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CNET
5 days ago
- General
- CNET
Your Kitchen Is the Hottest Room in the House. Here's How to Keep It Cool During a Heat Wave
We're barely into June, but July-like weather has descended on parts of the country, including the Northeast, where 90-plus temperatures are expected. But you've still got to eat -- and cook -- which means hot kitchens that can cause a domino effect, raising the temperature in the entire home. Read more: Best Foods for Staying Hydrated During Hot Weather Using appliances that don't produce as much heat and planning your meals so that cooking doesn't coincide with the hottest part of the day are just a few ways to save your air conditioning bill from spiking and your family from an uncomfortable climate. Here are 9 ways to keep your kitchen cool during a heat wave this summer. 1. Prepare food instead of cooking Ceviche requires no cooking. It just might be the perfect summer food. CNET Don't want to heat up your kitchen? Don't cook. That doesn't mean you can't eat. Focus on no-cook, fresh foods, such as summer salads, ceviche, smoothies and cold noodles. Even slicing up fresh fruit or vegetables like cucumbers and melons can be a refreshing and healthy summer treat. No-cook foods help beat the heat in two ways: By not heating up your kitchen -- or your body -- as you consume them. When you do cook, limit your time in the kitchen with a helpful meal kit (these are the best meal kits for 2025). You'll likely still have to cook the food, you'll do far less prep and spending less time in a sweltering kitchen is definitely a good thing. Most services offer lighter, no-cook meals during the summer, too. Essential gear for food prep 2. Use your exhaust fan An exhaust fan above the stovetop is never more useful than during hot summer days. KitchenAid If you're going to use your oven, make sure the exhaust fan is on full tilt whenever you do. Most people associate exhaust systems with limiting smoke, but these above-oven fans suck up a ton of heat too. 3. Cook outside with a grill or pizza oven Home pizza ovens are on a tear and present an excellent alternative to hot indoor cooking. CNET Take the heat out of the kitchen by cooking outdoors this summer. BBQ grilled chicken or steaks are classics for the grill but don't forget you can grill summer favorites like corn on the cob or watermelon too. You might be hot while you're outside using a grill or smoker to heat foods, but your kitchen can stay cool. Essential gear for grilling and outdoor cooking, all tested and reviewed. 4. Use an air fryer or Instant Pot Slow cookers give off far less heat than an oven. CNET Minimizing use of the oven and stove can help you avoid heating up your kitchen. Small appliances can cook your food just as well while emitting less heat than large appliances. Try using an air fryer instead of your wall oven, or a panini press instead of the stovetop. You'd be surprised how versatile small appliances can be. Your slow cooker and Instant Pot aren't just for winter soups and stews, either. Think of summer recipes you can achieve on your countertop, like Instant Pot pork carnitas. Don't turn your nose up at your microwave, which can zap rice, quinoa, vegetables and more while generating practically no heat. Kitchen appliances that keep your wall oven off 5. Meal prep ahead of hot days Some Instant Pots double as air fryers. Instant Pot If you're going to heat up your kitchen, make it worth it. If you do end up using your oven or stovetop, make larger quantities than normal. That way, you can use precooked leftovers, which means you have food ready to go without heating up your kitchen again. With the right kitchen appliances, you can batch cook and keep the oven off. For example, make a whole bunch of pulled chicken in your Instant Pot (which gives off very little heat). Then you can use the leftovers to make tacos, chicken salad nachos and other meals that don't require firing up your oven. Best gear for batch cooking 6. Cook during cooler hours If you're going to cook, try to do it when it's cooler out. CNET Cooking in your kitchen when it's already hot outside (and maybe already hot in your home) means you'll only add to the heat. Plan ahead and strategize your cooking times for when it's not as hot. The best time to cook to avoid the heat is in the morning or later in the evening. That might appear easier said than done, but you could bake bread in the morning, or cook proteins and pasta dishes while you're making breakfast or an early lunch so they'll be ready to go for dinner. More cool kitchen tips 7. Add some fans to the mix We're big fans of air circulation during the summer. Amazon Airflow can help cool down your kitchen. If you're using your stove, turn on the range hood vent. It's there to remove not just grease, fumes and odors but smoke, heat and steam that could get trapped and heat up your kitchen while you're cooking. Plus, you can keep a fan on in the kitchen to move air around and cool it down. You can also position your fan to move hot air out, or bring cold air in with a cool, wet towel. We're a fan of these 8. Limit bright lights Let there be (less) light. Getty/MirageC