I’ve recently learned to bake a few staples and I’m more interested in fine tuning those before moving on to others. As the father of a five year-old, chocolate cake tops that list.

I’d tried chocolate cake before, and despite the fact that it was my first time baking anything, I felt the recipe was lacking. I turned to my friend Caitlin, a dab hand at baking anything, for help. She pointed me to this recipe by Ina Garten.

Seemed simple enough to make, so why would this be better than what I’d tried before? For starters, buttermilk and coffee…

Khichdi is an Indian stew of rice, lentils and vegetables. I cobbled together my own recipe when my daughter was a few months old, and five years later it is still a healthy staple I rely on to fill gaps in her nutrition. Several friends have asked me for the kids’ version so I’m finally getting around to writing this. It’s pretty forgiving (so forgiving, in fact, that you’ll notice I measure some ingredients by the fistful) so don’t overthink it.

• A fistful of white rice
• A fistful of split red lentils
• 2–3 fistfuls of diced mixed veggies.
  I typically…

That is why I keep at it, and this piece by Eric Holthaus gives us a number of ways to double down on our efforts in 2021.

We ran out of beans, with 8 inches of snow outside and the mercury hovering around freezing. At times like these, we make chai. I haven’t been drinking it since I turned vegan because plant milks just don’t work as well in chai; they’re not fat enough to cut the acridity that a strong Indian black tea possesses.

Got me thinking.

If the Aeropress can strip the acidity from coffee to produce a full-bodied but smooth cupful, could it do the same for black tea? Turns out it can.

I use the upside-down method of brewing with the Aeropress. Milk…

There’ve been a lot of discussions about how shortform works, so we thought a quick primer might help. We’re also making an update to help shortform earn on Medium.

Shortform is any story under 150 words (including title and subtitle), and it is eligible to earn money if it is metered. Like all stories on Medium, shortform earns based on reading time on its story page, not simply viewing it in a feed.

A few months ago, we made reading more frictionless on Medium by switching to a single stream of stories on profile and publication homepages, making it easier…

Your Medium profile is where readers get to know more about you, to see the face behind the name, the mind behind the words. For writers, it’s a place to showcase ideas for the millions of curious eyes and hungry minds that flock to Medium each day. Your profile should be every bit as distinct as the stories you publish in it. But it isn’t. Today, we take the first step towards changing that.

In an effort to empower individual creators, we’ve taken what we learned from developing expressive tools for publications and brought it to everyone’s Medium profile. You…

I’ve always struggled with the way devi is portrayed in imagery or sculpture. She looked nothing like my mother. And my mother was everything like her.

The closest I come to meditating: riding this perfectly paved path, nestled between a lush grove of ancient hardwood and abandoned cliffside tracks. Feeling the steel-damped static of the road like a drunk bee trapped in my bones. The slightest whisper of a breeze caressing all of me at once, I am weightless yet connected. In control without wanting to be. My mind is quiet, asleep, hyper-aware, and at peace.

Highly recommended.