It was a couple of years ago that I first heard about bagged broccoli slaw. I was paging through a new cookbook and came across a recipe that I wanted to make; it called for bagged broccoli slaw and I actually didn’t know what it even was. I had to Google it to learn it’s a package of grated broccoli stems, carrots, and sometimes cabbage. I found it up among the other pre-fab produce items I gloss over because I don’t usually buy them: stir-fry vegetable mixes, already cooked beets, peeled garlic cloves.

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If you know me just barely, you know that I’m summer’s biggest fan, and after 20 winters in the Northeast, I still moan and groan over winter’s double-whammy: no fresh vegetables in season and freezing temperatures. So today, in frigid Brooklyn, I give you a piece about a hot tomato soup a friend brought back from a recent trip to Egypt. For me, tomato soup is summer food at its best, but a can of quality tomatoes can evoke fond memories of July and August, when the sun shines and the muscles are more relaxed.

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Recently, my brother asked an extremely adorable vegetarian to be his wife. She said yes. And I’d like to think that in some small way, my cooking had something to do with it. You see, my brother’s favorite meal growing up was French dip au jus. If there are chicken wings on a menu, they’ll end up on his plate. And I’m pretty sure if he had a choice between ribs and rice pilaf, he’d go with the former.

Luckily, though, his love for meat did not outweigh his love for this girl. And he was totally game to let me, his sister, come up with creative food swaps that kept everyone satisfied, including these faux pulled pork sandwiches. The secret ingredient? Carrots!

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Who: Jade and Toby Keller, son Cy, and dog Dot
Where: Chiang Mai, Thailand
Read Parts 1 and 2: Jade’s Thai Kitchen in Chiang Mai and Why Jade Shipped Her Special Wedding Dishes Across the Globe

Jade works as the Educational Program Manager at the SOLD Project, an NGO in Northern Thailand working to prevent the trafficking of children into sexual servitude. Recently Jade introduced baking into the project’s curriculum, which means that she totes her small kitchen oven to the SOLD project’s facilities every afternoon to bake with the students.

The kids love baking, as she told me, particularly one 11-year-old boy named Jai.

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As we wrote a few months ago, IKEA is retiring their AKURUM cabinet system and replacing it with SEKTION, a more modular system that promises to be even easier to work with and customize.

At the time we wrote that post, we hadn’t yet seen the new system in action, but that was then, and this is now, and now we have all the details, pricing info on sample kitchens, and plenty of photos ahead of the official February 2 launch.

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