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Received β€” 12 October 2026 ⏭

Your soup needs a little drama

βœ‡Salon.com
By: Ashlie D. Stevens
12 October 2026 at 15:00

When I was a kid, I absolutely adored Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes, those sprawling soup-and-salad buffets where, for a certain kind of child (me), the prospect of choosing from several enormous vats of soup constituted a genuinely thrilling night out.

I did, however, have one complaint: I always thought the selection of soup toppings was a little lacking. There was an entire salad bar’s worth of crunchy, salty, fresh and otherwise interesting things just a few feet away. Why weren’t more of them invited to the soup party? Eventually, I began making little trips between the two, returning to my bowl with whatever seemed promising.

I suppose what I’m saying is that I’ve been a soup maximalist for a very long time.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with my feelings about salads, which I also believe should contain a frankly unreasonable number of interesting things. In fact, my dream remains more or less unchanged from childhood: I’d like a salad bar, please, but for soup.

This is partially a texture thing. Even the most beautifully flavored soup can become a little monotonous after several spoonfuls of softness. Give me something crackly, crispy or crunchy to interrupt the proceedings! But it’s also about flavor, and the small pleasure of making an ordinary meal feel a little special.

One of my favorite lessons to borrow from good restaurant kitchens is that the best don’t treat anything on the plate as an afterthought. Everything has a job to do. I think soup deserves the same consideration. And no, I’m not here to malign crackers (I have a full issue on party crackers, after all!) or croutons, both of which I love. I’m simply suggesting that we give them β€” and everything else we might put on a bowl of soup β€” a little more thought.

Lesson 1: Build your bowl in three moves

Over the years, I’ve developed a loose formula for dressing up soup. Think of it as three levels of deliciousness, with full permission to stop whenever you’re satisfied.

First, start with texture. This is my nonnegotiable. Fried garlic or shallots, toasted pepitas, crispy bacon, a handful of crushed Ruffles or Fritos, tortilla strips, lacy rounds of Parmesan frico: All are welcome. The goal is to give your spoon something interesting to encounter beyond the usual soft, silky or brothy textures.

And sometimes the simplest toppings just need a little augmentation. Try tossing croutons in brown butter before scattering them over butternut squash soup, or dusting tortilla chips with ranch seasoning before putting them on chicken-corn chowder.

Next, add brightness or freshness. A little lemon juice or zest, chopped scallions, fresh herbs, a tangy dollop of labneh or yogurt, or something pickled can bring a rich bowl of soup into focus. Think about what would cut through the richness or wake up the flavors already there.

Finally, introduce a plot twist. This is where things can get a little weird, in the best way. Chili crisp, hot honey, an assertive cheese, a little funk, or a hit of unexpected spice. I particularly love cheeses with personality on starchy soups: something smoky, salty or wonderfully soft and bloomy.

You don’t need to hit all three levels every time. Sometimes one perfectly chosen topping does the job. But learning to think about these elements individually makes it easier to build combinations that actually work together.

Lesson 2: Make the toppings your kitchen project

Consider the deli-style creamy chicken-and-rice soup I love unabashedly. It’s one of my favorite soups, period, and I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time figuring out different ways to dress it up.

One evening, I decided to outsource the soup itself and make the toppings my kitchen project instead.

I cut little quarter-sized rounds of puff pastry, brushed them with butter and seasoned them with dried thyme, onion and garlic powder, and an almost comical amount of black pepper. Into the oven they went. Meanwhile, I muddled together a loose, chermoula-adjacent green sauce of parsley, scallions, lemon zest, lemon juice and good olive oil.

Once the pastry dots were golden and puffed, I scattered them over the hot soup, drizzled everything with the green sauce and finished with shreds of Parmesan.

It was a spectacular dinner. And, importantly, I didn’t have to make the soup.Β 

Sometimes, of course, I want to spend an entire day making stock and noodles and the bread to go alongside. Other times, I want to spend 15 minutes making something that someone else cooked feel a little more like mine. Both are perfectly good ways to spend an evening in the kitchen.

This is also my favorite trick for reviving leftovers. A big pot of soup might last you three or four days, but that doesn’t mean you need to eat the exact same bowl three or four times. Change the toppings, change the experience.

Lesson 3: Make your own edible confetti

Because I am fundamentally a clever-assembly girl, I’ve begun treating soup toppings almost like spice blends.

I call them edible confetti.

I keep little deli tubs of crunchy things around, some in the pantry and others in the refrigerator, depending on what they contain. Sometimes they’re individual ingredients; other times, once I’ve found a combination I love, I start making it regularly.

Spiced pepitas, fried shallots and tortilla strips, for instance, make an excellent little trio. So do crispy bacon and toasted breadcrumbs, finished with fresh scallions just before serving. Cashews, crispy garlic and fried shallots? Spectacular on congee.

The trick is to find a few combinations that suit the soups you eat most often and keep their components handy. Store dry, crunchy blends separately from fresh or moist ingredients so nothing loses its texture before dinner.

And don’t assume that any of this needs to be made from scratch. The Asian supermarket is a treasure trove of ready-made crispy bits. The snack aisle is full of possibilities. Yesterday’s bread, the last handful of nuts in the pantry or a few slices of pepperoni that could be crisped in a skillet might be exactly what tonight’s soup needs.

Once you’ve found a combination you love, make it again! Give it a name, even. There’s something quite satisfying about having a little house blend you know will make dinner better.

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Your soup-topper cheat sheet: 30 things to try

If your soup-garnishing repertoire currently begins and ends with a sleeve of crackers, consider this a starting point. Pick a few things that sound good, experiment with combinations, and see what sticks.

For crunch and texture

  1. Crispy fried shallots

  2. Fried garlic chips

  3. Brown-butter toasted breadcrumbs

  4. Lacy Cheddar or Parmesan frico

  5. Black-pepper puff pastry dots

  6. Toasted, spiced pepitas

  7. Crushed Marcona almonds

  8. Crushed ridged potato chips

  9. Ranch-dusted tortilla strips

  10. Crispy pepperoni cups

For brightness and freshness

  1. Thinly sliced scallions

  2. Fresh lemon zest

  3. Quick-pickled red onions

  4. Chopped giardiniera

  5. Fresh dill and minced cornichons

  6. Pickled jalapeΓ±os

  7. A muddled parsley-scallion green sauce

  8. A spoonful of kimchi

  9. Fresh mint leaves

  10. A drizzle of chive oil

For richness, heat and unexpected personality

  1. Chili crisp

  2. Hot honey

  3. Tangy labneh

  4. Browned butter with crispy sage

  5. Shredded smoked Gouda

  6. Brie crostini with balsamic reduction

  7. Crumbled blue cheese

  8. Crispy bacon bits

  9. Toasted cashews

  10. Fried capers

My little assignment for you this week: Find two or three toppings beyond your usual bread, crackers or croutons that genuinely delight you. Then start playing with combinations.

