World’s Strangest

Cucumbers never grew well in the garden at my old home. But this year we broke ground for a garden in the backyard, unearthing flood plain soil that hadn’t been cultivated in decades. Add my homemade compost and a sturdy trellis, and here comes an amazing crop of foot-long cucumbers! My family loves cucumbers, but we [...]

Love french fry? You ain’t tasted nothin’ yet! Research chefs have inveted a new way of cooking fries that supposedly made them taste so much better. The secret? A little ultrasonic wave: Maxime Bilet, Johnny Zhu and the other research chefs (including Young) at our culinary lab in Belle­vue, Wash., explored a variety of techniques for [...]