Really struggling to accept this as good advice. Instinct and experience are both telling me that the best mashed potatoes result from driving as much water as possible out the potato (preferably by baking or roasting in woodsmoke), then replacing what’s been lost with butter and creme fraiche. I get the idea of an…

I was dealing with this catalogue of horrors pretty well until you got to the cat litter box. I’m not a germaphobe, I thought I was pretty tolerant of other people’s life decisions, I’m just - you know - broadly and, I admit, fairly unthinkingly, against pink-eye, toxoplasmosis, lice, and living life in conditions a…

Long chopsticks. My cooking life has revolved around a wok for the past 12 years, and my chopstick skills have gone from “how do you hold these things” to winning bets by using them to throw a grain of rice into a coke can from across a table. (I’ll try that last one left-handed, too, if the stakes are low and I’ve…

I cannot star this enough (hippie parents, almost-that-deluded-about-food in-laws, a career in marketing that has left me certain that all commercial claims should be treated as what intelligence agencies call “puro”). Never stop debunking, please, preferably where I can see it.

Sorbet is life. Walnut brownies with plum sorbet. Edge-of-bitter dark chocolate oil cake with black cherry sorbet. Blood orange sorbet all by itself. I respect ice cream. I would date ice cream. I hope ice cream settles down with someone nice. But sorbets, not diamonds, are forever.

How do both the GQ author and this site, in its pointer to the piece, fail to mention the number one, no-close-second, unavoidable driver of pop-ups: rent costs? You can get a pop-up location for a month or six weeks (or a weekend, whatever), if you’re a determined negotiator, for less than a quarter what the…

Always, always, always try to make about 20 more wings that you think you’ll need, which should leave about 8-12 for the next morning’s “yes I’m hungover but I know how to fix that” meal. While drinking enough espresso to revive a frozen mammoth corpse, strip the meat off the remaining wings with your trembling hands…

Love the Worcs sauce idea. Must try. Another umami frittata: order extra eel when you order Japanese food (or when you make eel) and save with the unagi sauce for the next morning. Make a frittata using the sauce-covered eel, potatos and a couple of veg (bland veg seem to work better for me than others, but tastes…

I’m not saying this is definitively the better fat/veg marriage because I admit I would probably do unspeakable things to and/or with anonymous strangers for goose-fat roasted potatos. However, goose-fat roasted taro with XO sauce is the other option in the “best ever” conversation and I frequently go further out of…

Have now had this song in my head for 24 hours and am genuinely thankful for it. I was born in Winnipeg. I escaped aged two. It was my first important judgment call and I stand by it.

Three tips that might help (I live in China and have become almost as serious about rice as I am about potatos, and I’m half Irish). First, it could be the rice: if they sell Echizen, Yumeprika, or Hitomebore brands (all Japanese, but all sweet and nutty) near you, they’re all excellent and worth trying. A lot of…

Butter-poached langoustines. A must-have, second-day delicacy to survive trips home (read as: to survive multiple days of contact with in-laws). Use any standard recipe for butter-poached lobster. Sneak in a little shellfish stock (the kind that doesn’t have tomato in it) if you have any. Six langoustines are enough…

It’s a shame that Big Boiled Vegetable money has managed to corrupt another allegedly honest food blog. “Kevin Pang sleeps on the wet spot” is undoubtedly how BBV’s agent communicated his success to HQ (a charter school cafeteria in Iowa, I’m told.) While this article no doubt aroused tremendous pity among its…

Every 2-4 years, I’m living in a different place, needing a new car. Every time, I go looking for a car that’s small (because I live in huge cities), green-ish (eau de nil? I would drive a Tesla but I like wrenching too much and two cars is the max for a couple in a huge city), made by a manufacturer I like, and luxe…

Hell, yes! Beautiful point and leads to two more observations worth considering: Chinese owners (generally speaking - there is a long list of exceptions) are often absolutely shocked to find out something becomes public news as a consequence of US filings (regulatory/lawsuit-related) because their domestic equivalents…

Imagine if Jalopnik, and every commentator here, didn’t actually know what a car is. Imagine that the totality of what they could see, feel or understand about a car was the indicator light. Sometimes it’s on, sometimes it’s off, sometimes it’s left, sometimes it’s right. Discussions here might feature attempts to…

Apropos of nothing, here are some China/Malaysia-derived options for people who hate/won’t use ketchup in sauces.

I’m in Shanghai listening to local news radio: reports from Hangzhou suggest that the police recovered stolen property, so that appears, for now, to answer that part of the question. The relevant part of the law here (I think - I’m not a criminal lawyer) suggests imprisonment of up to three years and/or a fine is the…

May I ask, as someone who lives in Shanghai and spends about a week out of every two months in Seoul, what should I worry about from NK? To be honest, I’m not going to lose much sleep over the odds - I’ve spent all but two years of my life living in at least one nuclear power’s primary targets. But I am genuinely…

I suspect, albeit on nothing more than gut feel, that past invitations were a genuine “I thought you were doing that” misunderstanding. Future meetings, I think, may have come off the table as soon as Goodell’s contract renewal stalled. I can’t imagine a clearer signal from Jones et al that they’re looking for Goodell…