Extra Crispy

It’s 30 degrees in Lyon, France, and world-renowned chef Thomas Keller looks deceptively European in a perfectly assembled scarf. Keller, a California native, is the James Beard Foundation award-winning, Michelin star-decorated chef and restaurateur behind Per Se and The French Laundry. He’s in France for the Bocuse d’Or, the closest thing the world has to a culinary olympics, serving as the president of Team USA.

The post-party breakfast is a sacred ritual, reserved for the strongest revelers who’ve danced their way to dawn. You stumble into a restaurant and collapse bleary-eyed into a booth, ears still ringing from the subwoofers you’ve been hugging all night. Early-rising office drones at surrounding tables shoot curious glances from behind newspapers as you rattle off your order. When your food arrives, the first bite is a blessing. The second bite is bliss.

As you stroll the aisles of your grocery store, you might miss the Auria’s Malaysian Kitchen products. The brand’s packaging is humble, but the flavors inside pack major heat.

When I was in college and living in a tiny dorm room, my mother and I went to Target and bought a tiny cutting board, a tiny colander, and a 2-pack of tiny knives. We thought it would only make sense to literally downsize my cooking tools—I quickly realized how wrong we were. The dinky knives would cut an apple or a cube of cheese perfectly fine, but anything tougher (like, even thick-skinned citrus) was a nightmare.

In 2018, Big Milk was hurting. A rise in dairy alternatives like oat milk and almond milk helped lead to an enormous dairy surplus, which meant that the country was sitting on a whole lot of cheese—1.39 billion pounds, to be exact. 

Pie dough is one of those things, like poaching eggs and making biscuits, that can trip people up. Do it right and it's a perfect buttery, flakey shell for pies of all kinds. Do it wrong and it's a greasy, soggy mess that won't come out of the pan.

Nacho cheese is a gooey gift from the gods. It makes even the plainest tortilla chips palatable, and adds an element of delicious decadence to any food it touches. But do we really love nacho cheese enough to interact with an advertisement to eat it?

Here’s one thing we haven’t seen a shortage of in a long time: news stories about avocados. Due to society’s obsession with the green fruit, any shift in the avocado market is apparently worth the public’s attention.