Food news antipasto

As we gear up for the biggest food holiday in the US, people are finalizing their big Thanksgiving Day feast. Although everyone wants the meal to be amazing and delicious, sometimes things don’t go as planned. We’ve all had cooking mishaps, and often these turn into memorable events that get discussed for years afterward. My husband still loves to regale friends with the story of the time I singed my eyebrows making steak Diane. The Washington Post’s Emily Heil has collected a number of hilarious holiday cooking disasters that will have you chuckling and feeling a little better about your own missteps in the kitchen.

Aleppo pepper has found a much larger audience in the past few years as people discovered the fruity and tart nuances of the dried pepper flakes popular in Turkish, Syrian, Armenian, and other Middle Eastern cuisines. Over at Serious Eats, Yasmine Maggio provides an in-depth look at this spice, diving into its rich history and exploring the myriad ways it can improve your cooking.

Until recently, historians believed that humans began cooking in earnest about 170,000 years ago. Most anthropologists believe that cooking paved the way for accelerated human development because making food easier to chew and digest contributed to humans’ ability to survive and expand throughout the world. A new study turns this conventional wisdom on its head, positing that humans may have started cooking some 780,000 years ago, based on examinations of a site near the banks of the Jordan river.

You may have heard about the new black comedy called The Menu which opened this week, in which Ralph Fiennes plays a chef who prepares a lavish tasting menu at a remote location where guests are served with not only food but some shocking surprises as well. We’ve learned that the fabulous-looking food in the show was designed by Michelin-starred San Francisco chef Dominique Crenn. Director Mark Mylod was apparently inspired by Crenn’s appearance on the Netflix series Chef’s Table, so he asked her not only to create the food for the film, but also to coach the actors on how to inhabit the fictional kitchen to make it resemble an actual high-end restaurant.

Food lovers tend to wax poetic about cooking, and to create dishes that are as much a feast for the eyes as the palate. “It looks too pretty to eat” is a refrain you might hear about an eye-catching presentation, and people often talk about food as art. That notion can be dangerous, says food writer Virginia Hartley. She believes that this concept has the potential to damage people’s relationship with food and lead to unhealthy behavior.