Sunlight and even artificial interior light can generate heat, and when you're in the heat of summer, every degree counts. Dim the lights, shut any curtains, close your blinds and limit how many lights you turn on. You don't need to work in the dark but be wary of turning on lots of overhead lights. Smart lights for a kitchen glow-up Testing gas grills at the CNET Smart Home Testing gas grills at the CNET Smart Home Click to unmute Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Skip Backward Skip Forward Next playlist item Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration 2:07 Loaded : 28.04% 0:00 Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 2:07 Share Fullscreen This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Text Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Caption Area Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Drop shadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Close Modal Dialog This is a modal window. This modal can be closed by pressing the Escape key or activating the close button. Close Modal Dialog This is a modal window. This modal can be closed by pressing the Escape key or activating the close button. Testing gas grills at the CNET Smart Home 9. Keep yourself hydrated Water, water everywhere. Aarke This strategy won't lower the actual temperature in your kitchen but it will make the heat more bearable. Hydration is the no. 1 rule for most summer activities, and cooking outdoors or in a warm kitchen is no exception. Drink lots of water -- it's recommended to drink between 11 and 15 cups per day -- and sip even more than you think you should when the mercury rises. Want to punch it up a bit? Try water infusions for more flavor and refreshment. Planning to sweat? Add sea salt and lemon to boost electrolytes and flavor. Hot tips to stay hydrated
RNZ News
22-05-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Will your My Food Bag investment ever recover?
My Food Bag has reported a 5 percent profit increase in the most recent full year, but shareholders could be waiting a while for shares to return to their initial list price. Photo: RNZ My Food Bag has reported a positive year in its latest update, but shareholders are being told they could have a long wait ahead of them for shares to return to their initial list price. My Food Bag listed on the NZX in 2021, in what it said at the time would be the largest IPO by amount raised since 2014. Shares were issued at $1.85 each, including to many customers. But the price dropped in initial trading and has largely continued to decline from there. Shares were trading for 20c on Thursday afternoon, after chief executive Mark Winter told the market it had lifted its profit 5 percent in the most recent full year. Greg Smith, head of retail at Devon Funds, said the prospect of the share price recovering to anything like its list price was "incredibly remote". "It was a classic private equity exit, which has seen a lot of retail investors lose out. The stock was floated in peak conditions, as lockdowns were in force, and the idea of everyone ordering meal kits on a regular basis reinforcing the hype. The firm actually did deliver on its prospectus forecasts in the early days, but many investors extrapolated a situation that as we know now was only ephemeral," he said. The bulk of the shares sold came from private equity firm Waterman Capital, with smaller parcels from founding shareholders Cecilia and James Robinson and Theresa Gattung. "At under three times earnings (EBITDA) the stock seems very cheap, however investor confidence is pretty shot, and the question is how does the company deliver a sustainable earnings growth path? "Consumer spending pressures will ease at some point, but it has tried to expand overseas and that didn't work, competition in NZ has also intensified. As management also notes they have 'right sized' the business so it would be hard to see the shares ever getting back to former glories." Jeremy Sullivan, an investment adviser at Hamilton Hindin Greene, agreed it would be tough. "Never say never, although it's a long way off. There's no doubt that a lot has happened since they listed, including Covid, high food price inflation and rising interest rates. These factors have certainly hampered demand. "However, with rates starting to fall and people beginning to feel the pressure come off, things might start to turn around for the company, [Thursday's] announcement is an encouraging sign in that direction." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
WIRED
18-05-2025
- General
- WIRED
Are Meal Kits Cheaper than Groceries in 2025? We Break It Down