Maybe you’ll discover your own favorite edible confetti. Maybe you’ll find that a little chili crisp and a handful of scallions are all you need to look forward to the third consecutive day of the same soup.

Either way, I hope you’ll give your next bowl a little drama.

It deserves it.

This story originally appeared in The Bite, my weekly food newsletter for Salon. If you enjoyed it and would like more essays and recipes β€” including the puff pastry dots and lemony green sauce mentioned above β€” sent straight to your inbox, subscribe here.

The post Your soup needs a little drama appeared first on Salon.com.

Received β€” 27 September 2026 ⏭

The women reshaping kitchen culture

βœ‡Salon.com
By: Francesca Giangiulio
27 September 2026 at 16:30

For a long time, the image of the chef has been remarkably consistent: a man in a white jacket, barking orders in a hot kitchen and demanding perfection from everyone around him.

At the Chef’s Table Festival in Park City, Utah, last month, the women chefs I encountered offered a much more expansive definition of what it means to cook β€” and what it means to lead a kitchen.

They weren’t presenting a single vision for the future of food. They were doing something more interesting: building careers around their own identities, experiences and ideas rather than trying to force themselves into the traditional mold of what a chef is supposed to look like.

During a panel titled β€œWomen Shaping the Future of Food,” chefs Fariyal Abdullahi, Sarah Glover and BetΓΌl TunΓ§ talked about everything from social media and motherhood to femininity, cultural identity and the pressures of building a career in an industry that has not always made much room for women.

For Abdullahi, visibility is part of that work.

She told the audience that after posting a simple video of herself breaking down a fish, the clip unexpectedly took off on Instagram. What surprised her wasn’t only the number of people watching, but what some of those viewers saw in her.

β€œI don’t realize how many eyes are on me until someone is driving from D.C. to eat my food and saying, β€˜I want my daughter to be like you,’” she said. β€œInspiring little girls and being visible is so important to me.”

Abdullahi, who grew up in Ethiopia, has always understood food as inseparable from community. She was raised in a huge extended family β€” she has 32 aunts and uncles β€” and remembers a house that was almost constantly full.

β€œOur house was always packed, I was never bored,” she said. β€œOne of the things that captivated me about food was that it brings people together.”

That sense of togetherness followed her into professional cooking, but so did the more complicated expectations surrounding women and food.

Abdullahi spoke about growing up Muslim and the tradition of women showing respect for their husbands and male family members by cooking for them and serving them first. At the same time, she draws inspiration from the women in Ethiopian history who fought for the country’s independence, including an empress who went into battle against the Italian army.

She doesn’t see those identities as contradictory.

β€œI have both of those things in me,” she said.

That ability to hold seemingly opposing ideas at once became one of the most compelling threads running through the festival.

For Australian chef Sarah Glover, it has meant embracing femininity while building a career around one of cooking’s most visually aggressive elements: fire.

Glover talked about being inspired by Nigella Lawson, one of the early food-media personalities to make femininity itself a visible part of her public identity.

β€œNigella was so beautiful and sexy and really showing people how to be this domestic goddess,” Glover said.

She also recalled a conversation with open-fire chef Francis Mallmann, who described fire as feminine. Glover connected that idea to Aboriginal traditions in which women historically cared for the fire while men hunted. There is something almost deliberately subversive about that framing. Fire is usually coded as aggression, danger and toughness. Glover sees something else in it: warmth, caretaking and even a kind of dance.

β€œPeople think fire is aggressive because it burns and it can hurt you,” she said. β€œBut the smell and warmth is very nurturing and comforting.”

Glover said she enjoys embracing her femininity and β€œtaking that back” while working over fire. Her floral, flowing clothes and romantic aesthetic are not things she feels compelled to shed in order to be taken seriously as a chef. They are part of the point of view she brings to her work.

That idea β€” that a chef’s point of view comes from the entirety of a life, rather than one neatly defined culinary tradition β€” surfaced again during a panel about travel and where chefs eat.

Chef Isabel Coss spoke about deliberately seeking out experiences that leave her feeling a little out of place. Travel, she said, requires trusting yourself and trusting the journey.

β€œPlaylists, music, attention to detail, you bring all of that back,” she said. β€œWe’re a compound of our travels, lives, and experiences.”

It is a useful way to think about culinary identity. Food does not always have to fit neatly into categories like Mexican, Jordanian, Ethiopian or Australian. It can be the accumulation of everywhere a person has been and everything they have experienced.

Jordanian chef Sara Aqel made a similar argument from another direction.

β€œWe get really sucked into the idea of looking up to someone and wanting to be just like them, and that’s not right,” she said. β€œYou start losing bits of yourself and what could make you a better chef and make your food better food.”

Aqel said she is fascinated by ingredients and techniques from around the world, particularly Japan. But when she cooks, she returns to what she knows most intimately.

Her food is rooted in Jordan, she explained, even as she incorporates techniques learned from chefs in Italy, Peru and Ecuador.

β€œEvery chef I meet, I learn new techniques I can use,” she said. β€œBut when you cook, you always want to cook from somewhere you understand.”

That sense of authorship was visible throughout the festival. Each chef seemed to have a recognizable point of view β€” something you could understand from the plate itself, without needing the chef to stand beside the table explaining it.

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For women working in food, though, that question of authorship extends beyond aesthetics. It can also mean rethinking the culture of the kitchen itself.

Earlier in the festival, chef Jessica Rosval made that argument during a panel about creativity. Creativity, she said, is never free. Chefs have to consider seasonality, cost, time and, crucially, the people who will actually have to execute the food.

β€œYou have to be conscious of your team and employees in the process,” she said. β€œIt’s your responsibility as a chef to provide good quality of work life.”

Rosval pushed directly against the stereotype of the angry, aggressive chef who treats the kitchen like a battlefield. A menu, she argued, should not require cooks to spend 18 hours peeling pine nuts simply because the chef wants to demonstrate technical skill.

β€œYou have to learn how to take the big ideas and stories and compress that into a bite,” she said.

Her philosophy was simpler still: β€œWork does not have to feel like war.”

That may be one of the most significant shifts these chefs are arguing for. The goal is not simply to get more women into professional kitchens. It is to make enough room for women to decide what those kitchens β€” and the careers built inside them β€” should look like once they arrive.

That also means confronting one of the industry’s most persistent assumptions: that a successful chef must sacrifice everything else to the job.

