I am happy to report that I have found the best Halloween costume for an adult of 2018. Juan Ruiz dressed up as the Pioneer Woman's new floral Instant Pot and no other costume comes close to being so funny. You might as well just go home now, because nothing can top this. I'm sorry, your "spooky witch" costume is not going to cut it this year.
Last week, the city of High Point, North Carolina, announced that it would be stepping in to prevent its citizens from handing out those gross peanut butter kiss candies. "Alright everybody, we're giving you a one-week notice as you prepare for trick-or-treaters to remind y'all that by order of the City of High Point Emperor of Acceptable Candy (it's a real thing), these are banned," the City of High Point Government wrote on Facebook. "No one likes them, don't give them out."
This Halloween, if you can't summon the flames directly from hell, dress your kids up like Ina and Jeffrey instead! Is that how that classic Ina Halloween meme goes? No?
I'm here to report that the entire Kitchn staff is officially deceased after seeing these toddlers dressed up like our beloved Ina and Jeffrey, gracing the Internet with their absolutely perfect presence. To all the parents who had the foresight to purchase child-sized chambray button-down shirts in time for Halloween, you're the real MVPs.
The days are getting shorter and the news is getting bleaker each day, but the arrival of November also brings with it a bright spot: The Great British Baking Show is coming back to Netflix, with all its soggy-bottom joy and saucy-puds cheer. Okay, not all of it: There is still no Mary Berry, Sue Perkins, or Mel Giedroyc, but Paul Hollywood holds his own among the new hosts.
Kid costumes for Halloween are all super cute, but this one might be the cutest. Facebook and Reddit are abuzz with a photograph of an unidentified child (although their name seems to be Sloan by the nametag) offering their best "Would you like to try a sample of Kirkland signature's new granola bar?" as a Costco employee.
You've bought your meal prep containers. You've stocked up on grocery store staples. You've set aside a few hours on a Sunday. And now, you're ready to dive deep into a Power Hour meal prep session. The last thing to do? Pick the meal plan that's best for you.
We've created 14 plans that will help you get breakfasts, lunches, and dinners in order for the week ahead. Some focus on a specific dietary need (vegetarian, low-carb, keto), while others are centered around our favorite kitchen tools (cast iron skillets, slow cookers, sheet pans). Pick the one that works best for you and your family, then tell us: What are your favorite meals and meal prep strategies?
In an age when it feels like just about everything has been replaced by technology, the lazy Susan remains quietly unchanged — and as indispensable as ever. While there's no shortage of choices of the useful cabinet or countertop helper on Amazon, we have a soft spot for this top-rated style from YouCopia. And it's currently 30 percent off, coming in at just under $13.
Gail Simmons' seemingly effortless, simple-but-glamorous style combined with her culinary know-how has endeared her to fans of Top Chef since she started as a judge on the show in 2006. When she married her now-husband two years after that, she told People, she wasn't sure she wanted to have a family. All that eventually changed, and this May, she gave birth to her second child, Kole. In the article, she discusses her relationship with the other judges on the show, what she hates to talk about at the dinner table (hint: it's not politics), and spills on the best gift she got after she gave birth (yes, it's edible).
Imagine you've woken up in your dream home: you move your freshly laundered sheets to the side, and in your new silken pajamas, you go to the bathroom to freshen up: brushing your teeth, washing your face, and putting your face on for the day.
Once you're dressed in your new, dry-cleaned duds, you float down the steps to your pristine dining room where your butler pours you a delicious glass of freshly squeezed orange juice to go with the piping hot French omelette waiting on the table for you. What a clean, beautiful life you're living, right? RIGHT?!
Unfortunately I'm here to tell you that half of the things you touched that morning have poop on them. Or at the very least a common bacteria found in poop. Yes, even in that dream house of yours.
When it comes to buying furniture, some pieces stay with you for a year or two, and some for a lifetime. But when it comes to buying furniture on a budget, more can fall into the former camp. And while some inexpensive options might be required to get started while you save up for more investment pieces, it's also nice when those inexpensive pieces can grow with you. Our friends at Apartment Therapy (our sister site!) recently teamed up with Amazon to curate first apartment essentials, and their goal was to provide a selection of items that you could buy now and still use for years to come if you wanted.
