Mastic feels like stones between the fingers and turns pliant between the teeth — although “if you bite it, it cracks,” the French Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan says. Under a pestle, it crumbles into a shimmery dust. Stir this into liquid, and there’s a slight thickening, a sudden heaviness, verging on syrup. Kattan, a founder…
It’s as if you discovered that the living room in your new apartment had been painted by Michelangelo. Frank DiLella moved to New York City in 2002 to study journalism and theater at Fordham University. After he graduated, he rented apartments in Astoria, Queens, and in Hell’s Kitchen and on the Upper West Side of…
Hello! Mia here. Melissa Clark and I swapped days this week, and she’ll be with you on Saturday with a very special Cooking newsletter. My colleague Priya Krishna has a wonderful new article for The New York Times, writing about how cooking has connected her and her mother. Priya writes: “There’s something about cooking together…
Good morning. It’s skinned-knuckle season, the time of the year that’s all about stuck bolts and crushed washers and hydraulic fluid and bottom paint, sacrificial zincs and ceramic wax — old boats coaxed back to health so they can run us to the fishing grounds, so we can cast flies to bass. I skinned my…
Add cassava to that wardrobe of tortillas. A new line, Coyotas, is an alternative to flour tortillas. It uses gluten-free organic cassava flour and organic coconut oil with only water and salt. The result behaves like flour tortillas, holds up well with fillings and comes in three sizes: small for tacos, medium for larger tacos…
The hiking trail to Middleham Falls on the Caribbean island of Dominica is all wet leaves, slippery black stones and steps formed by tree roots. It could be a path in Middle-earth, shrouded, shadowy and green, fit for hobbits and fairies. Where sunlight pierced the canopy, rainbows formed in the mist, almost close enough to…
The hackers offered a menu of services, at a variety of prices. A local government in southwest China paid less than $15,000 for access to the private website of traffic police in Vietnam. Software that helped run disinformation campaigns and hack accounts on X cost $100,000. For $278,000 Chinese customers could get a trove of…
Helen Mirren declared herself to be “in love with them,” and Gabrielle Union said that “they might be the most comfortable shoes I have ever worn in my life.” Julia Roberts, Viola Davis and Drew Barrymore have worn them to Hollywood premieres. Queen Camilla owns 13 pairs and wears them at almost all of her…
In the early 2000s, when Tomoko Yagi and her husband went to the movies in New York City, Ms. Yagi couldn’t find anywhere she could hang out afterward with a nice cup of tea and dessert. Back in her hometown in Japan, she could go to the ubiquitous wagashi (Japanese dessert) cafes that served not-too-sweet…