All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Despite all appearances, meal kit companies don't really sell food. What meal kits offer, instead, is logistics. Photograph: Getty Images A single meal kit box at your doorstep from HelloFresh (7/10, WIRED Recommends) or Marley Spoon (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is a convergence of growers and purveyors and saucemakers from all over the country and globe, with each ingredient portioned individually and kitted out to suit your weekly culinary whims. The one-sheet recipes that arrive with each box, detailing how to make scratch ramen or mushroom Dijon chicken, are far less complicated than the process that got those ingredients to your door. A meal kit is a wonder of modern technology, convenience, and maybe global capitalism. Spalding Gray might pray over it. This, as much as anything, is why WIRED devotes so much coverage to meal kits—and why I keep reviewing so many of them. Photograph: Matthew Korfhage The standard knock, of course, is that meal kits are expensive: anywhere from $7 to $14 a portion, less than a restaurant meal but more than most food budgets. So I set an experiment for myself. Armed only with meal kit recipe cards, I went to my local grocery store to see if I could make the meals for less. Reader, it wasn't easy. In fact, I mostly failed. For the sake of science, I bought everything at the store that the meal kit provided in the box, including rice or 'Italian herb seasoning,' even if I otherwise already had it at home—but tried to buy it in as small a portion as I could. Where quality was credibly equivalent to the meal kit, I bought the lowest-cost option. Portions were for two, not for a family. And I only went to one store for each meal, meaning if I had to improvise substitutes to make the meal happen, that's what I did. No one's going to three stores for a Tuesday dinner, and so I did what people do when they're shopping for themselves on a weeknight: I bought what was there. My conclusion, not to spoil the ending, is that the real bonus offered by a meal kit is sauces, spices, and flavors, doled out in small portions rather than large jars. You can maybe buy a steak for less, even at an all-organic butcher, but you won't get your cream-cheese sauce with roasted red peppers, the Parmesan cheese for your rice, and the herbs you rub your meat with. Aside from time savings, it turns out that what a meal kit does best is serve up single- or double-serve flavor at relatively low cost compared with procuring it yourself. When trying to replicate meal kit sauces and spices at a grocery store, I ended up spending a lot more—though of course I then also had multitudinous condiments left over for future meals. Which is to say: You can, of course, eat much more cheaply than a $12 kit meal. But you can't easily eat these exact things this cheaply, unless you already own the right spices and bulk ingredients. Here's my experience trying. Seared Salmon & Cumin Sichuan Glaze (Blue Apron) Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Ingredients: 2 boneless, center-cut pork chops or 2 skin-on salmon fillets; 1 cup long-grain white rice; 4 cloves garlic; 2 tbsp vegetarian ponzu sauce, 4 tbsp soy glaze, 6 tbsp cumin-Sichuan peppercorn sauce, 12 oz carrots, 4 scallions, 2 tsp black and white sesame seeds Blue Apron price: $25 for two servings, including shipping Grocery store price: $39, mostly condiments and spices Buying for an Asian-influenced recipe at a chain supermarket in my mostly blue-collar neighborhood is perhaps a difficult test. But the nearest Asian-owned supermarket is a half-hour away from home, and it's already late on a weekday. Life prevails. Alas, the supermarket's diminutive Asian foods section contains nothing that answers to the description of soy glaze, nor Sichuan peppercorn sauce, with no black sesame seeds to boot. Photograph: Matthew Korfhage It'll be an improvised day. I bought sweet soy sauce and rice vinegar separately to make my own glaze, combined with sugar and corn starch from home. The Sichuan peppercorn sauce will be concocted at home from a mix of Lao Gan Ma chili crisp ($14) and a citric Olokoi sauce from Palau ($13), previously unknown to me, plus my own cumin. It'll be an experiment, to say the least. But just to get here, I've already shot most of my budget: I'm down more than $20 in condiments alone. And sesame seeds add $4 more to the total. Ponzu sauce for the carrots is another $5. Even worse, the only salmon for sale with the butcher counter closed is a $50 whole side of salmon—leaving me to sub in some pretty inexpensive pork chops instead, five chops for a mere $5. In the end, I spent a mere $10 on meat and vegetables and rice. The other $30 or so is sauces and spices. Mixing the sauce at home, I realize that the Olokoi is a lovely and tangy sauce well suited to meats, but it actually has serrano pepper, not Sichuan pepper. And so I also throw in a spoonful of my own mushroom-umami Fly By Jing Sichuan Chili Crisp ($15). My self-mixed soy glaze and Sichuan sauce turn out delicious, by the time I'm done tasting and blending. But lord, is it $25 worth of delicious? Maybe if I make it five more times. I've got half a condiment aisle in my fridge as leftovers, alongside three bonus pork chops. I might actually like my sauce better. But on the cost front, victory belongs to Blue Apron. Just for fun, I also shopped online through Instacart and Amazon: Whatever way I sliced it, buying salmon this time, I couldn't get the ingredients for much below $40. Ranch Steaks With Creamy Red Pepper Sauce (Green Chef) Photograph: Matthew Korfhage : Half-cup jasmine rice, umami stock concentrate, 6 oz broccoli, garlic bulb, 1 scallion, two 5-oz bavette