With the dining room, they went with understated pieces that are great for pizza night to even hosting your first Thanksgiving — and beyond.
Here are some of our favorite pieces.
As long as you've got a sheet pan in your kitchen, an easy dinner is always at your fingertips. With this one pan you can cook a whole meal — main and sides! — in a flash. When you need to get dinner on the table on a hectic weeknight, these 11 chicken sheet pan meals will be here for you.
You may know Geoffrey Zakarian as a host of Food Network's The Kitchen (yes, the one with an "e"). Or as the most dapper judge on Chopped. Or as the chef and owner of multiple restaurants across the country. Or as a cookbook author. Or as a passionate rosé enthusiast (see below).
We recently got a chance to chat with the multi-hyphenate chef at his New York City restaurant, The Lambs Club, and learned that there are a few things he thinks that everyone absolutely needs in the kitchen — aside from copious amounts of rosé.
Here are his top three picks when it comes to home cooks' must-have essentials.
It is hard to overstate the charm and ease of turning candy, chocolate, and pretzels into these adorable witches' brooms for your next Halloween party. Plus they are made just of peanut butter cups and pretzels — one of the most delicious combinations we know.
While ordering takeout is easy, it's not always the best choice for your wallet. A better option is to make your favorite takeout dish at home. That might seem more difficult, but these 10 recipes prove it's actually just as simple as calling in your order. Plus, it saves you money and, oftentimes, it's healthier too.
Have you ever started from scratch in a new kitchen? Perhaps you were leaving for college, or disentangling one household from another. Maybe you were outfitting a second home, or helping a young friend or family member set up with their own kitchen for the very first time.
Is it possible to equip a kitchen for robust daily cooking on a relatively small budget? We say yes. If you are starting from scratch, without a spatula to your name, here's your checklist of essential equipment — and all for around $300.
If Halloween ghosts and witches feel a little too dark or spooky for your kids (or you!), consider the monster instead. As we were working on our list of the top 10 classic Halloween treats of all time, paging through 50 years of women's magazines, these monstrous pretzel fingers came up over and over again. Is this the year you finally make them? Yes!
Growing up, I only ever considered butternut squash a side dish (specifically, a purée of squash sweetened with brown sugar that we'd eat at Thanksgiving and Christmas). When I started cooking for myself, I quickly realized I'd been missing out on a whole lot of other uses for the fall favorite, and now it's something I reach for all fall and winter long. Not only can it be turned into other great side dishes, but it's also hearty enough that it can steal the show as a main dish. Here are 10 ways I love to turn it into dinner.
When you grow up on Nestle Toll House cookies, it's easy to knee-jerk reach for that ubiquitous yellow bag. But that's just one chip in a sea of chocolate. What about all the other brands out there?
If you, like us, are always striving for the ultimate chocolate chip cookie, it helps to start with the best chocolate chips. We hit a few supermarkets to gather up all the brands we could find.
Here are the brands that rose right to the top.
Who remembers eating a handful (pun intended) of popcorn out of a plastic glove, spookily detached from its ostensible mummy body, and racing to get to the bottom where the treat — a single candy corn in the tip of the finger — awaited?
Raises hand!
When it comes to kale salad, there are two camps of people: those who roll their eyes and wonder how we aren't past this yet, and those whose love and adoration for this hearty green salad base haven't skipped a beat. I fall firmly into the latter group, and that is wholly because I've learned what it takes to toss together a really good kale salad that you want to keep making again and again. Here are 10 recipes to get you started.
Restaurants and commercial kitchens get ratings for how sanitary their cooking spaces are, but homeowners? Not so much. "A lot of people make mistakes at home and don't even know it," says Rob Acquista, a public health inspector in Columbus, Ohio (who inspected our Editor-in-Cheif's kitchen a few years ago). That's probably because the people who run kitchens and grocery stores have to go through training courses to make sure they understand the FDA codes for how to limit cross-contamination and keep critters out of their food preparation areas, but we regular homeowners just do whatever we're used to doing.
