CRYSTAL LAKE, Ill. — An Illinois family has got us saying “I’m loving it” after making the fast food find of a lifetime: a 1950s-era McDonald’s order inside the walls of their house. Grace Jones says it happened when she and her husband were updating a bathroom in their Crystal Lake, Illinois home. Her husband Rob was replacing an old toilet paper fixture, and when he pulled it out of the wall — he noticed a piece of bunched up […]

Jama Fowler (Photo courtesy of Emerson Funeral Home) A woman, whose business ventures with her husband include a fast food restaurant in Mountain Home, has died. According to Arkansas Business, the family of 85-year-old Jama Fowler of Jonesboro announced she died last week. Jama Fowler met her husband, Wallace, in 1953 when he was an Army soldier stationed in Fort Smith. Wallace Fowler worked at a pair of retailers in the Little Rock area before the couple purchased his aunt’s […]

Cooking is about the conversion of everyday ingredients – bags of flour, tins of tomatoes, dried pasta, spices – into something that ends up much more than the sum of its parts. I always think this when making pizza (which is always cheaper than buying it in): it’s a simple base topped with a simple tomato sauce and whatever else you have that needs using up. The same can be said of pasta bakes and curry bases, which I always […]

In a speech last week, Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, said the pandemic and the war had revealed that American supply chains, while efficient, were neither secure nor resilient. While cautioning against “a fully protectionist direction,” she said the United States should work to reorient its trade relationships toward a large group of “trusted partners,” even if it meant somewhat higher costs for businesses and consumers. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, said in a […]

Communities across the US are using federal stimulus money to bring grocery stores and healthy food to food deserts, as the pandemic and rising costs put nutrition further out of reach for many. The regions using American Rescue Plan funds include Montana’s Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, a 1,000-sq-mile expanse shared by the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes. Most of the reservation is considered a food desert by the US Department of Agriculture, meaning most residents have little access to healthy […]

Breakfast literally means “to break the fast.” It is the first meal of the day after a stretch of not eating overnight. Breakfast earned its title as the most important meal of the day back in the 1960s after American nutritionist Adelle Davis suggested that to keep fit and avoid obesity, one should “eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.” Though around 15% of people in the United States regularly skip breakfast, many […]

  Drought has been a constant companion in the life of 50-year-old Janabai Shakare, a resident of Beed taluka in the drought-prone Marathwada region of Maharashtra. Her youth, she said, was spent lamenting on the vagaries of living in a drought-hit area with little access to potable water and accompanying hardships. She married a farmer from a village about 100 kms from her maternal home, only to be living in another village with parched lands. Overs the years, Janabai’s kitchen […]

HOUSTON — The Hughie’s on West 18th Street is one among scores of Vietnamese American restaurants around this city. But it may have more in common with a Dairy Queen. For starters, it used to be a Dairy Queen. The sign out front still has the eye-shaped outline of the ice cream chain’s logo. On the menu, alongside banh mi and shaking beef, are thickly crusted, buttermilk brined chicken tenders, a Dairy Queen standard. The most striking similarity, though, is the […]

Hawaiian food has such a breadth of flavor, variety, and history. Whether or not you’re on the Big Island, we’ve got plenty of Hawaiian-inspired recipes you just might have to put in your weeknight dinner rotation. You’re likely familiar with poke bowls (packed with fresh sushi-grade tuna), or even the components of a classic Hawaiian lunch plate, loco moco, and my personal favorite, Spam musubi. Spam deserves all the recognition it can get. And Spam musubi? It’s an ideal beach […]

As anyone who drives is aware, gasoline prices are up a lot from their 2020 low. First, global economic recovery drove up oil demand, then Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine cut into Russian oil exports. But prices both at the pump and at the wellhead have stabilized, at least for now. By historical standards, real gas prices — prices relative to the overall cost of living — aren’t that high; in fact, they’re lower than they were from 2006 to […]