We may earn a commission from links on this page.Welcome to Cookbook of the Week. This is a series where I highlight cookbooks that are unique, easy to use, or just special to me. While finding a particular recipe online serves a quick purpose, flipping through a truly excellent cookbook has a magic all its own.Cookbooks dont really teach you how to cook. Instead they offer a collection of recipes that you (hopefully) like. If you find one, though, with recipes that serve as inspiration for adapting and modifying to create even more new recipeswell, thats a real gem. The cookbooks I find myself going back to time and again make a wee inspiration library. Sometimes I use their recipes, and sometimes I find a flavor combination or cooking method Ill get excited to use later in the week.But it is rare that a cookbook breaks down how a chef thinks about recipe creation. This week I chose Kitchen Matrix for my cookbook of the week because its unlike any other cookbook Ive seen before. Its a cookbook with major lessons on how to cook.A bit about the bookThis book comes from Mark Bittman, a legendary food journalist and author (read more about him here). Although this cookbook isnt newit was published in 2015the message is timeless: Cooking is an endless spectrum. A single recipe exists on a branch of an ingredients sprawling family tree. Ok, enough romance: let me explain.The pages of Kitchen Matrix are filled with recipes, yes, but directly following one recipe will be how to riff in three to 12 different ways. Essentially, how to make a whole new meal by swapping the main ingredient, or what you get when you change the cooking method from grilling to steaming. It reveals the connection between different dishes within a food set. For example, how only two or three ingredients separate minestrone from mushroom soup from tomato and garlic soup. The cooking method is the same; its a matter of swapping this for that. When you see it displayed in the clever way Bittman has arranged these sections, the art of cooking suddenly clicks into a clear science. Mark Bittman's Kitchen Matrix: More Than 700 Simple Recipes and Techniques to Mix and Match for Endless Possibilities: A Cookbook $28.09 at Amazon $35.00 Save $6.91 Shop Now Shop Now $28.09 at Amazon $35.00 Save $6.91 A great book for the confident cookJust because someone is a confident cook doesnt mean they cant enjoy a good cookbook. Kitchen Matrix is more like Cooking 201 versus Cooking 101. Its best for someone who already feels good about getting around the kitchen, using various cooking methods, trying out new flavors, and taking risks. Theres plenty of inspiration in this cookbook and a lot for the confident cook to get excited about.That said, many of the recipe spin-offs are written in what Ill call a recipe shorthand, while other recipes are written out in a full versionwith an ingredient list and steps underneath. For example, with the section Corn +12 ways youll get a short recipe equating to Mix this, this, and this together. Cook it until browned. Then two recipe variations underneath where only the swapped ingredients are indicated.Seasoned cooks will be able to connect the dots, while I think the missing information could be extremely confusing for many other home cooks.The recipes you can expectI like that many of the chapters are split up by main ingredients, like Meat, Vegetables, or Poultry and Eggs. Within each chapter will be a mini section dedicated to major popular items that fit in the section. For the Vegetable section you can flip to Salad Greens +12 Ways, Celery +16 Ways, or Vegan Entrees +10 Ways, among many others.This speaks to my nightly cooking habit of discovering I have six zucchini that are about to get weird, so I need a zucchini-centric meal STAT. I can simply flip to Zucchini +12 Ways and pick between raw, grilled, microwaved, or sauted and have three recipes each at the ready. Even if I had more squash than one recipe required, at least I have 11 different choices for tomorrows meals. Thats support. Its like un-creepy AI (if you can imagine). I feel like this cookbook has my back when I need it.My favorite feature of Kitchen Matrix is the Recipe Generator. There are a few of them throughout the book, and theyre double page visual diagrams of popular mealslike Sandwich Recipe Generator, Tartar Recipe Generator, Grain Salad, Eggs, Jamand they show you the components that are involved along with options so you can create your own. Prof. Bittman wants you to learn to create your own recipes. As a former teacher witnessing beautiful diagrams, I wipe a single tear from my eye. Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann The dish I made this weekI dont know if youve noticed, but its winter and hell has frozen over. Ive been in a soup mood. I flipped over to Soups and Stews, and landed on the Vegetable soups. I adore soups for all meals, and this sections matrix consisted of Creamy, Brothy, Bean, and Vegetable. I can never turn down a creamy soup, so I turned my attention there. The main recipe was for a creamy spinach soup, and underneath it were the two variations: curried cauliflower, or squash and ginger.I chose curried cauliflower. The main recipe for spinach soup had simple directions. Basically, cook the garlic and onion in water, then add the spinach and yogurt before pureing it all. The cauliflower soup instructed me to swap out a few ingredients: garlic for ginger, spinach for cauliflower, parsley for curry powder, and yogurt for coconut milk. I did just that, but using the same method from the spinach recipe.The soup was a golden-hued hug. Creamy without any cream, thick without being gloppy, and boosted with just enough spice to compliment the cauliflowers natural flavors. It was a reminder that great soup can be drop-dead simple, and as a result, I know how to make 11 other simple soups. Thats enough to get me through the winter.How to buy itKitchen Matrix is available online, as an ebook (for a bargain), and keep in mind that you can support your local brick and mortar bookstores by asking them to order it to their location if they dont have it in stock.

