In much of the US, especially the South, collard greens and black-eyed peas are the defining components of the New Year’s Day meal. The peas represent good luck and since collards are the same color as money, eating them on Jan. 1 has long been seen as a wish for a prosperous year ahead.
Here’s a piece of advice to help you become a more conscious consumer: Before you buy something new, shop from your house.
On Christmas morning, when many of us were lounging in pajamas, eating cinnamon rolls, and trying on new sweaters, Tamar Haspel was hauling more than 10,000 pounds of oysters out of the frigid waters of Cape Cod to overwinter safely on land.
At St. Clarets, a school in the village of Karumathur in southern India, kids have a chance to prove their moral mettle daily. Each classroom has an “honesty shop” from which students can help themselves to a table piled with snacks like candy, muffins, and samosas, using the honor system to pay for the items by slipping money into a cash box.
Big bottles are better. Wine-industry insiders, sommeliers, wine buyers, and importers who think about, and taste wine all day, every day, already know large-format bottles are special-occasion staples and coveted collectors’ items. For the rest of us non-professionals, here’s a primer.
One of the hallmarks of modern parenting is that everyone—no matter how little they know of you, your children, or child development—has an opinion about how it should be done, and what you’re doing wrong.
A heartfelt thank you to Rachel McAdams and photographer Claire Rothstein for this stunning photo, which underlines the need to normalize breast-feeding and pumping, and to support women as parents and professionals. Also, pumping milk sucks, no matter who you’re wearing.
There’s a reason that turkey and ham are so often at the center of family holiday celebrations—they’re relatively inexpensive and fairly simple to cook well. Prime rib, or a rib roast as it’s also known, is neither of those things. Purchased from a specialty butcher, a 5-lb piece of meat can easily run well over $100, and even from the grocery store the price is usually north of $10 a pound.
I grew up in a family of three girls. We first two were solidly built little kids, with convex bellies and broad shoulders. My youngest sister though, after a deliciously chubby babyhood, morphed into a classic string bean of a girl, all elbows, knees, and long limbs. Every time the three of us sat down to eat a holiday feast with my extended family, my grandmother would look at us, and note approvingly that my skinny sister must have gotten a tapeworm.
“Instant coffee has such a bad rep,” says Nate Kaiser, an entrepreneur in Pennsylvania. “It’s usually the worst-case scenario, or something your grandparents have. It’s never, never been thought of as a specialty product, and for good reason.”
Dinner. It happens every night, whether you’re ready or not.
Bek Andersen was scrolling through her Instagram feed, looking for something to cheer her up. It was Oct. 6, the day the US Senate voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice, despite testimony from Christine Blasey Ford that he had sexually assaulted her at a party when they were both teenagers.
Culinarily, chicken has somehow become all things to all people. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts, and the recipes built around them, are stand-ins for bland, unadventurous palates, while a perfect roast chicken recipe has become mark of foodie pride. It’s also a potent symbol of the modern age, and likely to be one of our most easily observable legacies as humans.
I really enjoy baking. I have a fairly large kitchen, a nice oven, and a stand mixer. Still, I sometimes find holiday cookie season to be a bit of a slog.
The first sips from my morning cup of coffee are like adding an Instagram filter to an under-lit photo—suddenly everything is a little warmer and brighter. It’s not just the mood-enhancing benefits of a caffeine jolt. Even if coffee is an everyday necessity, a warm, aromatic cup made just how you like it still feels like a small, indulgent luxury.
There’s an open secret on Nailed It!—the contestants are set up for failure.
There’s a two-episode Great British Baking Show holiday special available to watch on Netflix right now, and yes, it’s also holiday cookie season. But don’t watch it for inspiration for your own baking projects. Just watch because it’s such pure delight. It’s a winter wonderland of sugar, spice, and good cheer, with no kitchen chaos to clean up after.
Much has been made of the lifehack of creating a uniform for yourself and simply wearing it every day, from Steve Jobs’s black turtlenecks to Barack Obama’s closet full of navy and gray suits. In the ridiculous modern struggle that is keeping a family fed every week, I’ve turned to the same strategy to fight decision fatigue at the grocery store.
White truffles are having a great year. After a rainy early fall in Italy’s Piedmont region, where the majority of white truffles are found, the elusive fungus has popped up in record numbers.
This post has been updated with details of the launch.
At some point in the past decade, holiday gift buying for my adult family became a slog.
Earlier this year, rocker Jon Bon Jovi launched a brand of rosé, dubbed Hampton Water, with his son Jesse. This week, the wine made Wine Spectator’s list of the 100 best wines in 2018. What’s more, it was the top-rated rosé on the venerable list, a major accolade for such a young venture. Without further ado, to the tune of the 1986 smash hit “Living on a Prayer”…
MSG is not bad for you.
Final Table, the new Netflix cooking competition, feels ambitious. Twenty-four contestants cook for nine of the most accomplished chefs in the world, plus a cast of celebrity “culinary ambassadors”—all on an enormous, gleaming set tricked out to take stunning overhead action shots.