Abdullahi and Glover both spoke about the fear many women in the industry face that becoming a mother could mean giving up their careers. Professional kitchens demand long hours and enormous physical and emotional energy, and the industry has historically been structured around the expectation that someone else is handling the rest of your life.

Abdullahi argued that the solution is not asking women to choose differently. It is building an industry spacious enough to hold both.

β€œWe need to make space for women in the kitchen to have careers and also be mothers,” she said.

β€œWork does not have to feel like war.

The chefs at the festival weren’t offering a single blueprint for how to accomplish that.

Their work suggested precisely the opposite: there can be many versions.

There is Glover, embracing a feminine aesthetic while cooking over open flames. Aqel, grounding her food in Jordan while absorbing techniques from around the world. Coss, treating travel as an essential ingredient in her creative life. Abdullahi, drawing simultaneously from Ethiopian history, Muslim traditions and her own contemporary experience. Rosval, trying to build kitchens in which creativity and humane working conditions reinforce, rather than contradict, one another.

And then there is Bolivian chef Marsia Taha, who used the festival to introduce diners to an ingredient they might otherwise approach with some hesitation.

She served piranha.

The fish arrived at the table whole, head on, its sharp teeth still plainly visible. We ate it with our hands.

And it was delicious.

That meal felt like a small, vivid demonstration of what the women at the festival had been describing all weekend.

Food can preserve tradition without becoming trapped by it. It can be feminine without being delicate. It can be ambitious without being punishing. A chef can travel the world without losing sight of where she came from. She can become a mother without surrendering her career. A kitchen can demand excellence without demanding suffering.

At the Chef’s Table Festival, the women chefs seemed less interested in proving that they could succeed within the old model than in asking what might happen if they built something different.

The future of food does not require one new model of the chef.

It requires making room for many more of them.

The post The women reshaping kitchen culture appeared first on Salon.com.

Received β€” 25 September 2026 ⏭

How to celebrate Dolly Parton Day with a Southern feast

βœ‡Salon.com
By: Francesca Giangiulio
25 September 2026 at 17:11

Over the years, there have been several attempts to give legendary country singer, philanthropist and all-around icon Dolly Parton a commemorative day of her own.

In 2019, then-Nashville Mayor David Briley named August 5 Dolly Parton Day in recognition of both her musical career and the enormous impact of her nonprofit, Imagination Library. Then, in January of this year, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee proclaimed Jan. 19 Dolly Parton Day in honor of her 80th birthday.

It is difficult, of course, to contain someone as singular β€” and seemingly as genuine β€” as Parton within a single calendar square. β€œDown to earth” is an overused phrase, but rarely has it fit someone so famous quite so well. After the singer’s death in August, however, cities and states across the country joined together in recognizing Sept. 25 as Dolly Parton Day. This one feels like it might stick.

The date itself is a wink to one of Parton’s most famous songs: β€œ9 to 5.” There’s the phonetic joke β€” nine-two-five β€” but also something fitting in the song’s message of good humor and perseverance when the man, quite literally, seems determined to keep you down. That keep-your-chin-up spirit was central to Parton’s public persona and remains one small piece of the enormous legacy she leaves behind.

Parades, concerts, festivals and other celebrations will take place around the country. If you’re looking to extend the festivities at home, I can’t think of a better tribute than a true Southern feast β€” perhaps paired with a donation to Imagination Library.

Parton, who said she first learned to cook out of necessity for her many siblings, was a devoted champion of hearty Southern home cooking. She released several cookbooks filled with classics like chicken and dumplings alongside what she called β€œold mountain stuff”: beans, potatoes and the inexpensive staples of her East Tennessee childhood. She also launched a baking mix line with Duncan Hines and, later, a series of frozen meals and sides.

So, if you’re building a Dolly-worthy table, here’s where to start.

Cinnamon bread

First things first: You can’t throw a Dolly Parton party without a little Dollywood.

The theme park’s famous cinnamon bread may be the closest thing to a Dolly-approved breakfast pastry, and it is every bit as indulgent as you’d expect from something served in a place full of roller coasters, rhinestones and a giant pink butterfly. The pull-apart loaf is warm, soft and buttery, streaked generously with cinnamon sugar that caramelizes around the edges as it bakes.

Technically, it’s breakfast. Realistically, I have been known to sneak a piece at lunch, in the late afternoon or after dinner with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream. Dolly Day seems like an especially good excuse.

Coleslaw

Dolly’s β€œSlaw of Many Colors” is exactly the kind of Southern side dish you want on a table crowded with richer fare: crunchy, creamy, colorful and just a little more playful than your average bowl of coleslaw.

The recipe appears in β€œGood Lookin’ Cookin’,” the 2024 cookbook Parton wrote with her sister, Rachel Parton George, which features more than 80 recipes alongside family stories. Organized around holidays and gatherings, the book feels particularly appropriate for an occasion like this one.

Coleslaw is already a Southern cookout staple, but this version has a little extra personality. Its cool crunch and acidity offer some welcome relief beside chicken and dumplings, beans and potatoes and whatever other comfort food inevitably accumulates at a Dolly Parton potluck.

Think of it as a palate cleanser β€” provided your idea of a palate cleanser involves a generous amount of mayonnaise.

Macaroni salad

Parton’s macaroni salad appeared in her first cookbook, β€œDollywood Presents: Tennessee Mountain Home Cooking” (1989), a community cookbook featuring more than 250 traditional Southern and Appalachian recipes collected from members of the β€œDollywood Family” and sold at the Pigeon Forge theme park.

Macaroni salad was one of my favorite sides as a kid, though I’m not entirely sure why. My mom never made it at home, yet the dish still brings back immediate memories of summer cookouts at the local park: hamburgers on the grill, bubbles floating through the air, chalk neighborhoods drawn across the sidewalk.

There is simply something about a cold, creamy bowl of pasta salad that feels destined for a red-checkered tablecloth and a paper plate.

Dolly’s version fits neatly into that world. It is cool, creamy and loaded with crunchy vegetables, with enough tang and sweetness to keep you going back for β€œjust one more bite.” Better still, it’s ideal party food: Make it ahead, pile it into the biggest bowl you own and let everybody serve themselves.

Parton loved feeding people. This is exactly the sort of dish built for it.

Chicken and dumplings

If one dish belongs at the center of a Dolly Parton feast, it’s chicken and dumplings.

Dolly herself called it the recipe she was most famous for, and she frequently connected the dish to what she learned from her mother, Avie Lee. Her version appeared in β€œDolly’s Dixie Fixin’s” in 2006 and resurfaced in β€œGood Lookin’ Cookin’” in 2024 as one of the sisters’ family favorites.

