French Fry Alternatives

A reliable French-style bread machine recipe, from the Logik Stainless Steel Bread Maker instruction booklet.

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Thomas Pesquet’s Alpha mission is about to bloom! The ESA astronaut will soon be growing flowers on the International Space Station, in an experiment called “Graines d’Eklo”.

French toast is a classic breakfast dish and for good reason. It's made by soaking stale bread in a mix of milk, beaten eggs, cinnamon, and sugar and then cooking it in a skillet until it's golden-brown. The results are crispy on the outside and custard-like on the inside. It's even better with a pat of butter and maple syrup on top. It's a nostalgic breakfast that many of us grew up with. The basic recipe has been unchanged for years until our Test Kitchen stumbled across a new TikTok hack.

There are many great Houseplants That Can be Used as Christmas Tree Alternatives, and apart from that, they look good as well.

A favorite annual is the Marigold or Tagetes. Bold colours in Yellows, Oranges, Lemons Reds and Creams are a feature of these plants that flower from July to the first frost. Despite the names they all originate from Mexico.

Design trends are constantly changing, but sometimes a style reemerges at precisely the time when it feels new and fresh—no matter how long it's been around. Scalloped design is having just that sort of moment. Scalloped borders in interior design can be found as far back as the Renaissance, and they were often used in Art Deco interiors in the early 20th century, and again during the preppy 1980s. 

You don’t have to be a Starbucks aficionado to know Americans are obsessed with coffee. They love it so much that it’s the most popular beverage in the country, with consumption being at a two-decade high, according to the National Coffee Data Trends report.

I recently had the privilege of attending a presentation by Laura Dowling on arranging flowers in the French style. Laura was the Chief Floral Designer at the White House from 2009 to 2015. Her arrangements were inspiring, and the use of the materials was inventive and beautiful. She attended floral design schools in both Paris and Germany and has continued to pursue new techniques. She has also authored several books on flower arranging in the French style, featuring her design work at the White House. Laura shared her stories of working in the White House and other major events where she designed flower arrangements to create a magical background. Those two and a half hours encouraged me to think outside the box to create beautiful flower arrangements.

IN CASE I FAILED TO CONVINCE YOU in earliest spring that you didn’t want a Forsythia, but a Lindera benzoin or spicebush instead, more evidence just presented itself. Now try to resist this native Eastern shrub, and tell me that your Forsythia measures up to its gold standard.

DID YOU KNOW that robins can count, or that food (not paper or plastic) is the biggest single source of fodder for U.S. landfills? Those stories, and more, are among the latest links.

It’s a soup you can make and enjoy now, or freeze, depending on how many willing yellow onions you can get your hands on, and on whether you can resist eating it all right away. With my first bowlful, I didn’t even manage to wait long enough to melt the cheese on top of the recommended toast. It just smelled too inviting as-is (or was), and then, suddenly, gone.If you haven’t met David Lebovitz, the story, in brief: In 1999, he left Chez Panisse and a career in the restaurant business. He moved from San Francisco to Paris—where he jokingly says Belgian endive is so inexpensive as to be the French version of “trash” lettuce, and reports there are more than 1,260 bakeries. Packing up little more than his best skillet, cookbooks and trusty laptop, David turned to writing, and his 2011 memoir, “The Sweet Life in Paris” (Amazon affiliate link), became a “New York Times” bestseller.His website has likewise been a giant hit (and has an e-newsletter I enjoy); he is lately (as of 2021ish) moving more over to delivering his latest writing via a Substack newsletter.No wonder he is so perennially popular. Besides having a way with food, he is a delicious storyteller, too, always layering in the essential ingr