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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...

Peanut butter is a Proustian paste. Virtually no serious discussion about peanut butter can take place without evoking childhood memories, so we might as well get this out of the way: my family bought Skippy. The jar of extra crunchy super chunk, to be specific. This was the brand my mom picked up at Albertsons, without fail or derivation, and when I was old enough to start hanging around other kids’ houses, I was astonished that a whole world of peanut butter existed outside the Michelman family monoculture. Who’s Jif? I don’t know her.  If only eight-year-old me could have tagged along to the grocery store today. Somewhere on the way, perhaps ten years ago, a new paradigm emerged. The nut butter shelf, traditionally jammed with the standard ma...

At Molly’s Rise and Shine, chef Mason Hereford’s New Orleans temple of classic Americana breakfast fare, everything, from the crispy fried chicken on a biscuit to the tamales topped with salsa macha, is served with a heaping side of nostalgia. The walls are loaded with what appears to be the top-shelf treasures of a ’90s toy box: a life-size reproduction of E.T., a cardboard hoverboard from Back to the Future Part II, and a prodigious number of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Heads. But perhaps the most potent time capsule is their Grand Slam McMuffin, a delightfully unholy union of the Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast and a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin. It’s a breakfast sausage patty topped with thick-cut griddled onions, melted American cheese, and a fried “McDona...

Cavatelli [cah-vah-TELL-lee] Pasta My daughter gave me a wooden pasta board that can be made for gnocchi or cavatelli pasta. One afternoon we made some fresh pasta and prepared a batch of fresh cavatelli pasta for dinner that night.  We had a blast seeing who could make the perfect cavatelli. Since then, I've had store bought cavatelli and they are fantastic but not as good as preparing them with your daughter. Shape: They are shaped like tiny little hot dog buns but are considered a shell pasta because they are hollow like a sea shell you might find at the beach. I've seen them with and without the corrugated lines as show in the photo above. (these are cavatelli my daughter and I made) I've also seen them short and stubby like above or long and thin. They are easy to mak...

This honey garlic butter chicken recipe takes simple ingredients and turns them into juicy flavorful chicken smothered in addictive buttery sweet and savory sauce. This 15-minute meal is going to be a family favorite and is great for quick weeknight dinners. Today we’re making some honey garlic butter chicken, a variation of the popular reader-favorite honey garlic chicken recipe with a few flavor adjustments. The chicken is lightly coated in flour and pan-fried for a thin crispy crust that will soak up all the butter and honey garlic sauce. It’s smothered in a sweet and savory sauce with lots of garlic and buttery goodness. The best part about this sauce is if you’re not a fan of chicken, you can pair it with other proteins like shrimp, salmon, or tofu. Serve it over some mas...

Chouxnuts Give Crullers a Glazed Glow Up Recently, I was winding down from a day’s work with an episode of The Great British Bake Off—an admittedly funny way to relax after teaching a baking class in my hometown of Seattle. It was pastry week, and the contestants were asked to make something called a “chouxnut,” a hybrid pastry that is essentially a doughnut made from pâte à choux (also called choux pastry). I wached the bakers fill their creations with creams and custards made of passion fruit, yuzu, and caramel, and I suddenly found myself in the kitchen, whipping up a batch for myself. From fry bread to beignets to gulab jamun, people all over the world enjoy dough cooked in hot oil. It’s a...