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A ruler in the utensil crock. A jar of sprinkles by the stove. These are the telltale signs that I’m in a dessert person’s kitchen. You probably know the type: someone who dedicates precious counter space to a KitchenAid stand mixer and rules holiday pie duty with a buttery fist. Except I’m not in just any kitchen, but the upstate New York kitchen of Claire Saffitz, the patron saint of modern dessert people. These days, Claire’s poppy-seed-dusted fingerprints are found all over bookshelves and social media feeds. Her five-year tenure in Bon Appétit’s test kitchen and the 2020 debut of her best-selling first cookbook, Dessert Person, has elevated Claire’s recipes to the level of mononym status most often reserved for Martha, Ina, and Ottolenghi. ...

Main Dishes Published: October 16, 2022   |   Updated: October 18, 2022   |   1 Comment .tasty-recipes-quick-links { text-align:center; } .tasty-recipes-quick-links a { padding: 0.5rem; } This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure policy for more details. This slow cooker chicken and gravy recipe has tender melt-in-your-mouth chicken breasts smothered in a warm and comforting gravy. Serve it over hot steamed rice, creamy mashed potatoes, or warm buttered egg noodles for an easy dump-and-go crock pot dinner. I’m a big fan of easy comforting meals at the end of the year and this is where the crock pot shines. This slow cooker chicken and gravy recipe will easily become a family favorite when you’re craving some comfort food. It takes the humbl...

When I started writing Food IQ with my buddy Daniel Holzman, we sent out a survey to a couple dozen friends and family asking for their burning food questions, and the request for an “easy way to make really good potato gnocchi at home” came up more than any other. So let’s dig in. Daniel has been making this foundational Northern Italian dish for almost 25 years, and he believes firmly that the key to a good gnocchi game is all about timing—and burnt fingertips. Potato gnocchi are a gift from the culinary gods—the transformation from simple spud to something fluffy, ethereal, and soaked in brown butter. But that truth is lived only when the gnocchi are made fresh. Store-bought gnocchi (and we’ve all gone in this direction; there’s no shame in i...

Veronica Garza says that the beauty of quesadillas (“cheese tacos,” as her family calls them) is achieving the perfect cheese pull, which, of course, requires the perfect cheese. “I especially like shredded Oaxaca cheese,” proclaims the cofounder of Siete Family Foods and author of the new cookbook The Siete Table. She describes Oaxaca’s superior cheese pull, the sign of a quality melting cheese, as “droolworthy” and one of the recipes in their pioneering grain-free recipe collection.   As a teenager, Garza was diagnosed with multiple debilitating autoimmune conditions. Depressed and overweight, Garza turned to her other six family members (“siete” notes the family’s numerical bond) to increase their exercise but also turn toward grain-free, mos...

In 1997, my mother purchased a small cookbook ahead of my second birthday. The book featured recipes for cake—specifically birthday cake—and she chose a marbled lemon- chocolate cake covered in lemon frosting and spattered with chocolate. The cake went down as legendary. Each year that followed, a cake was chosen from The Birthday Cake Book. When my parents divorced, my dad bought his own copy, and when I started baking as a teenager, my mom found a copy in a used bookstore and gave it to me. As I slowly and blindly made my way toward a career in food writing, The Birthday Cake Book was always beside me, reminding me of both where I came from and where I wanted to go.  The author of this little red book is Sylvia Thompson, a food writer and cook...

“I am Taiwanese American.” The first line in Frankie Gaw’s debut cookbook, First Generation: Recipes from My Taiwanese-American Home, is simple and declarative, a statement of fact that feels like it might roll effortlessly off Gaw’s tongue if you met him in person. But Gaw, whose parents emigrated from Taiwan to the United States in 1985, admits that figuring out how to feel confident stating his identity as Taiwanese American—not as two distinct, separate identities—was a learning process.  Gaw grew up in suburban Ohio, eating his grandmother’s steamed baos and chicken nuggets from McDonald’s. It wasn’t until he was working as a product designer in his early twenties that he began asking his grandmother to teach him the recipes he grew up lovi...

A Creamy, Tangy, Cranberry-y Fall Dessert Every year, I feel exhausted by pumpkin spice before the first day of autumn even arrives. In search of fresh dessert inspiration this season, I recently turned my sights to a classic Australian treat. The vanilla slice is one of several signature desserts hailing from Sunburnt Country, in the company of pavlova, lamingtons, and the very Instagrammable strawberry watermelon cake. And it’s perfectly positioned for your fall diner party or weeknight baking fun.   A vanilla slice, also called a custard slice, sandwiches a thick layer of vanilla custard between two layers of crisp puff pastry topped with icing or a dusting of powdered sugar. It’s boldly el...

The adrenaline rush begins with an Instagram notification: Press SF just posted a photo. Instantly, I unlock my phone, racing to assess what jewel just hit the feed. Maybe it’s an image of a crouching crab, lovingly carved from a cucumber and immortalized in the 1996 edition of How to Garnish. Or a recipe for “Imprisoned Eggs for Timothy Leary,” which pairs bacon, sugared strawberries, and fried eggs “like a Utopian community” as instructed by the California Artists Cookbook in 1982.  I didn’t know I wanted any of these cookbooks, much less that I’d feel a desire so strong it would cause me to interrupt whatever I’m doing (slicing onions, writing this very article) to be the first to click the “buy” link. This is what it takes to secure the bag—...