How To Make Dreamy Dairy-Free Vegan Ice Cream — Cooking Lessons from The Kitchn

First off, I promise you there are no tricks to this ice cream. This isn’t “ice cream” in quotation marks. You’re not going to get your hopes up only to have them dashed with a bowl of icy, flavorless frozen dairy substitutes. This vegan ice cream is the real deal.

Yes, it’s creamy. Yes, it tastes like a real dessert that you’d drizzle with caramel sauce and sprinkle with nuts. Yes, it’s dairy-free and vegan too (no eggs!). Here’s what you need to know.

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5 Easy, Delicious Dinners for Meal Plan Beginners — Next Week’s Meal Plan

I’ve been sharing my weekly meal plans here on Kitchn for over a year, and between reader comments and our Meal Plan Club Facebook group (have you joined yet? Click here!) I’ve really come to understand that every person who meal plans has ups and downs.

We talk often about what recipes give us our mojo back or the recipes we reach for when we don’t actually want to cook, but this week’s meal plan is for anyone who is new to meal planning and needs a place to start. The dinners are easy, use some similar ingredients (to cut down on prep and shopping), and are so delicious they’ll prove that meal planning truly is the secret to stress-free weeknight dinners.

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Ina Garten’s Tip for Effortless Flower Arrangements — Pop Culture

When I was growing up, my mother kept vases of fresh flowers all over the house. There were flowers on the kitchen and dining room tables, in the entryway, and stationed in all the windows. She even kept some in the bathroom. Unfortunately, her flower skills did not rub off on me. (I’d say it skipped a generation, but my sister’s house has more flowers than a royal wedding, so I think it just skipped me.)

My flower ineptitude is not for lack of trying, either. I’ve read countless articles and Pinterest tutorials about how to make grocery store flowers look like expensive flower shop bouquets, but I’ve never managed to pull it off. I should have known that the secret to keeping flowers in the house wasn’t Pinterest — it was Ina Garten.

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Costco Sells Grapes That Taste Like Cotton Candy — Grocery News

Cotton Candy grapes sound like something you’d find on a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, or in the cereal aisle next to the Frankenberries, but we’re happy to report that they are very real. The grapes were developed by cross-breeding different types of grapes to create a variety of grape that taste extra sweet. They can be difficult to find and they tend to sell out fast, but now Costco has them in stock in several locations, and people are running to get them before they disappear.

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watermelon cucumber salad

We’ve decided to spend as much time as humanly possible at the beach this summer, which has led to my other new favorite habit: grabbing a few cookbooks I’ve been meaning to go through and reading them en route. In the fleeting moments when the kids have limited their bickering in the backseat and the traffic isn’t too terrible, when I’ve been away from my laptop and the kitchen for enough hours that I’m ready to absorb new inspiration, I find myself more open-minded and curious to try new recipes than I am, understandably, in the thick of deadlines and or hangry o’clock, approximately 6:15pm when dinner is nowhere near done.

basically all you need

Two weekends ago it was Saladish, a cookbook from Ilene Rosen, who is the chef and co-owner of R&D Foods in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn and previously did a 15-year stint as the savory chef at City Bakery, creating a salad bar with a cult following. This book is a natural progression. “All of the food I really like to eat and make is saladish,” she says in the intro, something I immediately related to. To me, salads are meals and meals can be salads, and only a fraction of them really need leafy greens. Layers of grains or roasted or raw shaved vegetables plus something pickled or punchy and something crunchy and herby and a good vinaigrette; I ate lunch 15 minutes ago and I literally made myself hungry again typing that.

watermelon triangles

I struggled a little as the book continued because I kept running into ingredients I didn’t keep around, pappadum, green garlic, makrut lime leaves, Chinese preserved cabbage, pea greens, and honestly, this is barely the tip of the iceberg. There wasn’t a recipe that didn’t have something that required an extra grocery run (easy for me to get in NYC, but still, I am lazy, and even when I overcome it, I know you guys would appreciate me finding alternatives) but wait, come back. You see, the sun was shining in the windows, little puffs of popcorn clouds dotted a blazingly blue sky, the shore towns were approaching, and I decided to stop being such a curmudgeon and look beyond these sticking points, which in many places are merely accents or extras. And here, at the base of each recipe, I found a dozen things I couldn’t wait to make.

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20 Meaty Mains to Make for Dad — Recipes from The Kitchn

In case you didn’t already know, Father’s Day is this Sunday. With two small kids, we try to keep things simple for these kinds of minor holidays, so a special meal and a few handmade cards is all we’ve got planned for celebrating my husband this year.

I did, however, have a really fabulous time and a few good laughs asking my husband what he thought would make a good roundup of recipes for Father’s Day dinners this year. There are some classics — steaks and pork chops — but there also a few surprises in the mix. Have a look and see what inspires.

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A Mom of 3 on What It’s Like Feeding Her Kids in Italy Every Summer — Real Mom Cooks

Michelle DiBenedetto-Capobianco’s life sounds awfully romantic. During the school year she lives in Port Washington, New York, and each summer she packs up her husband and three sons — ages 9, 10, and 12 — and moves to a tiny town in the mountains of Italy for the summer, where she runs a cooking school and tour company.

The village, called Salle, where her father grew up, feels frozen in time. “There are no stores in Salle,” says Michelle. “We either rely on the various trucks that come to sell things like fruits and vegetables, breads, cheeses, and fish, or we travel to neighboring towns to shop at open-air markets or shops.”

We talked to Michelle about how life’s rhythms change for her in Italy each summer.

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Small-Space Storage Tips from People Who Live in Tiny Homes — Organizing Tips from Kitchn

In any home, large or small, storage issues tend to be among the top gripes. There’s a good chance that your basement — if you even have a basement — is filled with needless items that you’ve collected over the years. You’ve probably lived through the experience of donating several small appliances, so you can, um … make room for new small appliances. And let’s not even discuss the clutter in that kitchen drawer.

It happens to the best of us, which is just one of the reasons why more and more people are turning to a minimalist lifestyle. The frontrunners of this movement? Tiny house owners, who have had to part with many of their possessions in favor of no mortgage, a simpler life, and the freedom to pick up and go whenever they like.

If you’re struggling to fit one more thing into your small space, look no further than these words of wisdom and minimalist practices shared by longtime tiny home owners.

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