How charmingly retro. There’s a new era of fruit dawning, and orchard stars such as the Honeycrisp and Red Delicious are about to become quirky throwbacks when compared to a new generation of apples billed as more delicious, beautiful and convenient for eaters, and more productive for growers.

As the list of famous men who fall somewhere on the creep-to-rapist spectrum grows longer, we’ve looked not just to their actions, but the ways in which they were protected. Reporters who tried, but were unable to break the Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K. stories have written about the power structures in Hollywood that kept these men safe. But the question of how, and even if, we should separate art from the morals of the artist pre-dates allegations against, say, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski—see: Ezra Pound, anti-semitism (paywall).

A stack of food magazines is sitting on my kitchen counter, menacing me with 20 different ways to brine, baste, roast, braise, and stuff a turkey; dozens of recipes for holiday cookies; and a raft of aspirational cocktail ideas. Instagram informed me this morning that my breakfast wasn’t pretty enough, and that I had missed the chance to see a butter sculpture of baking goddess Dorie Greenspan at an event in Brooklyn last night.

Like many writers, I succumb to a variety of distractions while I work. Email, snacks, household chores, and Instagram are all danger zones. Now I think I’ve discovered a new trick—one that’s helped me stay focused, head down, while writing this very article. So what’s my new productivity hack? Squeezing a giant foam strawberry, also known as a squishy.

When I was in junior high, I read a lot of Stephen King novels.

Whole Foods and Amazon have never exactly appealed to the same crowd.

Throughout the industrialized world, moms are getting older. The average age of first-time moms in the US has been steadily on the rise in the 21st century, reaching 26.3 in 2014—more than a year older than in 2000. The average age of a first-time mom in Canada is 28.5; the same is true in Finland. The average age is 29.2 in Germany and 30.3 in Japan. And women are also having fewer children: Most industrialized nations are currently hovering at replacement rate (2.1 children per woman, on average), and many, especially in Europe, are at sub-replacement levels.