If you've been waiting for a good deal on an iPad with one of Apple's M-series chips, now seems like a good time to take the plunge. The M2-powered 11-inch iPad Air has dropped back down to $500. That's $100 off the regular price and just a hair above the record low of $498. Every colorway has dropped to either $549 or $559, but you'll get the full discount when you activate the clippable coupon. This deal is for the base model with 128GB of storage (double the base storage from the previous gen) and no cellular connectivity, though there is Wi-Fi 6E support. You'll get 8GB of RAM as well. We gave the M2 iPad Air, which debuted less than a year ago, a score of 91 in our review. It's our pick for the best iPad for most people. It hits the sweet spot between performance, features and price even more so considering this deal. It offers better future proofing compared with the entry-level iPad, as many features and apps only run on M-series chips and newer A-series ones. For basic tasks like web browsing and streaming video, performance shouldn't be an issue at all. The M2 iPad Air supports Apple Intelligence features, as well as demanding games like Death Stranding and the Resident Evil 4 remake. You should get about 10 hours of battery life on a single charge. There's no Face ID here, but a Touch ID fingerprint scanner is built into the power button. One other major positive is that Apple has shunted the front-facing camera to th longer side of the tablet, making FaceTime calls in landscape mode an easier proposition. The M2 iPad Air is compatible with the Apple Pencil Pro, but not the second-gen Pencil. One of our main complaints about the M2 iPad Air is that it has an LCD display with a 60Hz refresh rate. It's not as smooth or vibrant as the 120Hz OLED you'll find on the most recent iPad Pro. Still, it's a bright, sharp screen. However you slice it, the M2 iPad Air is a pretty great tablet. Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/the-11-inch-ipad-air-m2-is-back-on-sale-for-500-153619990.html?src=rss