As you can imagine, Acquista sees mistakes everywhere he goes — something that he admits could make him an unpopular dinner guest. "I don't say anything with my friends, but when I'm with my family, I'll give them reminders — hey, I don't want to get sick!" says Acquista. So we grilled him on the biggest issues he sees in home kitchens.
Here are the 10 scariest places in every kitchen — and what you can do to fix them.
Cheese pizza ghosts are the only kind of ghost you'll want haunting your kitchen this Halloween. A quick combination of English muffins, pizza sauce, and sliced mozzarella cheese come together for a festive snack or dinner.
The secret to cute and easy cheese ghosts? A flower-shaped cookie cutter.
You've likely stopped in the pasta sauce aisle a million times to grab a jar of marinara, but I'm guessing you skipped over the Alfredo sauce section. Well, I'm here to tell you to go back and grab a jar. It's the secret to this creamy Italian chicken flecked with sweet sun-dried tomatoes and wilted spinach, which comes together easily in the slow cooker and begs to be served over pasta.
This is just the kind of homey dinner that we all need a little more of as the days get shorter and colder.
Kitchn's Delicious Links column highlights recipes we're excited about from the bloggers we love. Follow along every weekday as we post our favorites.
Sometimes it feels like there is no such thing as an ordinary number of pots. Every meal seems to either require one pot, or every single pot, pan, and muffin tin in your house, and halfway through you'll find out it requires some pan or utensil you don't own.
On the weekends I love a finicky recipe that requires a cook to have a million ingredients and six burners going at once, but during the week there are only a handful of hours between work and bedtime, and I prefer to use as few pans as possible when cooking, because it keeps the clean-up to a minimum, and I really hate cleaning.
When it comes to comfort food, tortellini is a classic. What's not to love about bite-sized nuggets of pasta filled with cheese? Skip the usual sauce, though, in favor of cooking up a rich and creamy tomato soup that comes together in 20 minutes — perfect for busy weeknights!
There's something so incredibly satisfying about your dinner guests fawning over your "super fancy" plates when, deep down, you know you only paid 50 cents each. (Whether or not you come clean and tell the truth/brag about it is totally your call!)
With the holidays coming up — and lots of sales currently going on — we decided to round up some of the best deals we've seen online. These serving pieces are all ridiculously good looking and on sale for way less than they have any right to be.
Halloween is here — and secretly, I think it's the most amazing time for food-lovers and their kids. Why? You get to play with your food!
Our collective digital feeds are filled at present with cute spider sandwiches and bat-wing cookies, but this is not a modern phenomenon. For nearly a century, there has been pressure on parents to rise to the occasion of Halloween. Women's magazines shaped modern Halloween treats long before Pinterest and Instagram, helping parents make Halloween treats that satisfied children's desires to be grossed-out, tickled-silly, and, most of all, delighted with this darkly magical holiday.
We took a look back at nearly 100 years of iconic Halloween treats and chose the top 10. If you're ready to finally try to make one (or all!) yourself, you can't go wrong with any of these picks. They're all classic, they're all easy, and they're our favorite Halloween treats of all time. Get ready.
Costco is pretty much king of kings when it comes to bulk items. There's unnaturally large tubs of cream cheese, mammoth teddy bears, and pallets of salmon as big as your bed. Costco is also a great place to score your supermarket staples, from butter to batteries. With so much fantastic stuff coming out of the bulk-item juggernaut, there's hardly been any reason to complain about them.
Well, that is, unless you buy the milk there.
Chocolate bark transcends all holidays — it is as welcome as a Christmas gift as it is alongside your bunny cake at Easter — but it is at its most clever and delightful at Halloween. And it's even better with one simple, easy upgrade.
Like me, I'm sure many people have fond memories of making sugar cookies with family during the holiday season. The soft, warm cookies would come out of the oven fresh and you'd have to wait in agony while they cooled off on the stove. Now Target, a store that is already packed full of irresistible treasures, is making sugar cookie nostalgia in milk form. It's only $2.49 for a quart and it's available right now.