This is not sleek, minimalist chicken. It is unapologetic Southern comfort: tender meat and soft dumplings tucked into rich broth, the whole thing landing somewhere between supper and a blanket.

That heartiness makes even more sense when you remember Parton was one of 12 siblings and learned to cook in part by helping her mother feed the family.

In a characteristically Dolly explanation of what makes the dish special, she has said her chicken and dumplings have β€œlove” in them.

We’ll take that as the final ingredient.

Beans and potatoes

Beans and potatoes may not sound especially glamorous for a celebration of one of country music’s most glamorous women. That is precisely why they belong here.

Parton grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee in a family where cooking was less about spectacle than figuring out how to make something good from what you had. She has described those early meals β€” beans, potatoes and other inexpensive staples β€” as foundational to the way she learned to cook.

At Dollywood, pinto beans and potatoes connect the theme park’s enormous spectacle back to the Appalachian upbringing that shaped its namesake. Parton also famously loved potatoes, once joking that the starchy vegetable was the reason she could never stick to a diet.

Together, the beans are savory and substantial, the potatoes soft and comforting: exactly the kind of unfussy side dish that makes sense alongside the richer Southern classics on this table.

More than that, they are a reminder that Parton never appeared especially interested in sanding away the humble roots of her childhood. She carried them with her β€” all the way into an enormous career built, in part, on the warmth and generosity she first learned at home.

Cuppa cuppa cake

Now for dessert β€” and a little Hollywood history.

Cuppa cuppa cake became famous thanks to Parton’s role as Truvy Jones in the 1989 film β€œSteel Magnolias.” In one of the movie’s most memorable food moments, Truvy explains the almost comically straightforward formula: a cup of flour, a cup of sugar and a cup of fruit cocktail.

That’s it.

No elaborate pastry technique. No agonizing over whether your peaks are stiff or merely firm. This is pure dump-and-mix baking, producing a simple, sweet fruit cake with a golden, bubbly top and soft, spoonable center.

It lands somewhere between cake and cobbler and is especially good served warm under a generous scoop of ice cream β€” which feels appropriately unfussy for Truvy and appropriately celebratory for Dolly.

Banana pudding

Finally, I can’t think of a better way to close a Dolly Parton celebration than banana pudding.

The recipe was one of Parton’s contributions to β€œCooking with Country Music Stars,” a 1986 cookbook compiled by the Country Music Foundation featuring recipes from some of the genre’s biggest names, including Reba McEntire, George Strait and Conway Twitty. Parton has described banana pudding as one of her favorite desserts, tying it to both her childhood and her mother’s cooking. Versions continued to appear in her later cookbooks, keeping the dessert firmly rooted in the food story she told throughout her life.

Parton’s is the old-fashioned kind: layers of vanilla wafers and sliced bananas nestled into creamy pudding, finished with a cap of fluffy meringue lightly browned in the oven. The bananas add freshness; the wafers soften just enough in the pudding to become almost cake-like.

It is, above all, a dish meant to be shared β€” friends and family gathered around a kitchen table, everybody reaching for another spoonful while quietly keeping track of who got the last good piece.

If there’s one thing Parton seemed to understand especially well, it’s that food is rarely only about food. It is family, memory, generosity and the simple pleasure of making someone feel welcome at your table.

And it doesn’t always have to be pretty. What matters more is that it tastes good and that you share it with people you love.

So put on a Dolly playlist, pile the plates high and pass the banana pudding.

The post How to celebrate Dolly Parton Day with a Southern feast appeared first on Salon.com.

Received β€” 22 September 2026 ⏭

Don’t meal prep. Make yourself one nice thing

βœ‡Salon.com
By: Ashlie D. Stevens
22 September 2026 at 16:30

Last Sunday night, my grocery order arrived without my usual breakfast sandwiches.

This ordinarily would not constitute a crisis. Except my little freezer stash of homemade breakfast burritos had also dwindled to nothing, and I knew exactly what Monday morning would look like without some intervention: Wake up. Realize there was nothing easy to eat. Debate whether I had enough time to stop somewhere. Get annoyed that breakfast had somehow become a decision I needed to make before coffee.

On busy weeks, I hate busy mornings.

Breakfast is consequently my most brainless meal. Give me something I can put in a 350-degree oven for a few minutes while I shower and become a person, and I am delighted. Weekends are different. On a Saturday, I will happily get up at 6 a.m. with coffee to babysit yeasted cinnamon rolls or start whisking hollandaise. The fuss is part of the pleasure.

Wednesday morning? Absolutely not.

So, standing in my kitchen Sunday night, I decided to give myself one nice thing.

I had two sourdough heels, two eggs and some cream, which meant I had the beginnings of either a sweet or savory strata. Savory sounded more like Monday, so I did what I think of as reverse-shopping: opened the refrigerator and started looking for ingredients that wanted to know each other. Half a can of diced tomatoes. Half a white onion. Four strips of bacon. A little shredded cheddar left from chili night. A jar of roasted red peppers.

Scrappy, yes. But coherent.

I whisked the eggs and cream with garlic powder, onion powder, dried thyme, oregano, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper, plus a little drizzle of soy sauce. Trust me. Then I added the tomatoes directly to the custard because I wanted the bread to soak up their sweet-savory juices rather than simply sit alongside them. In went the torn sourdough, which I thoroughly dunked in the custard, followed by crisped bacon, a small drizzle of bacon fat β€” sue me β€” cheddar, roasted peppers and minced onion. You could soften the onion first if you prefer, but I liked the little bit of bite it retained after baking.

The whole thing went into a greased 8-inch baking dish and into the refrigerator overnight.

Before bed, I also chopped one slightly wilting scallion and tucked it into a little bowl for morning.

This is perhaps the detail that best explains what I mean by β€œone nice thing.”

The next morning, I drizzled a little olive oil over the strata, put it into a 350-degree oven and went to shower. About 25 minutes later, I gave it another few minutes to brown, scattered my already-chopped scallions over the top and sat down to a breakfast that felt vaguely cafΓ©-quality on a Monday morning.

It felt cafΓ©-quality on Tuesday, too.

I’ve written before about my general resistance to rigid weekly meal prep. I’m much happier with an occasional Big Seasonal Prep Day β€” fill the freezer with soups, sauces, breakfast burritos and other useful things β€” and then let the ensuing weeks fall where they will.

But this fall, β€œone nice thing” has become something of a guiding star. It is a season in which a lot of energy is flowing out: two family weddings back-to-back, seven family birthdays between August and November, the usual work, a cookbook project, a documentary. When that much is going out, it feels especially good to do something small that preserves a little energy for me.

