KINGSTON, N.Y. — Almost a week before Thanksgiving, residents at Chiz’s Heart Street group home begin their preparations. With six turkeys to defrost and brine, more than 50 pounds of sweet potatoes to cube and giant trays of stuffing to mix, this is not a one-day job. The meal will be served family-style, but many of…
A few times a year, Thupten Bachan’s family sets out into the mountains near their home in the Kham region of Tibet to forage for herbs — mostly parsley, coriander and chives — that they’ll bring back, clean and dry for the months to come. Mr. Bachan and his fiancée, the chef Tashi Dechen, opened…
Home bartenders aren’t often stuck in high-volume situations. But combine guests in dry-clean-only clothes with social anxiety and suddenly you’re hosting a holiday party, and frantically making drinks for a horde. Instead of spending the night juggling sticky shakers and unfinished conversations, or relying on assorted beers from a bathtub filled with ice, welcome guests…
The best wine book I read this year was not about wine. It was about cider, though not entirely. It was really about trees and places, agriculture and culture, and the tension between nature and industry. All of which is about wine and a lot more. “Uncultivated: Wild Apples, Real Cider and the Complicated Art…
Good morning. We’ll get to the recipes soon enough, to this insanely good macaroni and cheese (above), to Julia Moskin’s hashed brussels sprouts, to gravy instruction and a whole lot more. This is perhaps the time you need recipes most, of any time of year. But there are two important points to make before we…
The morning walk before a holiday meal can feel like an act of advance penance: a show of restraint before the feast, best performed under a pale sun, amid a lonely scatter of leaves and with a determination to keep the campfire in sight. March off too slowly — or too far — and you’ll…
IN THE HILLY Boaco region of central Nicaragua, the turmeric plants on Celia Dávila and Gonzalo González’s farm stand over four feet tall — thriving giants, although as natives of South and Southeast Asia, they’re actually newcomers to this land. Coffee once ruled these fields, but as its price has grown unstable, smallholder farmers like…
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that it had identified 27 more people who were ill from the recent outbreak of E. coli infection linked to romaine lettuce from Salinas, Calif., bringing the total number of reported cases to 67. The C.D.C. reported no fatalities but said the outbreak affected 19 states,…
The only problem with amba — the habit-forming, incandescently bright mango pickle found on the bar of every falafel shop — is how long it takes to make. Days, if you’re doing it the old-fashioned way: salting pieces of mango and letting the jars sit in the sun, until the fruit has softened, released all…
MONTREAL — Irwin Shlafman, the owner of Fairmount Bagel, boasts that his bagels were the first in outer space, when his astronaut cousin brought them to the International Space Station. He also says Fairmount, founded in 1919, is the oldest bagel joint in town. Just don’t tell that to his arch-bagel-rival, Joe Morena, the jovial…