After watching Netflix’s Wild, Wild Country, I try not to use the term “cult” lightly, but I’ll say this: Instant Pot’s most enthusiastic users display a devotion to the combination slow-cooker/pressure-cooker that borders on religious zeal. After receiving mine at Christmas, I joined a couple Instant Pot groups on…
There’s so much optimism on day one of a camping trip. The fresh air! The slightly tough but enjoyable hiking! The scores of fish waiting to be caught! By day three, though, the reality of mosquitos, heat, and your weak ankles have set in, not to mention your cooler is a swampy mess of floating sandwich detritus. I…
Cheers to the detectives at Munchies who remind us that this week is the 20-year anniversary of A Tale Of A Terrible Tiramisu, an article that ran in The Washington Post in July 1998. (Also bless the Post archives for keeping the original story online.) The true tale centers on a young woman who set out to make…
Wander into any high-end gourmet store, or even a normal grocery store, and you can feel immediately overwhelmed by the various cooking oil options. Personally, I’ve watched enough Rachael Ray episodes so that I’m always stocked with EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil). And I usually toss some sesame oil into whatever…
Those of us of a certain age (ahem) may remember a time period (or at least hearing about a time period) when high-school girls took home economics class, and high-school boys took shop. Men were going to grow up and work on their own cars or home repairs, while women would become homemakers and take care of their…
In the course of a life, one stumbles through the occasional invisible door, and once one passes through such a door, there is no turning back. They make a choice, express a preference, mention that they happen to really like this one book or that one color, and bam, the door slams behind them. The old Allison is…
I’m a loyal subscriber to Bon Appetit. But I’ve come to accept that the magazine and others like it have a very different attitude towards camp food than I do. Planning my recent Memorial Day camping trip in southwest Montana, I clicked through a slideshow of beautiful campfire meals: red-wine marinated hanger steak,…
Trust me, I’m a writer. My whole life is about procrastination. Want to have homework for the rest of your life? Embark on an exciting writing career. But unfortunately, when I’m putting off deadlines, I’m usually immersed in bullshit like Words With Friends, Twitter, or Instagram. When I could be procrastibaking!…
It’s late at night, you’re alone, maybe there were a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. You’re too lazy to get off the couch, too awake to sleep. You’re flipping through channels and then something catches your eye. A miracle product, a shiny gadget, promising to change your life for the better for only a few easy…
At The Takeout’s morning meeting today, we started this discussion about the merits of eating the same lunch every single day. Somehow, that led us off a tangent and into a rabbit hole about co-workers who brought/cooked/ate bizarre foods in the office (the cliche being the inconsiderate colleague who microwaves fish).
We’ve already established that millennials spend no time cooking—or shopping at Costco, for that matter—because they’re too busy ruining everything and/or Snapchatting. But just how inept is my generation at basic kitchen tasks? We’re fucking imbeciles.
By decree of the National Consortium Of Cooking Video Producers, all videos published online today must conform to the following standards:
If we could offer one culinary tip ahead of this weekend’s Super Bowl, it’s that premade supermarket guacamole is almost always a terrible idea. Why deprive yourself the pleasures of scooping the creamy avocado flesh from its skin, folding it in with chiles and limes, and mashing it with a fork? It tastes better,…
What strikes me about the Japanese relationship with fried chicken is the frequency of consumption—more often than a once-in-a-while indulgence. In America, eating fried chicken every day is viewed as gluttonous behavior. The same practice in Japan is met with gentler judgment.
The summer after my freshman year of college, I became a saleswoman for Cutco cutlery. One day I was 19, broke and aimless, living at home and trying to earn beer money without working too hard. The next I was in a stale office, slowly grasping that the marketing position I’d seen advertised on a telephone pole…
Certain dishes are obligatory on the American Christmas dinner table—ham, mashed potatoes, pie, gingerbread. But why not baby back ribs? Battered shrimp? Why isn’t there Christmas chili mac?
Six minutes into the original 1996 infomercial for the George Foreman Grill, product-hawking queen Nancy Nelson segues from ghastly broiler-cooked hamburgers to ask former boxer George Foreman about his then-nine kids (he has a dozen now), so that the audience might acknowledge him as quite the family man. Foreman…
The following is excerpted from Lucky Peach’s newest book, All About Eggs: Everything We Know About the World’s Most Important Food, in bookstores April 4. Read our interview with the book’s queen egg, Rachel Khong.
As we live in Chicago and winters here are a stupid kind of cold, we’d rather not venture outside and instead, stay in and make frothy mugs of hot chocolate. We weren’t satisfied with the Swiss Miss instant stuff, so we asked some of our favorite chefs for advice, as well as our internal staff, several of whom are…
Food is love. It’s why your family gets together for your favorite meal when you come home, and why your beloved brings you breakfast in bed, or why your friends buy you doughnuts and drinks on your birthday. When you feed someone, it’s a sign you care about their well-being, that you want them to continue to live,…