Importantly, β€œnice” is doing a lot of work here.

This isn’t about optimizing every meal, spending three hours prepping identical containers or constructing the sort of Sunday routine that makes you feel behind when you inevitably skip it.

It starts with a different question: What would make me disproportionately happy to discover already done tomorrow?

Maybe the answer is waking up and realizing you don’t have to hit the drive-thru for breakfast. Maybe it’s knowing you won’t have to pull out another knife for three days. Maybe it’s just opening the refrigerator and finding something cold and lovely to drink.

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Here are a few of my current β€œone nice things,” roughly in ascending order of effort:

  • Put tea bags in a jug of cool water and refrigerate overnight. Cold-brewed green tea the next day feels disproportionately fancy for something that took approximately 45 seconds.

  • Make one dip or dressing. For me, this is often cottage cheese ranch or a punchy vinaigrette β€” mostly because Future Me is considerably more enthusiastic about eating vegetables when there is something good to drag them through.

  • Make one big batch of Very Simple Soup. I’ll be sharing some of my favorites over the coming weeks, but a pot of soup in the fridge can quietly carry several lunches without asking much of you.

  • Put on a podcast or an episode of whatever you’re watching and chop the vegetables. I set up my cutting board at the bar in front of the television, clean and chop everything, then stash it in labeled deli tubs. Yes, in my personal estimation, making an entire batch of soup is easier than a dedicated vegetable-chopping session. Your mileage may vary.

  • Make something that gets better while you ignore it. Chili. Curry. Baked pasta. A strata like this one. Something that can sit in the refrigerator for a day or two and somehow become more itself.

The point isn’t to prepare yourself perfectly for the week.

It’s just to put one small pleasure into motion.

Tomato-Cheddar Strata with Bacon

Yields
4-6Β servings
Prep Time
15 minutes, plus overnight chilling
Cook Time
25Β  minutes

Ingredients

  • 2 to 2 1/2 generous cups torn sourdough bread

  • 2 eggs

  • 1/4 cup heavy cream

  • 1/2 can diced tomatoes, with their juices

  • 3 teaspoons garlic powder

  • 3 teaspoons onion powder

  • 3 teaspoons dried thyme

  • 3 teaspoons dried oregano

  • 3 teaspoons red pepper flakes, or to taste

  • A small drizzle of soy sauce

  • Salt and black pepper, to taste

  • 4 strips bacon, cooked crisp and crumbled

  • A little reserved bacon fat, optional

  • 1/4 cup shredded cheddar

  • 1/2 small white onion, finely minced

  • 1/4 cup chopped roasted red pepper

  • Olive oil, for the baking dish and finishing

  • 1 scallion, thinly sliced, for serving

Β 

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs, cream, garlic powder, onion powder, thyme, oregano, red pepper flakes, soy sauce, salt and black pepper. Stir in the diced tomatoes and their juices.
  2. Add the torn bread and toss well, pressing and turning the pieces so they thoroughly absorb the custard.
  3. Fold in the bacon, a small drizzle of reserved bacon fat if using, cheddar, onion and roasted red pepper.
  4. Transfer to a greased 8-inch baking dish. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
  5. The next morning, heat the oven to 350 degrees. Drizzle the top of the strata lightly with olive oil and bake for about 25 minutes, or until hot throughout and beginning to brown. Give it another 2 to 5 minutes if you’d like a little more color.
  6. Top with sliced scallions and eat immediately β€” or directly from the refrigerator tomorrow. I can confirm both are quite nice.

Β 

The post Don’t meal prep. Make yourself one nice thing appeared first on Salon.com.

I was a farmers market failure

βœ‡Salon.com
By: Ashlie D. Stevens
4 August 2026 at 15:00

When I moved to Chicago, I assumed I would become a slightly different person.

Not in the wholehearted country-song sense, where crossing the county line might allow me to outrun myself. The reinvention I had in mind was more municipal than spiritual: perhaps a change in infrastructure might produce a corresponding improvement in character.

I was moving without my car, so I would naturally become someone who walked, biked and took the train more. Our apartment was about ten minutes from Lake Michigan; perhaps proximity alone would turn me into one of those women who began the day with a brisk swim. At the very least, I would develop strong opinions about beach sandwiches.

And I would be living within walking distance of a sickening number of farmers markets.

Of course this would become part of who I was.

The life I pictured appeared in View-Master slides, each image crisp and complete, with all the inconvenient connective tissue outsourced.

Click. I’m on the train.

Click. I’m wheeling my bike off it with balletic ease, definitely not annoying my fellow commuters as I lug it down the stairs.

Click. I’m wearing a helmet that looks chic rather than orthopedic.

Click. The helmet β€” and any evidence that it has touched my hair β€” has disappeared. I am now carrying a gorgeous straw tote and wearing linen that has somehow survived public transit without acquiring a wrinkle.

Click. Farmers market stalls.

Click. Farmers market haul.

Click. A thrown-together dinner party on the rooftop of my building for all my neighbors. Yes, it overlooks a nest of alleyways, and no, management does not like people going up there, and no, I don’t know all my neighbors by name or even sight yet. But I have somehow assembled enough glittering people and enough secondhand objects β€” a woven rug, cushions, low tables, an impossible number of candles β€” that it feels like a tiny seventh-floor pop-up restaurant.

In my imagination, even the building superintendent has been cast. He arrives to break up the party with the energy of the businessman who plans to level the summer camp until he witnesses the final talent-show number. Then he takes a bite of the olive oil cake I have made for dessert. He softens. β€œMaybe we should do this more often,” he says.

Click. Community.

What I had not pictured was shopping.

In the View-Master version, the market haul arrived already edited. There were no prices to compare, no heavy bags to carry home, no stalls selling six unrelated things I suddenly believed might change my life. I would wander in with my perfectly sized tote, allow whatever charmed me to determine dinner and wait for the ingredients to organize themselves.

Later, when someone praised the meal, I would demur in the manner of women for whom this sort of thing came naturally.

β€œOh, this?” I would say. β€œJust something I threw together.”

Little did I know.

I was a farmers market failure.

This remained true for an embarrassingly long time β€” including several years when I was already being paid to write about food. I knew how to want everything at a farmers market. I simply did not know how to shop at one.

The clearest evidence came one late-summer afternoon, when several weeks of bad weather produced a scheduling anomaly: two neighborhood farmers markets on the same day. The vendors posted flyers and made an occasion of it.

I decided I would, too.

The first occupied a roped-off parking lot beside an elementary school. I left home with $45 in cashβ€”which felt ample, even indulgentβ€”and one of the crinkly blue totes I had picked up on our last trip to the suburban IKEA.