The Switch 2 is a big boy. That was my main takeaway from Nintendos long-awaited reveal of its next portable. How could you have watched that trailer and left with any other impression? Its not like Nintendo showed much else. Sure, there was the slide about backward compatibility, but the difference in size between the two systems stood out even there. It got me thinking: How big is too big? And did Nintendo prioritize the wrong design choices?If you had been following along with all the pre-release leaks, you knew this was coming. I certainly did, but I had still hoped that the rumors of an 8-inch display were wrong. Im a relative newcomer to the Switch. My girlfriend and I split the cost of an OLED model during Black Friday 2024. Since then, its become one of my favorite ways to play games, in big part because of its portability.Nintendo/EngadgetThe Switch OLED is not as powerful as my gaming PC, but I can curl up to play games on the couch with it. Its also small enough to fit in my 15L backpack, making it great for travel. I also love the OLED screen. It makes every game look better, to the point where I can forgive some for performing poorly on the system.On paper, the Switch 2 should retain at least some of the OLED models portability, but I wonder how easy it will be to transport. Consider that if the Switch 2 ships with an 8-inch display, it will feature a bigger screen than the Steam Deck OLED. The Steam Deck is, like the Switch, a handheld, but I would argue its not portable in any true sense of the word.I once tried to pack the Steam Deck for a trip, but I gave up after I found it impossible to fit it in my duffle alongside everything else I needed to bring with me. I havent tried to travel with the Steam Deck since. Its too early to tell if the Switch 2 will suffer from the same problem and it looks relatively thin, but depending on how much it weighs, I suspect a lot of people will use it almost exclusively in their homes.Thats not inherently a bad thing, but the genius of the Switch is how it promotes co-op play. Im almost certainly in the minority here, but tablet mode is one of my favorite ways to play the Switch. On a recent flight my girlfriend and I took to Europe, the Switch was a godsend on a plane with no in-flight entertainment.I know the Switch 2 will feature a tablet mode just like its predecessor, but I wonder how many people will take advantage of that capability with a larger, heavier device? I can see it going two ways. Either the bigger screen makes that feature more attractive, or more people leave their Switch 2 at home because its cumbersome to carry around.The other big unknown here is battery life. If the Switch 2 features an 8nm chip paired with 1080p LCD as has been rumored, its very likely its battery wont last nearly as long as the Switch OLEDs. Before Nintendo released the Mariko revision of the original model and later the Switch OLED, battery life wasnt the consoles strong suit, and I suspect it wont be the Switch 2s either.There are still so many unknowns about the Switch 2, but the thing that struck me about the consoles recent reveal was that I wasnt fully convinced it would be a clear upgrade over the Switch OLED. Obviously, the Switch 2 will offer far greater performance and what looks like a much more solid set of Joy-Cons, but Im not too excited about a system that could be bigger, and feature a worse screen and battery life. If those predictions turn out to be true, Im probably sticking with my Switch OLED until Nintendo announces a Switch 2 Lite or Switch 2 OLED.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/what-if-the-nintendo-switch-2-is-too-big-150002921.html?src=rss

For February 2025, Netflix is removing over 30 movies and just two TV shows. This is everything leaving Netflix next month.

All but two of the world's biggest streamers have something new for you to watch this weekend.

Meta CEO MarkZuckerberg announced the company plans to invest around $60 to $65 billion in capital expenditure this year

SEC rescinds controversial rule in latest pro-crypto measure taken by new Trump administration.

At least 242 million children in 85 countries had their schooling interrupted last year because of heat waves, cyclones, flooding, and other extreme weather, the United Nations Childrens Fund said in a new report Friday.UNICEF said it amounted to one in seven school-going children across the world being kept out of class at some point in 2024 because of climate hazards.The report also outlined how some countries saw hundreds of their schools destroyed by weather, with low-income nations in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa hit especially hard.But other regions werent spared the extreme weather, as torrential rains and floods in Italy near the end of the year disrupted school for more than 900,000 children. Thousands had their classes halted after catastrophic flooding in Spain.While southern Europe dealt with deadly floods and Asia and Africa had flooding and cyclones, heat waves were the predominant climate hazard shuttering schools last year, UNICEF said, as the earth recorded its hottest year ever.More than 118 million children had their schooling interrupted in April alone, UNICEF said, as large parts of the Middle East and Asia, from Gaza in the west to the Philippines in the southeast, experienced a sizzling weeks-long heat wave with temperatures soaring above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).Children are more vulnerable to the impacts of weather-related crises, including stronger and more frequent heat waves, storms, droughts and flooding, UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell said in a statement. Childrens bodies are uniquely vulnerable. They heat up faster, they sweat less efficiently, and cool down more slowly than adults. Children cannot concentrate in classrooms that offer no respite from sweltering heat, and they cannot get to school if the path is flooded, or if schools are washed away.Around 74% of the children affected in 2024 were in middle- and low-income countries, showing how climatic extremes continue to have a devastating impact in the poorest countries. Flooding ruined more than 400 schools in Pakistan in April. Afghanistan had heat waves followed by severe flooding that destroyed over 110 schools in May, UNICEF said.Months of drought in southern Africa exacerbated by the El Nio weather phenomenon threatened the schooling and futures of millions of children.And the crises showed little sign of abating. The poor French territory of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean off Africa was left in ruins by Cyclone Chido in December and hit again by Tropical Storm Dikeledi this month, leaving children across the islands out of school for six weeks.Cyclone Chido also destroyed more than 330 schools and three regional education departments in Mozambique on the African mainland, where access to education is already a deep problem.UNICEF said the worlds schools and education systems are largely ill-equipped to deal with the effects of extreme weather.AP climate and environment news: https://apnews.com/climate-and-environmentGerald Imray, Associated Press

