The first cup of coffee is an essential part of the morning routine for many of us. That’s why so many people spend a big part of their daily commutes waiting in lines 40 people deep at their local Starbucks, just waiting to get their coffee, get to work, and get on with their day. Now Starbucks is trying out a new system to see if they can make those lines move faster, and they’ve actually just stopped accepting cash entirely as part of a new cashless pilot program.
A beautiful, functional, new kitchen is a wonderful thing. The act of renovating a kitchen? Maybe not so much. It’s a job that causes even the calmest heads to get a little stressed over the many decisions that need to be made.
To help ease the strain for all the brave planners, we gathered some of the best real-life info on an item most every renovator considers at some point: IKEA kitchen cabinets. The availability and price make the option super appealing, but how easy is the process and how will they stand up over time? Here’s the scoop, straight from our smart and savvy readers.
Not only does chicken’s versatility and crowd-pleasing tendencies make it a recurring choice for weeknight dinner, but it’s ability to be a wholesome meal also allows for it to constantly be added to the roster. There are so many healthy ways to enjoy the white meat — we rounded up our 10 most favorite, from soups to salads to one-skillet dinners, that always find their way to our table.
Many of us are accustomed to throwing a few inexpensive packets of dried ramen soup into our grocery cart to save our weary weeknight cooking in a pinch. But making the best restaurant-quality ramen at home begins at the Asian market. Most of the ingredients are long-lasting pantry ingredients that make keeping a ramen-ready kitchen almost as easy as cooking up a cup of noodles.
I am an absolute sucker for a fancy-looking oven. I know, I know, ovens are tools and what really matters is how well they perform, not what they look like. But I can’t help myself; I just adore a beautiful range. Give me brass knobs, bars on the doors, and a range of colors that include options like “Provence blue.”
Basically, give me Ina Garten’s kitchen, complete with her brand-new French range from Lacanche.
Let’s be honest — picking out recipes is the most fun part of meal planning. Part of making my meal planning ritual enjoyable and repeatable is making time at the end of each week to flip through magazines, browse Kitchn’s recipe page, and select meals for the following week. It doesn’t hurt that I like to do this with a cocktail or a soothing cup of tea in hand, either.
On the flip side, the biggest mistake I see new meal planners make is in the recipe selection. Either they are being too narrow in their recipe selection or skipping a key step (or two) before they even select recipes. There are a few better ways to select the right recipes for your meal plan — here are five of the most common.
Rachel Yang, the James Beard Award-nominated chef behind Seattle’s Joule, Revel, and Trove restaurants, and Portland, Oregon’s Revelry, is a force. Her food— undeniably Korean at its roots, unabashedly creative in practice — combines noodles, dumplings, barbecue, and hot pots with flavors from all over the globe. But after cooking with her week after week during the process of writing her cookbook, My Rice Bowl: Korean Cooking Outside the Lines, I’ve learned her food is always one thing: Even though it’s restaurant food, it’s always comforting.
While you can certainly make cabbage rolls after you get home on a weeknight, cabbage rolls can also be simmered until deliciously tender in the slow cooker all day long and welcome you home with their enticing aroma. With a no-cook beef-and-rice filling and no-cook tomato sauce, these cabbage rolls are easy to throw together in the morning so that dinner’s cooking away while you’re at work.
Growing up, we always had a few cans of tuna tucked in the back of our pantry. They were leaned on for easy brown-bag lunch sandwiches, yes, but also for simple, affordable dinners, most often seen in the form of classic noodle casserole. These days, I still find myself with a couple cans on hand at all times to lean on when I am in need of a fuss-free meal that won’t break the bank.
Ramen is a Japanese soup, by way of Chinese noodles, that has become an American obsession. Not only have ramen noodles become part of our cultural lexicon in their ubiquitous dried mass-produced packets that sustained a generation of latch-key kids and college students, but they also grew to a burgeoning restaurant sub-culture of scavenger-hunt ramen shop tours and enthusiastic slurping.
With this recipe, we’re exploring how to do that enthusiastic slurping at home. We’ll tackle the important components of ramen — broth, seasoning, noodles, and toppings — with respect to our obsession but with a bit of grace and ease.