The day was sticky enough that the plastic adhered to my bare shoulder. Every few minutes, I peeled it from my skin and transferred it to the other side, where it promptly attached itself again. The chic tote from the View-Master apparently had another engagement.

Everyone at the market seemed either to have a distinct plan or to be genuinely content wandering. A mother steered a stroller while consulting a list. A white-haired man in a Tommy Bahama shirt amiably haggled two dollars off his peaches. Another man had a shallot tattooed on his forearm, suggesting either a career behind the line or an allium devotion I could not hope to match.

I wanted to resemble the relaxed browsers who paused over a melon because its scent had summoned them. In fact, I am much more comfortable with a list. I hadn’t learned yet that I was a Type A person masquerading as Type B. The disguise began to fray almost immediately.

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I completed one slow circuit, attempting to look discerning. Nearby, a woman with timeless preschool-teacher energy played the accordion for a ring of toddlers as shoppers crowded around nearly white ears of sweet corn. Then I noticed things were disappearing behind me. Baskets I had paused over were emptier when I returned. Someone bought the last loaf of a bread I had not yet decided whether I wanted.

This sent me into a faster orbit.

The accordion sounded louder.

To steady myself, I bought a $12 arancini from a stall that accepted only cards. Because I had designated the cash as my farmers market budget, the card purchase belonged to a parallel economy; by this logic, my $45 remained intact. Arancini in hand, I passed a booth lined with turquoise jewelry, Coca-Cola merchandise and approximately 40 embroidered denim vests. It looked as though the vendor had raided a secret convention of 1990s elementary-school teachers and persuaded them to turn in their uniforms.

Then I made a beeline for the heirloom tomatoes.

I chose two: one ridged and heavy, its skin receding from burgundy into a deep, almost plum color; the other a cheerful red beefsteak. They were fat and beautiful and cost about $8. A woman carrying two heirloom tomatoes could still plausibly claim to be shopping for dinner. I was back on course.Β 

The plan splintered almost immediately. I ping-ponged from soft cheeses to eggs and squash, then past a gelato cart and a table crowded with jams, pepper jellies and a milk carton filled with VHS tapes.

Finally, I arrived at the pastry stall.

It was run by a man in his early 40s with a single gold hoop and a tight gray bun. I had never before described a man bun as severe, but no other word will do. He was arguing with another vendor in the unmistakable register of people with history. β€œYou’re always like this,” one of them said. β€œI’m not sure why we’re even doing this again.”

I studied the pastries while pretending not to listen: tea-infused buns knotted with candied citrus, laminated pastry layered with spiced cream cheese, craggy oat muffins dotted with boysenberry preserves. I waited for a lull. I misjudged it.Β 

There was no visible menu, so I began, β€œExcuse me, how much—” just as the baker turned toward the other vendor. β€œDo you remember last August?” he demanded.

There was an awkward two-second collision. Then he looked at me.

β€œPrices are marked,” he hissed.

They were not.

I could have walked away. Unfortunately, I have always struggled with disappointing authority figures: professors, bosses, priests, parents β€” and, apparently, severe-bunned bakers. I pointed to two oat muffins.Β 

β€œFor breakfast,” I told myself.

They were $7.50 each. I wanted them, though not $15 worth of them, but by then β€œWell, actually…” was beyond me. I paid and tucked them beside the tomatoes.

The bag remained almost offensively empty. For $23 in cash, it contained four objects, all of which now had to be protected from one another. Still, I had just over $20 left. The arancini did not count. The muffins were breakfast. Dinner remained possible.

I could turn this around.

I just needed to go to the second market.Β 

It turned out to be both prettier and worse.

The vendors occupied a tree- and bench-lined pedestrian stretch that I once overheard two teenagers in airbrushed wolf T-shirts nominate as the neighborhood’s most romantic place to smoke a joint. They may have been right about the romance. Unfortunately, everyone else had arrived before me.

By then, the baskets had been picked over. The best things had departed in the totes of people who knew what they were doing. I walked one more circuit, attempting to let the remaining produce speak to me.

It said very little.

I bought a jar of blackberry jam because it sounded good.

Then, on the way home, I stopped at the corner store and spent the rest of my cash on a frozen pizza.

Back at the apartment, I unpacked. Everything from the markets was beautiful, delicious or both. It simply did not add up to the thing I had gone there to find.

The only dinner in that day’s haul had come from the freezer aisle.

This shouldn’t have been a surprise, really.Β  It was not as though the open air of a farmers market was going to cure my base shopping instincts. Put me in a grocery store without a plan and I move through the aisles like a dog with the zoomies: produce, meat, back to produce, an abrupt dairy detour, then three aisles in reverse because I have remembered lemons.

For a long time, I assumed the solution was to become more instinctive. Food culture is inordinately fond of nonchalance: meals that are β€œalmost too easy,” cakes that come together β€œin a snap.” It reminds me of how, recently, my younger sister β€” deep in the trials and tribulations of planning her wedding look β€” called me sounding breathless and almost conspiratorial. β€œDid you know pop stars wear hair extensions?”

Effortlessness, we agreed, generally has at least a little scaffolding underneath.

Perhaps the market shoppers I envied had simply made a few decisions before everything started charming them.

My reeducation began, as many good things do, with pasta.

I had rigatoni, olive oil and butter at home, which meant one good vegetable would be enough. Zucchini could be grated and cooked down until jammy, then loosened with pasta water; tomatoes could be sliced, salted and left to steep in olive oil. Cheese would be a bonus.

I wrote a two-item list: Good vegetables. Good cheese.

Then I took a beat and added: Pastries for morning.

I gave myself a five-purchase limit, leaving two slots open for surprise.

At the market, I moved differently. With dinner already half-imagined, I could pass the tomatoes and melons without treating each one as an alternate future I might regret abandoning. Instead, I gravitated toward a pile of thin-necked yellow summer squash. The day was in the low 70s, and a breeze was coming through our kitchen window; I decided I would not mind standing at the stove long enough to coax the squash toward sweet collapse. Because one caramelized vegetable is good and two are better, I added a white onion.

Then I followed my list to the cheese stall, where I found a soft chèvre, and to the baker (a different one, blessedly) for croissants and a hunk of cornbread, which I naturally counted as a single purchase. My wildcards were honey, for the vegetables and leftover cornbread, and basil, mostly for color and romance.

At home, I cooked the onion and grated squash in butter with a spoonful of honey, miso and red-pepper flakes until they became jammy. I crumbled some of the cornbread into olive oil and toasted it in a skillet. Then I added the rigatoni and enough pasta water to turn the vegetables velvety, finishing each bowl with the crisp crumbs, little pillows of chèvre and torn basil.