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced last month that automatic payments are being sent to roughly one million taxpayers who did not claim the 2021 Recovery Rebate Credit on their tax returns.These payments, according to the IRS, were expected to be disbursed throughout December and arrive by late January 2025 in most cases, meaning most eligible recipients should receive them by this week or next at the latest.Why are these payments being sent out?The Recovery Rebate Credit was created to provide financial support during the COVID-19 pandemic for individuals who missed or did not receive the full amount of their Economic Impact Payments, commonly known as stimulus checks.While most eligible taxpayers have already claimed their credits, IRS officials identified a significant group that overlooked this benefit.Looking at our internal data, we realized that one million taxpayers overlooked claiming this complex credit when they were actually eligible, Danny Werfel, commissioner of the IRS, said in a statement in December. To minimize headaches and get this money to eligible taxpayers, were making these payments automatic, meaning these people will not be required to go through the extensive process of filing an amended return to receive it.How are these payments being disbursed?The payments, which can reach up to $1,400 per individual, will be sent via direct deposit or as a paper check to the address or bank account listed on the recipients 2023 tax return. Those receiving payments will also be notified by letter. If a taxpayers bank account has changed, the funds will be reissued as a check to the updated address on file.Am I eligible for a payment?In total, the IRS estimates approximately $2.4 billion will be distributed through these final payments. Taxpayers who did not file a 2021 return but believe they are eligible have until April 15, 2025, to submit a return and claim the credit.The IRS encourages taxpayers to confirm their eligibility using online resources or by reviewing the credit guidelines on the IRS website.Importantly, if you are eligible for a payment and filed a 2021 return, you dont not have to do anything. The payments are automatic.The agency has also committed to further outreach during the 2025 tax season to ensure individuals understand other available benefits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and other pandemic-related tax relief.This final round of payments closes the chapter on pandemic stimulus measures, offering a last opportunity for eligible individuals to access unclaimed financial support.

Switzerland-based designer Ini Archibong has created a dimpled-glass gin bottle for musicians Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg's spirits company Gin & Juice, following the brand's launch in 2024.For the Still G.I.N. bottle, California-born Archibong was informed by references such as 90's West Coast hip-hop culture and the "old world elegance" of Murano, Italy where the designer has worked extensively with glass blowers.Ini Archibong has designed a glass gin bottle for Gin & JuiceThe bottle features a short silhouette made of glossy black glass with a "honeycomb" texture covering its entirety. A brushed gold cork cap tops the bottle, while its label is encapsulated in a debossed oval.Archibong pulled from a host of eras for its design, from the low-riders and diamond-stiched leather of 90s West Coast street style to the old-world culture of Murano glassmaking, which was concentrated into law on the Venetian island in 1291.Read: Sabine Marcelis and Ini Archibong among designers to collaborate with Japanese artisans"There was an attempt to combine things that were considered classic and beautiful in general and then take it through that 90s era of what would be considered 'high-end baller'," Archibong told Dezeen."Making the bottle in Venice added another element to it the old-world elegance. Imagining somebody from that era, what kind of bottle would they have on their shelf?"The design was informed by Dr Dre's music productionUltimately, Archibong designed the bottle to encapsulate Dr Dre's style,partly to complementa more punchy premixed drink that the designer previously created,representative of Snoop Dogg.The Gin & Juice can has a "happy-go-lucky" spirit, according to Archibong, while the Still G.I.N bottle was informed by the refinement of Dr Dre's musical production."There's an attempt to try to translate some of the intangibles of the art that Dr Dre makes into an object," said Archibong."It's part of the reason that I took the route of sampling different eras and then pulling them together into a refined, finished piece, similar to how Dr Dre would put together a production."It features a dimpled exterior and brushed gold topThe launch of the gin bottle also coincides with Archibong being named creative director for Gin & Juice, where he'll oversee graphic identity, design language, future packaging concepts and visual presentation for the brand.Other bottles created by designers for spirit companies include a collection of sculpturalbottles by Thomas Heatherwick for gin brand Bombay Sapphire and "brain" cases by Philippe Starck for Mortlach whiskey.The photography is courtesy of Gin & JuiceThe post Ini Archibong designs gin bottle for Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre appeared first on Dezeen.