Jen Karetnick

If you save guacamole for a restaurant meal, you're missing out. Guacamole is one of the easiest dips you can make for a party, and it's a fast and simple way to spruce up taco night, too.
Homemade guacamole is easy to personalize to your tastes. Like it spicy? Add more chiles. Prefer more of a crunch from onions? Double (or triple!) the amount. Once you've learned how to make guacamole, you can mix up ingredients to make it just the way you want.
What Is Guacamole?
Guacamole is an avocado-ba...

Photo by Ruth Kim
You might have noticed the slew of creative Israeli restaurants flooding the city in the past couple of years.
It began with homegrown restaurant Abbalé Telavivian Kitchen and continued with Motek, Jaffa, Neya, and Aba, among others. Despite how you personally might feel about Israel, which is certainly a complicated subject, and despite how some of these restaurants are now distancing themselves from the politics and accompanying anti-Semitism by calling themselves Middle E...

Blend one up, and slip away to the tropics.
Total Time:
5 mins
The Piña Colada gets a bad rap as an umbrella drink that you order only on vacation. It’s also true that in the 70s and 80s, asking for a piña colada—a sugary, premade blender mix at the time—was as fashionable as big hair and even bigger earrings. After all, who can forget the 1979 Rupert Holmes song "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)?"
But Puerto Ricans have always been proud of this cocktail—as they should be. And the more people t...

Very few homeowners have a perfectly situated inground pool that’s open to both air and sunshine yet protected from the elements. In fact, even a well-placed pool that’s not surrounded by trees or other vegetation is almost impossible to keep completely free from debris due to everyone who swims in it. Children track in sand, dogs jump in after a tennis ball and shed fur, and guests may accidentally spill food and drinks in the water. That’s why, even if you have a pool service that regularly...

Summary: From the peaks of the Rocky Mountains in Montana, you immediately understand why this American state has earned itself the nickname of “Big Sky” country. At 7-12,000 feet above sea level, all you can see above you is space, occupied only by a spectrum of blue, wisps of clouds, and cartwheeling birds of prey. Far below you, the landscape unrolls like a variety of foam mats, as if you’re viewing a yoga class from the ceiling. But to arrive at that breathtaking expanse, you have to move...

You're just 25 minutes away from an easy dinner.
Active Time:
5 mins
Total Time:
25 mins
Servings:
This 7-Can Soup, which begins with a can of vegetarian chili, couldn't be easier. Just pop open the tops of the cans, tip the insides into a large stock pot, and simmer until it's ready.
When ready to serve, add some rice, or stir in some cheese, top with sour cream or scallions, or crumble up some tortilla chips for additional texture. Feel free to substitute meat chili, or add some leftover ro...

The ‘Wild Huckleberry’ Is Redundant
By Jen Karetnick
If the only wild huckleberry you’ve heard of is the character from “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” then you likely haven’t been in northwest Montana in the summer-fall shoulder season. That’s when it’s all wild huckleberries, all the time.
Indeed, these little berries are huge business in Big Sky towns like Kalispell, Bozeman, Misso...

You might find yourself a little puzzled by the Alexander, a mid-Miami Beach oceanfront resort, which you perhaps last thought of as a dining destination when Shula’s Steak House opened in 1998. The sputnik light fixtures overhead are half-extinguished at the valet, which costs a retro five bucks. Inside, glittering chandeliers also recall its 1960s past, as does a sweeping staircase.
But patterned carpets and a clashing array of upholstered, mismatched furniture challenge any mid-century ele...

When coming up with this diverting little list of drinking holes, we wrestled with some questions: What makes an establishment a bar as opposed to a pub, a tavern, a speakeasy, or any other synonym? Are they allowed to serve food, or are they supposed to be a strictly peanuts-and-brewski kinds of places? Can they offer entertainment and be more like a lounge or a nightclub? And, if it’s also a restaurant, do minors in the establishment discount them?
Then there’s the definition of "continuous...

Key Points
Kitten-proofing your home is a proactive way of keeping your new furry friend and your house happy and safe.
Some places to kitten-proof include your kitchen, your bathrooms, your living room, your laundry room, your garage, and your garden.
To start, look for places where tiny kittens can get in big trouble with electrical cords, blind cords, drapes, and tablecloths. Put away breakable valuables and encourage your new family member to use a cat tree or scratching post instead of y...

So you watched The Menu, cackling at all the “breadless bread plate” and “broken emulsion” scenes. And then, since you had viewed one food-driven movie, your streaming service suggested that you also screen Love, Charlie: the Rise and Fall of Chef Charlie Trotter.
Both movies are, at their essence, about tasting-menu culture. But unlike The Menu, a satirical thriller about consumerism and pretentiousness in the hospitality industry, Love, Charlie is a documentary about how multiple James Bear...

The addition of sour cream and chives adds a tart touch to this classic side dish.
Mashed potatoes are a classic side dish for every kind of meal, from weeknight dinners to holiday feasts. The creamy, fluffy potatoes perfectly accompany roast beef, short ribs, and roast chicken, but mashed potatoes can also be a great base for pot roasts, soups, and more.
Mashed potatoes are fairly simple and straight-forward, but there are ways to make this old-fashioned side even easier. One such way: an In...

In his 1974 tome On Food, James Beard wrote, "To me, there are few things as magnificent as scrambled eggs, pure and simple, perfectly cooked and perfectly seasoned."
He's not alone. Many chefs, home cooks, and folks who appreciate food feel that an egg, cooked to personal specifications, is one of life's purest pleasures.
Lately, however, that pleasure is quickly becoming a luxury.
As they're known in the industry, shell eggs have been skyrocketing in cost. The USDA's National Shell Egg Inde...

Carmen Martínez Torrón via Getty Images
The news, when it was announced in late December, was both dire and definitive: Ronzoni had discontinued its signature pastina, product No. 155. Fans all over social media — many of them Gen Xers who were raised on the tiny pasta shape and fed it to Gen Z children, just like their postwar elders did for their families — were outraged.
Twitter lit ablaze as people mourned the star-shaped carb.
Today I found out that Ronzoni is discontinuing their pastina...

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My welcome-to-Miami party was a hurricane party. In 1992, newly married, I moved to South Beach just in time to be clobbered by Hurricane Andrew. Back then, we didn’t have a lot of warning either. On Saturday, we spent the day at the beach, and on Sunday we were shipping out under mandatory evacuation orders. The Category 5 hurricane struck early Monday morning, on Aug. 24.
Since then, my family and I have been through many tropical systems, ranging from Kat...