Annaliese Griffin

A friend of mine swears that if she ever won the lottery or came into a substantial sum of money, she would change her life in just one way—she’d have a salad bar installed in her kitchen and eat all of her meals from it. I’m not quite that passionate about salad, but I do find it to be immensely satisfying as a main course, and one of my favorites is what I think of as the refrigerator-clean-out salad. Greens topped with whatever combination of vegetables that are in the crisper, a hard-boiled egg, some crumbled bacon, goat cheese, olives, and maybe the dregs of a can of chickpeas, all topped with a yogurty, herby dressing is a frequent lunch for me. In my house we often repurpose grilled chicken or carnitas from taco night into taco salads, by tossing it with greens, avocados, pickled red onions, and tomatoes.

Most diets fall into one of two categories—they either claim to unlock a previously misunderstood secret of nutrition science that will lead to effortless weight loss (see: Keto, Atkins); or they promise an innovative way to change your thinking around food that will lead to effortless weight loss (see: Noom, intermittent fasting).

Whole Foods Market is expecting.

Meal kits, with their abundant packaging and precise instructions, have become a sort of shorthand for modern wastefulness. All that cardboard and plastic, plus the pre-portioned servings and glossy instruction cards, have to be the least environmentally friendly way to get dinner on the table, right?

Barns are under siege. The theft of weathered timber planks has been reported around the US from Montana to South Carolina.

Chicken eggs are an everyday wonder. With a carton in the fridge, you’re never more than a few minutes away from a satisfying meal. Add greens, cheese, hearty bread or potatoes, and you’re most of the way to a simple but wonderful dinner. They’re inexpensive—even high-end pastured eggs from birds that spend happy lives scratching in the dirt and eating bugs don’t top $2 a serving. And they’re ubiquitous.

Recently I went to a dinner party where the hosts had prepared a pitcher full of delicious cocktails ahead of time, which struck me as the height of graciousness. It’s a move I fully intended to replicate.

Forty years ago, Tim and Nina Zagat, two New York City lawyers, published the first of what would become an annual slim, burgundy volume of restaurant recommendations. Zagat Guides quickly became indispensable for their pithy reviews, culled from surveys the Zagats passed out to their friends, and an ever-widening circle of opinionated diners.

Even as Pinterest prepares to go public, tech journalists covering the company remain slightly befuddled when it comes to defining what it does. Variously described as a social network, a scrapbooking site, an online image board, and an image-sharing social media company, Pinterest has generally been an object of curiosity for who uses it, more than what it is or could be.

When you think of the average Pinterest user—a “pinner,” in company parlance—you may well imagine someone like Brooke, a blonde 28-year-old from Seattle who smiles from Pinterest’s IPO documentation, alongside her scruffy dog. But really, the biggest opportunity for the image sharing network’s growth as it prepares to go public is with a pinner like Priyanka from Mumbai; Reika from Tokyo; or Denise from Sao Paulo—all also featured in the company’s filing.

Green thumbs listen up—throw out your trowels, ditch your outdated spades. Spring’s hottest gardening tool is here and it’s not a rake or a shovel. It’s a traditional Korean hand hoe called a homi.

In response to a long-running dispute with the EU over aircraft subsidies, the Trump administration has drafted a proposed list of tariffs (pdf) to impose on goods from Europe. A public hearing on the matter is scheduled for next month, but fans of fine European swordfish steaks, cotton sweaters, jams, and binoculars take notice—it may be time to stock up before tariffs take effect and your favorite imported razor clams are suddenly very expensive.

The Swiss government has been in a perpetual state of extreme preparedness for nearly a century. In the aftermath of World War I, it established mandatory stockpiles of sugar, rice, cooking oil, and animal feed to supply the country in case of war or disaster. This week it announced a proposal to take coffee off that list.

“People hate us on Yelp”: For some restaurants, this phrase has become a badge of honor, one proudly displayed in sticker form on their front doors. Botto Bistro, an Italian restaurant in San Francisco, made national news in 2014 when it took the sentiment a step further by offering diners a discount for writing one-star reviews, the snarkier the better.

In this mini-series, we return to movies and TV we’ve loved to see how they depict gender. Does it hold up in 2019? Warning: contains spoilers.

For the longest time I resisted the idea of sheet pan dinners—the often-touted solution to the weeknight cooking conundrum where all the elements of the meal are roasted together. Something about them seemed boring to me, and I worried that everything would come out tasting the same.

Beets don’t get enough credit. Sliced and roasted, their roots are earthily satisfying. Their tender greens are toothsome in a salad, and quicker cooking than kale or chard when sautéed. Pureed, beets can add silky depth to chocolate cake, and I recently made a beet pie that will replace pumpkin pie on my holiday table from here on out.

Toilet paper, tampons, cotton swabs, and baby wipes are all personal care staples that, perhaps surprisingly, come with hefty environmental costs. From upstream problems, like logging crucial boreal forests for wood pulp that becomes toilet paper, to post-use issues like the centuries it can take a tampon to biodegrade, many of these single-use products come with serious environmental costs. There are smarter, more ecologically sound choices to make for almost every item, and some may even be upgrades. Here’s how to choose personal products wisely.

Kohlrabi. Normally it’s the kind of vegetable you grudgingly accept responsibility for when it shows up in a CSA box. Or, it’s a project vegetable, one you go looking for to properly complete a many-step Ottolenghi recipe. But for most home cooks, Kohrabi’s squid-like shoots and bulbous body are more likely to spark curiosity than joy.

The James Beard Foundation announced the finalists for the 2019 Restaurant and Chef Awards today (March 27). The shortlist was whittled from a longer list of semifinalists that was made public in February.

As it prepares to go public, Pinterest has its sights set on global growth.

Helicopters, snowplows, lawnmowers, drones—vehicular metaphors have been rolled out in force to describe the type of parenting being gleefully blamed for the college admissions scandal. Article after article has quoted psychologists shaking their heads over students so unprepared for life without their parents that they can’t pick out food in a college cafeteria by themselves and college professors complaining about students who don’t understand how to make a simple phone call.

The White Russian always feels like a novelty to order, more a boozy desert than stiff drink. It’s sweet and creamy, and with all that vodka, plenty boozy too. But it’s not completely uncool: Thanks to the 1998 Coen brothers comedy The Big Lebowski, it has a laid-back, easygoing reputation, more Dude than dad.

Growing up in Vermont, my mom always made the same thing for St. Patrick’s Day—corned beef with cabbage, carrots, and potatoes, and a loaf of Irish soda bread on the side. The bread was crumbly and rich, slightly sweet, and delicious spread with butter. Since she only made it once a year, it took on a special significance in my mind’s catalogue of childhood treats.