With the warm summer months right around the corner, just the thought of having to bake anything in your oven may have you perspiring profusely. But you don't want to give up dessert, especially not luscious, layered cakes, so what's a sweaty sweets-lover to do?
Avocados have been the darling of the food world for quite some time now—so you'd think that we might have already exhausted the ways in which to enjoy this amazing fruit.
In many places, May has given way to a surplus of strawberries cluttering the produce aisle. These sweet berries are great in a wide variety of delicious baked goods, from pies to cakes and everything in between.
Store-bought marinades and sauces have an ability to jazz up the simplest items. But after a while, those favorite tastes seem a bit repetitive and mundane, and that got us to experimenting with different add-ins to make our marinades stand out. Fruits, herbs, spices—all of the usual suspects were delicious, but not spectacular.
When we initially started juicing, we tended to gravitate towards the widely popular juice staples—carrots, cucumbers, celery, kale, spinach, and apples. However, as we grew more comfortable with these fruits and vegetables (and honestly, a bit bored), we realized there are other unsung juicing ingredients that are just as tasty and nutritious.
The lingering smell of cigarette smoke can bother just about anyone, including smokers themselves. Unfortunately, it can be quite difficult to mask or completely get rid of the smell altogether. While you can go through extremes like washing and even repainting the walls in your home, those options don't exist when the odor is in your car.
Whether you are vegan, lactose-intolerant, or cooking for someone who is, standing before the non-dairy milk shelf in the grocery store can be daunting. Instead of playing it safe with the two most common milk alternatives—soy and almond—perhaps you should explore a few other choices that tend to be overlooked.
Most home bakers rely on vanilla extract as a flavor component to their cakes and cookies, but little do they know what they are missing until they trade in their extract for whole vanilla beans. The rich complexity and different notes of flavor of a true vanilla bean are often washed out and distilled into a one-note sweetness, especially if the extract is cheap or imitation. If you want to get more serious about baking, you need to get serious about using vanilla beans.
Switching your favorite facial cleanser isn't an easy choice. Since everyone's skin type can range from dry, to oily, to some complicated combination of both... well, let's just say that the conventional wisdom is to stick to what you know works.
Winter and the winter holidays in general are a time of joy, laughter, and love… but not for everyone. For some, the stress of preparing for parties, hosting family, traveling long distances in bad weather, and just keeping up with your daily routine can start to bring you down.
Having a store-bought cold pack on the ready is the perfect solution for minor bumps, bruises, sprains, and strains, but why spend money on bright blue ice packs when you can make your own right at home?
Be it happy hour, a Super Bowl party, or just a gathering of friends, buffalo wings are a universal favorite. Since they're usually prepared for large groups, there is always a mix of both those that aren't counting their calories and others who are.
I held the orange packet in my hands and presented it to my friend, Seth, as though it were a plastic-wrapped jewel—rather than three ounces of dehydrated noodles.
If you don't want to dress up as a vampire, witch, werewolf, or zombie again this Halloween, step things up a notch and go viral. There have been a ton of funny memes and absurd news since last October, so the only hard part is settling on the right one for inspiration for your costume.
3D Touch is a new feature on the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus that's reinventing the way we interact with our smartphones. With just a little bit of added pressure when tapping on the display, you can perform Quick Actions from an app's home screen icon, "Peek" at emails, stories, and photos in-app, as well as perform other app-specific gestures. Since 3D Touch is such a new concept, here are some of the apps that currently support it, along with the shortcuts you can use.
In my opinion, there is no candy greater or more timeless than Sour Patch Kids. They're the ultimate treat: sweet and refreshing, yet sour and tangy. These contrasting flavors are what make Sour Patch Kids perfect for the people of all ages—especially your kids. So let's make dishes that incorporate this awesome candy into your cooking rotation!
Many people deal with motion sickness on a daily basis, and if you're reading this, chances are you're one of them. Kinetosis can make your stomach roll, your entire body sweat, and make you feel fatigued and dizzy at even the slightest movement, whether it's related to carsickness, seasickness, or airsickness. And let's not forget the worst part—vomiting.
There are many hacks for increasing productivity, but so many depend on tricking your own mind or behavior. When it comes to motivation in the workplace, though, sometimes the space within which you work dictates how you behave and the work you produce. So if you want to increase your ability to get more done in a single workday while doing a better job, consider changing your surroundings in the following ways.
I think we've all had that childhood (or adult) desire to have ice cream for dinner. But veggies for dessert? It's something I had nightmares about as a kid.
Arcade games have always been more about chance than skill (at least when I play them). Whether you're at a children's party at a Chuck E. Cheese's or drinking it up with your pals at a barcade like Dave & Buster's, you'll find similar games that hold the golden ticket to fun and cheap prizes that no one needs—boy, do you want them.
Cortana, Microsoft's voice-activated personal assistant, originally launch on Windows Phone, but is now built directly into Windows 10 complete with "Hey Cortana" voice search (take that, Apple). It can help you locate files, set up reminders, control music.
Whether it's the start, middle, or end of summer, it's prime-time grilling season. If you find yourself without a grill, however, it may seem as if half your summer plans of swimming by the pool while stuffing hot dogs in your face could be ruined.
Protein powder is a fad in the same way that Justin Bieber's music is: you either love it, or you hate it. Everyone I know has a strong opinion about protein powder, ranging from "daily necessity" to "utterly useless."
For foods that encompass both tastiness and convenience, it's hard to beat boxed mac and cheese. Mac and cheese in a box takes 15 minutes to make, dirties only one dish, requires no skill, costs only two bucks, and is, despite all of the above, wildly delicious. Yet it can get even more delicious just by adding a few more ingredients.
Few things in life are as relaxing and enjoyable as baking. When I'm having a bad day, I make cookies. When I'm stressed out, I bake a cake. When I have a free Sunday with nothing to do but listen to music and drink coffee, I bake a tart or a batch of cupcakes.
Unless you're well off, you've probably experienced the hard liquor purchasing conundrum. You know the one: you want to stock your home bar with more than just one spirit, but you don't want to drop $100 or more just so you can have some variety in your alcohol cabinet.
Sriracha has quickly become one of the country's most universally loved condiments. The addictive and affordable chili sauce seemingly goes on anything, and with anything, and never seems to get old. To wit: when I studied abroad, all of our food was boring, pre-packaged Sysco shipments; for three months, I smothered every breakfast, lunch, and dinner with Sriracha. And after all of that, I still eat it almost religiously.
There's nothing in this life that we love more than making one ingredient or one food tool do multiple things. It saves money! It saves time! It makes us look smart at cocktail parties!
If you're a child of the '70s, then you'll probably remember Pop Rocks, those fizzy little candies that created such a buzz. They went out of style in the States for a while, but now they're back with retro status. I was surprised to see them in my kids' Halloween bags a few years ago, and one taste brought me back to my childhood.
There are so many cutesy pink, red, and heart-shaped desserts and drinks put out on Valentine's Day, but none of those really get you into a low-light mood. Instead, turn up the heat with one of these aphrodisiac cocktails for grown-ups.
Unlike wine, you can't re-cork or stopper leftover bubbly after you've opened it, but all is not lost even if you haven't managed to finish every last drop. You can use your leftover champagne to make light-as-air crêpes or pancakes, to create a detox face mask, to cook seafood and rice, or to make dips and salad dressings.
There's nothing more jarring than the sound of your morning alarm. Even hearing it on others' phones, hours after your own abrupt wakeup, can cause you to flinch in fear. Though we depend on that shrill sound to get up each morning, it's actually better to wake up naturally—so don't even think about hitting that snooze button.
There are certain foods and beverages that can actually brighten your smile or improve your dental health when you chew or sip them. Once you understand their chemical properties or textures, you can look to items you already have in your cupboards or refrigerator to help keep your teeth looking and feeling their best.
Dulce de leche is a beautiful, caramel-like spread that you can slather onto bread or use to flavor cakes, cookies, or flan. You can also use it as a drizzle for ice cream, chocolate candies, and pastries. It tastes like heavenly toffee, translates roughly to "milk candy," and is popular all over Latin and South America. A version of the confection is also popular in the Philippines, in Russia, and is known in France as "confiture de lait." The traditional way to make dulce de leche is to slo...
Somehow, we end up with a pile of leftover candy canes at the end of every December. Yet just because the enthusiastic holiday commercials are gone and the Christmas cards are on discount doesn't mean you have to let the minty sweets go to waste.
Christmas trees, once decorated and brightly lit, are the penultimate holiday decoration, but authentic pines lose their brilliance fast without any nourishment. Plus, they are major fire hazards without regular hydration. But watering one requires a lot of sliding around on the floor, and it can be hard to tell how much water is in the bowl beneath the dark, prickly branches. These five hacks can help!
There are those who prefer Thanksgiving leftovers to the actual official meal, much like people who prefer cold pizza over hot. I'm definitely in the latter camp. There's something luxurious about enjoying your perfectly cooked turkey and stuffing while wearing sweatpants and not having to make small talk with your weird uncle who drinks too much.
To say we're a nation of coffee-lovers is putting it mildly. Americans consume 400 million cups of joe in one day alone, but how well do we actually know our morning BFF? We know it comes from a bean, and that more coffee drinks exist than there are ways to skin a pig, but what else?
Emojis have transformed the way we laugh and cry, tell stories, give responses, and express excitement to get a drink after work — without any actual text required. Heck, in an incredibly meta move, the Oxford Dictionary even named the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji as their word of the year at one point. So how could you not want to be an emoji character for Halloween? Emojis are everywhere. The ubiquitous symbols are already on smartphones, tablets, and social networks, so why not help them...
It's never too early to start planning for the best holiday of the year, right? We've already shown you how to make chillingly creepy cocktails, shrunken heads out of apples and potatoes, and a slew of DIY costumes, whether you want to go as Groot or an emoji. Now it's time to think about the most important part of any good Halloween party: the food. If you need inspiration for some spookily tasty Halloween hors d'oeuvres, just read on.