Do you remember eating pudding cups with crushed cookies and worms at every Halloween party as a kid? My birthday falls just before Halloween, and this is something I requested at every costume birthday party from the time I was 6 until I turned 10.
Now I'm delighted to introduce my own kids (and our neighbors) to this classic treat. Here's how you can make your own party-sized pudding graveyard this Halloween.
For a certain generation of food-TV lovers (erm, mine), Ina and Jeffrey Garten's relationship has been, in internet parlance, marriage goals. He's always around to run a helpful errand, inquire about secret ingredients, and raise a glass of wine in toast to Ina at the table. And Ina tells People this isn't just for the camera.
Even after 50 years of marriage (as of December), her own rise to fame and his success in his own right, the two are just as smitten — and get along just as well — as in the honeymoon period. And People has the tips for just how they've kept that up for half a century.
Children of the '90s will immediately recognize this hilarious after-school snack: Apple slices and mini marshmallows are held together with nut butter to make a vampire-inspired grin that walks the line of treat and snack.
I personally remember fumbling through making these when I was a latch-key kid, but now that I'm making them for my own little monsters I've discovered the super-simple secret that makes this snack even easier.
Whipping up a hot breakfast from scratch in the morning — be it on leisurely weekends or busy weekdays — always sounds like a good idea, but sometimes it's difficult to make happen.
Well, these 25 recipes are here to jump-start things for you. If you prep, assemble, or even bake your breakfast the night before, you'll be left with minimal work when you wake up.
Ready for fall? To us, it's a season that means deliciously creamy, nutty butternut squash (and other winter squash varieties too, of course). Here are 10 of our favorite ways to enjoy a butternut squash — from soup to nuts, with recipes too!
Slow cookers are often associated with hearty dinners: hunks of protein that break down over several hours, layered stews that slow-simmer all day. But the staple appliance is also pretty excellent when it comes to two (slightly unexpected!) things: cakes and desserts.
The low, even heat of a Crock-Pot lends itself perfectly to several sweet techniques. It can be used as a water bath or mini oven, perfect for things like silky cheesecakes or cinnamon rolls. It can also poach or braise fruit for compotes, ideal for scooping over crumbles or ice cream.
For all recipes below, the batter or dough (or, in some cases, leftover bread) goes directly into the slow cooker. A few hours later, you'll de-lid and dig in.
This dining room had a lot going for it — natural light, wood trim, a soothing palette, the fact that it exists — but its owner couldn't get past how "boring and beige" it felt. Paint to the rescue, and no, it's not all white.
Everybody loves Ina — that's not news at all, but it's always exciting to learn that celebrities (they're just like us!) are as obsessed with the high-goddess Barefoot Contessa as we are. This week on Bon Appétit, Jennifer Garner, Ms. Alias herself, wrote what amounts to a love letter to Ina, her recipes, and specifically her boeuf bourguignon.
Get the recipe: Ina Garten's Beef Bourguignon from Food Network
Whether you're a beginner home cook or you've been at it for years, I'm convinced that at the end of the day we all want the same thing out of chicken recipes: We want recipes that are easy to make and taste really good, right?
These are some of our absolute easiest chicken recipes, and they check all the boxes: basic ingredients, easy-to-follow instructions, and a quick cook time.
Butternut squash is really, really good on top of pizza. But what happens when the butternut squash BECOMES the pizza? That's what I imagine was the lightbulb moment somewhere in a faraway Trader Joe's HQ conference room, during their company-wide brainstorm for their newest seasonal, alternative pizza crust offering: Butternut squash pizza crust.
I recently gave the crust a try, for research purposes, and concluded that it wasn't exactly my favorite because I couldn't get it crispy enough for my liking. SO, in hopes of giving this buzzy new item a second chance, I turned to the wise people of the internet for some ideas on how to zhuzh it up and make it a little less sweet, soggy, and sad. Here are some new ideas that just might fix the problem.
Cost Plus World Market is my Disney World. Instead of magic carpets they have rugs, and instead of turkey legs they have turkey napkin rings. It's like a carefully curated Epcot where most of my shopping dreams come true. Speaking of Epcot, World Market buyers actually travel all over the world to hand-select a wide range of products that shoppers will treasure (at really great prices).
