Our cooking columnists answer your questions on gift etiquette, how to get your hands on hatch chiles, and paper properties.

Three (Generations of) Guys a-Laughing
A collection of sillily subversive poems reminds one dad just how meaningful a shared laugh between father and son can be.

My One and Only Spatula
Rick Casner muses on the magic of certain inanimate objects after falling–hard–for an everyday utensil.

Pastry Paris
In Paris, everything looks like dessert. Or so sees Susan Hochbaum, who finds her muse in sweet sculptures of butter, cream, and sugar.

Never Cook Naked: Mayo Salads, Shared Steak, Pie Crust
Our (fully clothed) cooking columnists handily take on weepy mayo salads, shared steak etiquette, and shrinking pie crusts.

A Sweet History: Portugal’s Pastéis de Tentúgal
This cigar-shaped sweet, swaddled in pastry and filled with eggy custard, was first made in…convents?

The Kitchen Counter Cooking School
An existential crisis and a chance supermarket encounter prompt cooking school grad Kathleen Flinn to stumble onto her true calling.

Chocolate Chip Cookies and Red Cowboy Boots
After devoting decades to (unsuccessfully) replicating her grandmother’s chocolate-chip cookies, Kimberley Lovato discovers that she’s more like her grandma than she’d imagined.

Stumbling into Motherhood
Author and mom Anne Enright sniffs babies up and down, then holds nothing back as she relays what each precious smell calls to mind.

Leite’s Loves…Laguiole Steak Knives
A splurge at Anthropologie reveals some unabashedly girlie French knives with an unmistakably masculine appeal.

Never Cook Naked: Perfect Hard-Boiled Eggs, Too Flat Cookies, Blonde Coffee
Our Never Cook Naked columnists, Mark Scarbrough and Bruce Weinstein, share lots more lessons than just proper cooking attire.

Besotted with Brisket
Why exactly does a flaccid, four-pound, gray-brown piece of beef shaped roughly like the state of Tennessee inspire Proustian prose and evoke deep pleasure?

Eggs and Other Easter Oddities
Sometimes it’s not a bad thing to take a hard look at those things we never stop to consider. Jennifer Thompson Trainer takes on an Easter essential.

A Manly Man’s Sippy Cup
We’ve all experienced moments of brilliance in which the stars align and the angels sing and we see the everyday anew. Rick Casner shares his most recent revelation.

Cooking with Scrambled Legs
Having a kid who lacks the strength to stand at the kitchen counter beside her turned Jess Thomson’s world upside down. Here’s how she’s returning her family’s life to right side up.

Leite’s Loves…Whirley Pop
So long, microwave. We’ve found a far more reliable contraption for popping popcorn, and it’s dancing buttery circles around you. Jenna Levy says good riddance.

New York (Food) Diaries
A recently published collection of journal entries indulges our inner voyeur with four centuries of all manner of curious culinary moments. Lovers of diaries, enjoy.

Comfort Me With Gnocchi
In Uruguay, the 29th has long been heralded as the Day of the Gnocchi, a harbinger of luck. But for these lovers, eventually that luck ran its course.

How to Woo Women–Well, Kinda
Jonathan Dixon long ago discovered that the way to a woman’s heart is through her stomach…or so he thought.

Cheez Doodles Français-Style
A year in Paris can rid an American of many an uncivilized habit. But as Adam Ried explains, a dependency on Cheez Doodles isn’t one of them.