In a way, it really was something I had thrown together.

But the ingredients had not organized themselves.Β 

I had given them somewhere to land.

How I shop the farmers market nowΒ 

(Ashlie Stevens ) IKEA tote, and contents

The point was never to become less susceptible to the market’s charms. It was to stop asking every beautiful thing to become dinner. Here are five simple tips I keep in mind to let the market surprise me without leaving dinner to chance.

Choose a form, not a recipe

Before I leave home, I decide what kind of thing dinner will be. Not the exact recipe, but the form: toast, pasta, a frittata, a rice bowl, a substantial salad, perhaps a pot of soup or stew.

Even a well-stocked farmers market rarely behaves like a supermarket organized around a recipe’s demands. It offers what is there, in the quantity there is. A useful form already provides enough structure β€” a base, a binder, a vessel β€” that whatever looks best can find a place within it.

One tomato may not look like a grocery haul, but with bread, mayonnaise and an egg, it is dinner. A handful of mushrooms that seems meager in a paper bag can become the center of a frittata. A single bunch of greens can be folded into beans, piled onto toast or wilted through cheesy rice.

The form supplies the logic. The market supplies the surprise.

Start with the kitchen you already haveΒ 

A farmers market is not a complete food system. It is exceptionally good at providing the vivid part of dinner β€” the ripe tomato, the thin-skinned squash, the bunch of herbs still cool from the morning β€” but it may not provide the starch, protein, fat, acid or seasoning required to turn those things into a meal.

That is what the kitchen at home is for.

Before I leave, I β€œreverse-shop” my fridge and pantry, taking stock of the support system already in place: pasta or rice, bread or tortillas, eggs, tinned fish, tender white beans; butter, olive oil, yogurt, vinegar and whatever cheese is threatening to fossilize in the refrigerator.

I jot those ingredients at the bottom of my market list. Seeing eggs, rice, yogurt in writing makes it easier to recognize what a bunch of greens or a basket of cucumbers could becomeβ€”and easier to pivot when the ingredient I imagined isn’t there.

The market ingredient does not need to do everything. It only needs to be good.

Set a limit, but leave room for surprise

A rigid list can make a farmers market feel like a slightly understocked supermarket. I have better luck shopping for roles rather than exact ingredients: Good vegetables, good cheese, pastries for morning.Β 

Perhaps the squash looks better than the zucchini. Perhaps the cheese is a bloomy little wheel rather than chèvre. The role remains useful even when the ingredient changes.

Then I decide roughly how many purchases I want to make. Three items may be plenty for tartines; a big, maximalist salad could happily accommodate eight or ten. The number is not sacred. It simply gives me a stopping point before I begin believing every peach, pickle and pastry belongs to the plan. When necessary, I set a spending limit, too. Other weeks, a predetermined number of decisions is enough.

I also leave room for wildcards. They might improve dinnerβ€”herbs, honey, good bread, something pickledβ€”or have nothing to do with it: flowers, jam, a spice blend, a VHS tape, an embroidered denim vest.

Impulse is part of the pleasure. It simply does better with a little containment.

This also preserves the culinary reason for the limit without overpronouncing it: farmers market ingredients are usually best when they remain recognizable. You don’t need to cram every beautiful thing into the same dinner merely because it came home in the same tote.

Let one excellent thing be enough

On that note, a successful trip does not require a photogenic avalanche of produce.

One excellent vegetable can be cooked down with butter and tangled through pasta. One tomato can be grated onto toast. A small bundle of herbs can sharpen a bowl of rice and beans. A few peaches can become dinner with cheese, bread and something salty.

The smaller the minimum, the less likely you are to buy six unrelated ingredients in the hope that abundance will eventually explain itself.

Let the market be incomplete

Sometimes the stalls are picked over. Sometimes the beautiful thing costs more than you want to spend. Sometimes the market is rich in soap, flowers and decorative squash but not in dinner. Pivot to another generous form. Stop at the supermarket for eggs or bread. Buy one jar of good jam for the pantry and go home.

And when the entire enterprise has ceased to sound fun, there is always frozen pizza.

Dinner should not be held hostage by the farmers market.

This story originally appeared in The Bite, my weekly food newsletter for Salon. It is theΒ  first half of this two-part farmers market special. Next week, I’ll be back with five flexible recipes to keep in your pocket for market dayβ€”including the jammy squash pasta with chΓ¨vre and cornbread crumbs that started this whole reeducation. There will be options for tomatoes, greens, fruit and the miscellaneous beautiful thing you bought before deciding what it was for. Subscribe here to have it sent straight to your inbox.Β 

The post I was a farmers market failure appeared first on Salon.com.

Received β€” 18 May 2026 ⏭
Received β€” 23 April 2026 ⏭
Received β€” 20 March 2026 ⏭

Broiled Whole Branzino recipe

βœ‡No Title – Cooking Korean food with Maangchi
By: Maangchi
19 March 2026 at 23:33
Since leaving Korea and living abroad for many years, I’ve come across a few fish that were unfamiliar to me when I lived in Korea. Two of them are whiting and branzino, and I found that they can be especially delicious when cooked with Korean flavors. In a previous recipe, I used whiting to make […]
Received β€” 17 February 2026 ⏭
Received β€” 9 January 2026 ⏭

Tarte au citron: Lemon Tart Recipe

βœ‡David Lebovitz
By: David
9 January 2026 at 16:27

Not everyone thinks of citrus fruits as β€œwinter fruits.” But that’s when oranges, grapefruits, tangerines, tangy lemons, and enticing limes are often at their peak. And that’s a good thing because there’s nothing that brightens up any season – but especially winter – better than a classic French lemon tart.

French lemon tart recipe

Any bakery in Paris will have a Tarte au citron on offer. Some are on the sweet side, others tart. I like my lemon tart, well…tart, for sure and when I search for lemons at my market, I choose the plumpest, juiciest ones I can find. Fortunately, good lemons are available just about anywhere, so anyone can make this tart. Most of us don’t even have to wait until winter!

https://www.davidlebovitz.com/2009/05/tart-au-citron-french-lemon-tart/

I juiced my lemons, cracked some eggs, and got to work on the tart.

