Month: August 2022

Icy Cherry Piraguas Are Air Conditioning You Can Eat As a child, I’d spend many summer days playing with friends in the parks around my Brooklyn neighborhood, closely guarding the $5 my mother told me not to lose. While some of it would be spent on sunflower seeds or a slice of pizza, I’d always reserve at least one of those dollars for the beloved piragua man. Although they’re just crunchy bits of shaved ice with a candy-like flavoring, piraguas have the power to cool you off on the hottest of days. Once Memorial Day hit, the piragua man would roam the streets with his cart filled with flavored simple syrups in glass bottles with pour spouts and an enormous block of ice (which somehow never m...

It started with seven trees in the backyard of their Central New Jersey townhouse. It was the early 2000s, and Seema and Vivek Malik were infatuated with Japanese food. After falling hard for the cuisine in restaurants, the Maliks turned to home cooking to replicate their favorite foods from Hokkaido to Okinawa. They bought a copy of Nobu: The Cookbook by Nobu Matsuhisa and learned to simmer a perfect dashi, fry a crackling tempura, and purchase the best soy sauce and miso. But they got stuck when it came to whipping up a fresh yuzu-spiked ponzu. “We started to look for [ yuzu], but we couldn’t find it anywhere,” says Vivek. After eventually tracking down a few golfball-size, exorbitantly priced yuzu at the Japanese grocery store Mitsuwa in Edge...

When Hannah Che decided to become vegan in 2015, the plant-based foods landscape was boringly predictable. Blogs and social media were populated with what can only be described as “bowl food”: chia-topped smoothies, whole grain salads, and pureed coconut soups, all served up in shallow ceramics.  Eager to immerse herself in vegan culture, Che stocked the pantry with chickpea pasta and began trawling Pinterest for overnight oats recipes. And when she returned home from college during winter break for her family’s Lunar New Year celebration, she didn’t help fold the tender pork dumplings—instead standing to the side.   “Before I went vegan, I just viewed food as ingredients on a plate,” she says. “When I started learning about factory farming an...