The spices are merely a vessel for culture, community, storytelling, and politics. The recipes were so fresh, simple, and seasonal. That's not the version of South Asian food that most people know.
I was just sort of desperate. Anything that I could possibly make, I wanted to make, and I turned to the kitchen. I tried to make this almond cake, and it doesn't go exactly as planned. It goes awry. And I think that's kind of rare in cookbooks to see, you know, the first instance of baking turn out to be, you know, this sort of humiliation, this massive failure.
Setting them, that is. Keeping them? That's another story. According to a 2024 Forbes Health survey, resolution setters last an average of only two to four months. High on the list of perennial resolutions is losing weight. Diets abound, and how you lose weight, I've discovered, is not as important as how you keep it off. I've finally realized that for me, the difference between losing weight and maintaining weight may only be a few added calories.
For three years, Eric Wareheim ate a lot of steak. We're talking three steakhouse meals a day, complete with sides and sauces. Towers of onion rings stacked high, bone-in rib-eyes, bubbling pots of lobster mac and cheese, fries and meats drowning in au poivre. His mission in traversing the country was, in part, figuring out how to define the "uniquely American" institution at the center of his new cookbook, "Steak House: The People, The Places, The Recipes."
For the past five years, chef and author Samin Nosrat has done something that, for many, can feel impossible. She's kept up a weekly dinner with friends. At first, she thought people would be too busy for it. But over time, the dinner held every Monday night for about 10 guests at a friend's house has become "a grounding, meaningful practice in all of our lives," she says. "At one point, a friend told me that Monday dinner was her church."
Gene Daly sits up at the table with us as we talk about his parents' latest cookbook, The Daly Dish Air Fryer, and the whirlwind that has been the last five years of Gina and Karol's lives. Gene recently started playschool near their home in Co Meath, but he's home today, a bit under the weather, while his teenage siblings, Holly and Ben, are at school.
Cassandra Peterson—better known to the world as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark—sat down with Kyle Meredith to talk about her newest creation, Elvira's Cookbook from Hell. The book, she insists, isn't just another seasonal cash-in, but a legit lifestyle manifesto: goth entertaining 365 days a year. "I'm like the Martha Stewart of the macabre," she laughs, explaining how long she'd fought publishers to get the concept in print.