I asked my fellow Kitchn staffers which World Market finds they're treasuring right now. Here are our picks.
Potatoes are a very low-fuss vegetable. They don't bruise easily, they're cheap, and they're easy to prepare at home (hello, buttery mashed potatoes). But it turns out that how you store your potatoes is actually pretty important — and you're probably doing it wrong.
Halloween is a day that's sure to be filled with chocolate, candy, and other sweets — so what are you eating for breakfast? Whether you'd like to kick the holiday off on a wholesome note and squeeze in some veggies or lean into the sweetness and indulge in something decadent, these 10 recipes cover both bases and all feel celebratory.
Last month I discovered that you shouldn't eat bread that has even a little bit of mold on it. Pretty devastating, right? All mold has a part that you can see, and also a microscopic part that you can't see. Science Insider explains this horror with a great analogy of mushrooms growing in a forest. The part any human can see, the caps that grow above ground, are actually joined by an underground network of microscopic roots called hyphae.
It turns out this isn't just the case for bread, unfortunately. It's also a great analogy for a food I assumed couldn't get moldy like other food: soft and shredded cheese.
If you want to make meatloaf, you've got your choice of thousands recipes with an infinite number of variations, and chances are they all purport to be the "best" one. Recently, I stumbled on one recipe that even put that proud boast right in the title: "Best Meatloaf Ever."
It was the digital equivalent of someone throwing down the gauntlet. "Oh, really?" I thought to myself while checking out the photo of a bacon-lashed loaf. "That's a pretty bold statement." But that wasn't even what got me the most interested.
The loaf didn't look particularly special (I did give the author a pass, though; we all know meatloaf isn't photogenic). Still, I was intrigued by his confidence, his generous use of pork (both ground and sausage, plus a pound of fatty ground beef) — and the fact that he got pretty much all of his ingredients at Trader Joe's.
Even though it's been nearly six months since Parts Unknown host Anthony Bourdain died in his hotel room in France, his fans are still having trouble coming to terms with his passing. CNN decided to air the final season of Parts Unknown, perhaps to give fans some closure, though it was incomplete —Bourdain had not yet added his voice-over to many of the episodes.
The final episode of the show, which will take place on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is set to air on November 11. That means it's almost time to let go of a show so many people depended on to understand our world. As a parting gift, the show's crew opened up about working with Bourdain for 12 seasons in a special episode of Parts Unknown called 'Behind the Scenes,' which aired on October 28.
Read more: Behind the Scenes from Explore Parts Unknown
Boo! Spiders are taking over this Halloween! Don't be scared, these arachnids are the friendly, candy-loving sort and they'd love nothing better than to march across your buffet table and perch on the edge of your plate. So grab your sugar googly eyes and pick up some licorice — your Halloween is about to get crafty.
You might think it would be embarrassing to whip out your own personal stash of soy sauce when you go to a sushi joint. But you'd only think that if you haven't had Bourbon Barrel Foods' small-batch soy sauce aged in bourbon barrels. Once you've had this sultry, complex soy sauce, you'll never go back.
Really? You might think. It's just soy sauce.
Kitchn's Delicious Links column highlights recipes we're excited about from the bloggers we love. Follow along every weekday as we post our favorites.
One of the best things about fall is how often pecans start showing up in grocery stores and on menus and at gatherings. Pecan pie is always a treasure, and pecan bars are a personal favorite. The buttery crunch of pecan is a welcome addition to everything from candy to ice cream, but it does not appear on the main dish nearly as often as it should. This recipe from Spicy Southern Kitchen rectifies that situation, though, with a sweet-savory dish of honey pecan pork chops that sound like the next best thing to eating candy for dinner, and they only take 13 minutes to cook from start to finish.
Is there anything that spells party more than glow-in-the-dark jello shots? When lit up by a black light in the dark, these spooky shots look like a mad scientist whipped them up in a laboratory.
You might think that this requires some spooky alchemy, but the secret ingredient is so simple and easy: tonic water, which contains quinine that lights up under UV light.
