Extra Crispy

Did you spend some of your holidays blissfully watching the contestants of The Great British Baking Show as they attempted creme patisserie or complicated breads? Did you ever wonder what actually happens to the leftovers of those fabulous technical challenges? Do they get boxed up and taken home? Composted? Furtively eaten by Paul Hollywood? How much sponge cake can one man really eat?

Raise your hand if you’ve been in the midst of scooping brown sugar into a batter only to realize the recipe you’re using calls for dark brown sugar. Huh?

Grapefruit, one of the lovely citrus gifts of winter, has so often been associated with austerity and diet culture, probably because of that whole grapefruit diet thing that started way back in the 1930s. But it feels unfair, because grapefruit has so, so much more to give.

Perhaps better than anyone, chef Jacques Pépin understands the satisfaction of improving a familiar food through technique—no tricky ingredients or gimmicky technology required.

I have been doing a lot of roasting lately. Not the traditional holiday things, like beef tenderloin or turkey, but duck. Duck is delicious, and it's a great party trick. And it's relatively easy (as long as you watch out for the duck fat catching on fire) to roast in the oven. Twice over the last two weeks I've made duck a l'orange for family or friends, a delicious dish that made me feel extremely like Julia Child. Twice, discovered what I've always suspected: You mostly don't need a roasting pan.

2018 is nearly at an end. Cleanse it from your memory and start the year anew.

Granted, your insistence on continuing to reference the 1987 film Predator by summoning up your best Arnold Schwarzenegger impression and yelling, “Get to the chopper!” might not be aging like fine wine, but it is the inspiration for a new whiskey.

It’s the dawn of 2019. You maybe had a few too many glasses of bubbles last night. Your New Year’s Resolutions are imminent, but can probably wait until you’ve gotten your hair of the dog. And it’s still a holiday, so we can be a little festive. But on January 1, complicated drinks are probably beyond you by this point.

Do you have a spoon rest? Do you love it? Because if so, please tell me. It is rare, with apologies to my former colleague, that I find someone who really loves their spoon rest. It is a clever idea to have a receptacle for a kitchen tool that's still in use. If you don't designate an area for them, they end up floating around the kitchen or buried in the sink—a very inconvenient quality for something that you're going to need imminently. But a spoon rest is always lacking somehow.

Though America’s beer laws have become increasingly lax over the years, alcohol is still one of the more heavily-regulated products in the country, and selling booze comes with plenty of hoops to continually jump through. For instance, every new product label has to be approved by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB).