Mary Kate Skehan

I first came across the food influencer Samah Dada while searching for gluten- and dairy-free dishes. Dada, a twenty-eight-year-old food influencer with regular segments on the Today show, a cookbook, and a 400,000-follower Instagram account, somehow makes being a gluten-free vegan who doesn’t drink look fun. Her skin and hair are positively radiant with nourishment and nontoxicity; she looks very well-hydrated. Hoping to achieve some of this plant-based glow for myself, I headed to the Instagram account DadaEats and tried to eat like Dada. I started with the desserts, simply for the economy of scale: check out of the grocery store with almond butter, dark chocolate chips, rice cakes, maple syrup and dates, and you’ll be able to make almost any of her no-bake desserts.

The cardinal rule of the internet may be “never read the comments,” but in at least one corner of the web, the rule should be never to skip them. I’m talking about the New York Times Cooking blog and app, the most-used resource in my kitchen. NYT has more than 20,000 recipes in its database. Many of them sport hundreds of “community notes” left by passionate home cooks. In my years using the app, I’ve noticed a few trends in the comments. The most famous NYT Cooking comment annotates the classic recipe for Katharine Hepburn’s brownies. The commenter gushes about the recipe before veering into a story about sharing her brownies with a German acquaintance. The note ends with a twist: “Eventually, she moved to the US and stole my husband!

My sister recently gave up gluten and dairy on doctor’s orders. In a show of support, my whole family has been exploring ways to make shared meals more tolerable for the poor woman, suddenly deprived of the two best food groups. We’re revisiting family recipes for breakfasts, sides and desserts: my grandmother’s strata, with its layers of cheese-soaked bread, is out altogether, while mashed potatoes go without butter and pie goes without crust. It’s easy to make your first GF/DF meal. The first time my sister came over for dinner after starting her new lifestyle, we smoked a pork shoulder and ate it with mayo-based coleslaw and baked beans: a classic BBQ! Meat and potatoes are GF/DF, as are stir-fried veggies and rice, and bacon and eggs.

What do I cook when I don't feel like cooking? Scrambled eggs. Beans on toast. Canned soup. But Caro Chambers, recipe developer, Substack author and mom of three little boys, might instead go for Jerk Chicken with Coconut Rice and Strawberry Salsa, or Lamb Pita with Dilly Minty Yogurt Sauce, or some other recipe with prepositions in the title, from her popular Substack “What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking.” Once a week, she releases a new recipe to her 112,000 subscribers, who pay $5 per month for fifty-two new recipes per year plus access to the archives. “If you want something done, ask a busy person,” said either Benjamin Franklin or Lucille Ball. This could be Chambers’s slogan.

Our first Thanksgiving together, my now-husband, then-medical-resident-boyfriend worked a shift during the family feast. I made it up to him with Melissa Clark’s one-pan, one-pot Thanksgiving for two. The recipe went off flawlessly and made the constraints of my tiny apartment kitchen feel more like a game-show challenge than a life-or-death struggle. Clark’s 2022 cookbook Dinner in One makes the same promise about 100 different meals. The game-show, can-it-be-done? energy made the Thanksgiving method fun, but could feel tedious on a Tuesday night. Is “one-pot” a theme or a gimmick? Does this constraint serve the cook and the recipe, or is it arbitrary, artificial and unnecessarily limiting?

There comes a time in every home cook’s life when she is separated from her craft. This may be due to illness, incapacity, repairs, renovations or, worstof all, moving house. This month, I moved from Texas to Pennsylvania. Between packing up my utensils and appliances, waiting for the moving truck to make its halting way across the nation, and finally unpacking and reorganizing my tools, I lost my kitchen for four weeks. But benched cooks like mehave a surprisingly satisfying alternative: cooking podcasts. The first podcast I tried is most similar to traditional cooking shows: Food 52’s Play Me a Recipe. Chefs and cookbook authors host episodes in which they introduce a favorite recipe and talk through its ingredients and method, encouraging listeners to pause and rewind as needed.

I occasionally come across a social media account — usually run by a conservative male — claiming to great fanfare that young women these days don’t know how to cook. They’ve been too busy girlbossing to learn. In my experience, this is wrong. The ambitious women I know are ambitious in every part of their lives. They get the promotion while moving up the Peloton leaderboard, planning their dream wedding and creating flavorful, photogenic meals that Betty Crocker hadn’t dreamed of. For these women, there’s the Ambitious Kitchen. The Ambitious Kitchen was created in 2011 by a Chicago woman named Monique Volz. It has since amassed more than 700,000 followers on Instagram and a cookbook deal for 2024.

Heidi Swanson started her vegetarian food blog, 101 Cookbooks, in 2003. At the time, the Atkins Diet was sweeping the nation, even as schoolchildren still learned the carb-heavy Food Pyramid. It would take another year for a landmark study to link high-fructose corn syrup to the obesity epidemic, and another fifteen for the FDA to ban trans fats. Back then, granola was for tree-huggers, like organic produce, Whole Foods Markets and the Pacific Northwest. Times have changed. These days, everyone outside the Lion Diet community agrees that a plant-based diet is best, preferably free of hormones and artificial sweeteners. 101 Cookbooks is still active and popular, if less countercultural than at its inception.

Imagine a summer morning in Southern California. You rise with the sun in a palm-shaded bungalow and stroll to a nearby farmers market, where the tables spill over with heirloom tomatoes, sweet corn and cartons of juicy strawberries. Your canvas tote filled with the season’s bounty, you return to your sun-dappled kitchen to prepare a farm-to-table feast for all your friends while listening to your favorite vintage records. Sigh. This is the dreamy lifestyle purveyed by Salad Freak: Recipes to Feed a Healthy Obsession by Jess Damuck (Abrams, 2022). I’ve always aspired to be the kind of woman who can “just toss something together,” making a light, fresh, delicious dish with ease, rather than worrying that something will catch fire if I leave my post by the stove.

Summer comes early to San Antonio. I moved here in January, dodging the worst excesses of the northeastern winter, but by March, the temperature had already reached into the nineties. By the time you read this column, summer will be approaching the rest of the country as well. It’s no-bake dessert season. I’ve always been intrigued by this genre of dessert recipe, which involves a vast spectrum of quality. The worst can be appalling — think of gelatin salads, gloppy pudding pies, packets of flavored powders and demeaning names like “mess” and “fool.” On the other hand, some no-bake desserts are transcendent: for example, panna cotta and the Magnolia Bakery banana pudding.

Have you heard about the latest food trend sweeping the nation? It’s called “whimpering over your grocery bill.” In the early days of 2023, Americans are spending 70 percent more on eggs than one year ago. Chicken, dairy and bread prices outpaced inflation as well, increasing by double-digit percentages. What’s an adventurous home cook to do? The answer is Budget Bytes, a website I first turned to as a broke twenty-two-year-old with a galley kitchen in Queens. I didn’t know, before an acquaintance tweeted a link to a coconut vegetable curry, that you could make a tasty, filling meal, complete with leftovers, using almost entirely canned or frozen goods. Budget Bytes taught me to cook.

Who is Ali Slagle? A fan of New York Times Cooking might recognize the name: nine of their fifty most popular recipes of 2022 are credited to her, the most of any of their contributors, including household names like J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Melissa Clark. But despite the tremendous popularity of her recipes, Slagle herself is a bit mysterious. She crops up, cheerfully and occasionally, on NYT Cooking channels. Her 142,000 Instagram followers are a mere fraction of the followings of her food-celebrity contemporaries, like Molly Baz, Alison Roman, or Claire Saffitz. She doesn’t appear to be developing a platform; she has no Twitter, no Substack, no YouTube channel. She appears to live in a camper van.

It’s the new year, and that means time for resolutions. Many of us will pursue food-and-drink-related goals: eating healthier, eating out less, or trying a 'Dry January' – giving up alcohol for the month. Non-drinkers have more interesting options these days than coffee or Diet Coke. Commercially bottled kombuchas are a plausible substitute for something stronger. Non-alcoholic beers, wines and cocktails are also multiplying, judging from the crush of Instagram ads I receive. As someone in a semi-permanent state of trying to drink just a bit less, I’m always interested in tactics to facilitate sobriety. This year, I tried out mocktail recipes that might help a Dry January feel livelier.

Joshua Weissman’s number-one bestselling An Unapologetic Cookbook is misnamed. You won’t catch the potty-mouthed, long- haired chef saying sorry for making a mild ethnic slur against Italians or a penis joke, but in a philosophical sense, apologetics is exactly what he’s doing: he champions the joys of home cooking to an uninitiated audience. Weissman’s unlikely following is made up of the type of guys who consume a lot of quasi-educational content on YouTube and Wikipedia. They won’t buy the latest Barefoot Contessa volume, but they are curious about how things are made, whether it’s bridges or Big Macs.

As one of eight children, I feel deep kinship with others who come from big families. Bunk beds, hand-me-down clothes, abject chaos at dinnertime — these are the staples of big-family life. Tieghan Gerard, the author of the food blog and cookbook series Half Baked Harvest, is one such kindred spirit. She comes from a family of ten, and began cooking as a tween to help with frenzied mealtimes. She soon started creating her own recipes for a food blog, which became three bestselling cookbooks and a four-million-follower Instagram. Her big-family backstory blends with her wholesome, rustic aesthetic: feeding a crowd, after all, involves creativity, resourcefulness and well-loved tools. I hoped I’d recognize some high-volume cooking tricks in Half Baked Harvest: Super Simple.

I recently got engaged. After the celebratory Champagne and indulgent restaurant meals my fiancé and I enjoyed in our month of post-betrothal bliss, reality set in: soon I must fit into a wedding dress. Of course, dresses come in all shapes and sizes, just like brides. But have you seen the price of a wedding photographer lately? I’d like to look my best. These days, the main weight-loss food trend seems to be the ketogenic diet. Like the Paleo and Atkins diets, eating keto means cutting carbs. Unlike these other diets, keto isn’t high in protein; it’s high in fat. The idea is that depriving yourself of carbs and protein will cause your body to burn fat for energy — starting with the bacon and eggs you ate for breakfast and ending with your thighs.