For the base, I usedΒ Paule’s pastry dough, which is so easy to make and hasn’t failed me yet. It’s delicious and buttery, and goes particularly well with the delicious lemon topping.

https://www.davidlebovitz.com/2009/05/tart-au-citron-french-lemon-tart/

I cooked the filling, a sunny, luscious lemon curd,Β on the stovetop with the fragrant zest of the lemons, then poured the warm filling through a strainer to make it as smooth as possible.

https://www.davidlebovitz.com/2009/05/tart-au-citron-french-lemon-tart/Β One could pipe whipped cream on it or top it with meringue. To do so, let it cool and spread or pipe whipped cream over the top or serve a dollop alongside. If you want to give a go at meringue, check out my Lime Meringue Tart recipe or the marshmallow topping that I use onΒ my Pumpkin Pie with Marshmallow Topping.

https://www.davidlebovitz.com/2009/05/tart-au-citron-french-lemon-tart/

Both are delicious, but just as it is – or as the French say, nature – is just fine with me.

French lemon tart

Print

Lemon Tart

I recently updated this recipe to increase the amount of filling and I dialed down the sugar a bit due to frequent questions about reducing sugar in recipes. You can taste the filling in step 3 and if you'd like it sweeter, add up to 1/4 cup (50g) more sugar If you find that you have a bit too much filling for your tart shell (they seem to vary), any remaining lemon filling that you don’t use can be spread on toast, fresh biscuits, or scones. You could substitute fresh lime juice for the lemon, and if you have Meyer lemons, reduce the sugar to 1/2 cup (100g). You can use a favorite tart dough recipe, or the one I’ve linked to.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup (250ml) freshly-squeezed lemon juice
  • grated zest of two lemons preferably unsprayed
  • 3/4 cup (150g) sugar
  • 12 tablespoons (170g) butter salted or unsalted, cut into cubes
  • 4 large eggs
  • 4 large egg yolks
  • One pre-baked 9-inch (23cm) tart shell

Instructions

  • Preheat the oven to 350ΒΊF (180ΒΊC).
  • In a medium-sized non-reactive saucepan, heat the lemon juice, zest, sugar, butter, eggs and egg yolks. Have a mesh strainer nearby.
  • Stir until the butter is melted, then whisk the mixture continuously until the mixture thickens and holds its shape when you lift some of it up with the whisk and it visibly mounds up when dropped back down over the rest of the mixture in the saucepan. It should just take a few minute.
  • Pour the warm lemon curd though a strainer into a bowl (or directly into the tart shell), scraping with a rubber spatula to press it through.
  • Smooth the lemon filling in the prebaked tart shell and pop it in the oven until the curd is just set. It’ll take about 5 to 6 minutes.
  • Remove from the oven and let cool before slicing and serving.

Related Links

Recipes to Use Up Leftover Egg Whites

Lemon Verbena Ice Cream

Moroccan Preserved Lemons

Tips for Freezing Eggs

What is non-reactive cookware?

French lemon tart recipe-13

Received β€” 27 August 2025 ⏭
Received β€” 28 July 2025 ⏭
Received β€” 10 July 2025 ⏭

41 No-Cook Summer Dishes for When You Absolutely Cannot Turn On the Oven

βœ‡Food52
By: Katie Macdonald
10 July 2025 at 07:26

I love my kitchen, I really do. But lately, I’ve been searching for every excuse under the sun to get outside. Whether it’s taking a long walk home from work, bringing my weekend reading to the park, or slipping outside for lunch, I’m making the most of our very warm, sunny weather. But some days are just too hot to think, too hot to move, and certainly too hot to cook. For those sticky, sweaty, sweltering days, make one of these no-cook summer dishes. That means that you don’t have to turn on the stove or oven to enjoy a seasonally inspired meal for lunch or dinner. I want dishes I can toss together sans stove or oven, like crispy salads, cool soups, and crunchy sandwiches. And, thankfully, summer’s bounty is ready to provide. After dinner, cool off with a frozen treat like our no-churn ice creams or dairy-free sorbets. We're in the dog days of summer, when all you want to do is sit by the A/C with a pint of ice cream. Here, I’ve gathered 30 of our freshest no-cook dishes. Now, go outside and enjoy the day!

Our best no-cookΒ recipes

1. Corn, Shrimp & Avocado Salad With Chipotle-Pepita Dressing

When you’re sick of the heat and don’t feel like cooking, this no-cook salad will save the day. Pro tip: Purchase fresh, precooked shrimp so that you don’t have to turn on the stove.

Read More >>

Β© Julia Gartland

Β© Julia Gartland

Β© Julia Gartland

Β© Julia Gartland

Β© Julia Gartland

Β© Julia Gartland

Β© Julia Gartland

Β© Julia Gartland

Β© Julia Gartland

Β© Julia Gartland

Received β€” 19 May 2025 ⏭

23 Easy Ways to Upgrade Boxed Mac & Cheese for Last-Minute Dinners

βœ‡Food52
By: Erin Alexander
19 May 2025 at 19:55

Let me get one thing straight: I have loved boxed macaroni and cheese for as long as I can remember. From the bright orange Kraft mac and cheese dinners my dad "cooked" when my mom was out of town, to the countless microwaveable single-serve Easy Mac cups I consumed in college, and fancied-up shells and white cheddar from Annie's that now fill my pantry, this gloriously convenient invention has always been a part of my life.

And while you can often catch me whipping up a batch of the stuff in its purest form (including last night, when I had zero desire to prepare a full dinner), there are times when I like to experiment with different combinations of ingredients. Some are based off my cravings (spicy, bright and herby, or totally carbo-loaded), and other times they're based off whatever leftovers are in my fridge. Sure, adding extra ingredients can take away a bit of the simplicity, but incorporating them is easy and rarely takes more than a few minutesβ€”in fact, you can usually finish the prep while the pasta water boils. Most importantly, they pay off big time in terms of flavor.

Read More >>

Received β€” 23 March 2025 ⏭

Spicy pork party in Namhae

βœ‡No Title – Cooking Korean food with Maangchi
By: Maangchi
22 March 2025 at 23:51
A lot of people in my late father's hometown of Namhae, South Korea remembered him well. I got them together and made spicy pork and a few side dishes for lunch.
Received β€” 24 February 2025 ⏭

Seaside lunch in my father’s hometown

βœ‡No Title – Cooking Korean food with Maangchi
By: Maangchi
24 February 2025 at 00:20
I headed to Namhae, my father's hometown and where I had spent a lot of time when I was young. I was visited by my old friend Ms. Im for a seaside fresh fish lunch.
Received β€” 24 January 2025 ⏭

Cooking for my aunt in Yeosu

βœ‡No Title – Cooking Korean food with Maangchi
By: Maangchi
24 January 2025 at 01:35
My Auntie in Yeosu taught me so many things about cooking and has been my role model for many years. She's always been there for me and my family so when I visited Yeosu I wanted to make her a special meal using local seafood.
❌