steaks, 1 tbsp Italian seasoning, two oz roasted red peppers, 1 oz cream cheese, 2 oz peas, ¾ oz Parmesan cheese Green Chef price: $27.66 for two Grocery store price: $43 with a lot of extra red peppers, cheese, and peas Green Chef is the organic-focused imprint of German-founded meal kit giant HelloFresh, and so most items are organic unless stated otherwise. I figured the equivalent would be the local organic-focused supermarket, and so off I went to the nice butcher counter, the one with grass-fed steaks. It's funny, though: Again, the meat was a mere fraction of the meal cost. Bavette steaks were nowhere to be found in the butcher case, but I pulled a 12-ounce grass-fed top sirloin, ready to be butterflied into two fillets, for less than $14. I spent nearly as much, a little more than $10, on the cream cheese and roasted red peppers and garlic I'd eventually use as a sauce. A small container of Jasmine rice was another $5, and so were some frozen peas, and here we were already over budget before I even got to the shredded Parmesan cheese. (I was a bit early in the season to buy shelling peas by the pound.) Even if I'd bought cheaper steaks and produce at a different store, I would have had a hard time getting below $14 a serving. Victory to the meal kit, yet again. Garlic Rosemary Pork Chops (EveryPlate) Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Ingredients: 9 oz carrots, ¼ oz rosemary, 2 cloves garlic, 1 zucchini, 1 red onion, two 5-oz pork chops, 1 packet chicken stock concentrate EveryPlate price: $14 for two, including shipping Grocery store price: $16 (but doable for $13 on a better day) Here's the paradox of the meal kit world: The budget meal kits are actually easier to beat on cost. Why? Because budget meal kits tend to be built on simpler flavors—a single herb or sauce or spice. And sauces and spices are usually what make the recipes expensive, if you're trying to buy from scratch at a grocery store. EveryPlate, the budget plan from HelloFresh, is fairly friendly on the budget: a mere $6 or $7 a serving, including shipping. This is true even though the garlic rosemary pork chop, with a carrot and zucchini and onion side, remains a hearty meal—one I enjoyed while testing the meal kit. But it's simple. The pork chops are $5 total, for five chops. The veggies and garlic added less than $4 more. Chicken broth, used for making pan sauce, was a buck and some change. What's left is rosemary, a spice that many, many people already have in their kitchen, or maybe even growing like an angry weed in their backyard. (My rosemary plant, quite frankly, could feed an Italian army.) But by weird chance, fresh $2 rosemary sprigs were out of stock at the store, so I had to buy a full shaker of dried rosemary for $5 to prep the recipe. On a better day, Kroger would have edged out EveryPlate by a buck, with three pork chops to spare. We'll call it a tie, but advantage on normal days would go to the grocery store. Martha's Best Creamy Mushroom Chicken (Marley Spoon) Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Ingredients: 2 potatoes; 5 oz baby spinach; 4 oz mushrooms; 1 lemon; 12-oz pkg boneless, skinless chicken breasts; ¼ oz paprika; 1 packet chicken broth concentrate; 1 oz cream cheese; one bulb garlic; ¼ oz Dijon mustard. Marley Spoon price: $27.60 for two Grocery store price: $29.57 This Hungarian-influenced recipe was one of my favorites from the Martha Stewart–endorsed Marley Spoon meal kit, a rich mix of cream and Dijon and mushroom over paprika-rubbed chicken breast that recalled the simple, middle-European food I'd grown up with as a child. It's a complex plate, with layers of savor and acid balance. But most of the flavor comes from the macro-ingredients themselves: chicken, mushroom, lemon, spinach, potato. And so again, we came out pretty close to a dead heat on price. About half the cost of the meal came from buying paprika (a spice I always keep in abundance at home), cream cheese, and a jar of Dijon mustard. Also, fresh chicken is unusually expensive per pound, in these days of avian flu. But for the most part, we're close enough to consider Marley Spoon and the grocery store pretty much tied on price. The difference is, I had to go to the grocery store. Lessons Learned The lesson to be drawn here is not, of course, that meal kits are cheaper than home cooking. They clearly aren't, when I cook the way most people cook at home. On a regular grocery week, I might buy a few items with a specific recipe in mind. But what I more often do is get attracted by the ingredients themselves, pulled along also by the dull undertow of routine. Again and again, here I am with this same old chicken breast, those perennial noodles, the onions and cabbage and carrots and peppers. The spark, or fun, each week usually comes from whatever seasonal thing the farmers market has on offer. Mealtime is an all-too-familiar improvisation, based on whatever's in the fridge. The game is to use all of it. What a meal kit offers, especially when ordered just a few meals a week, is an easy break from my own tired rituals without resorting to more expensive, often less satisfying takeout or a more time-consuming cookbook recipe. And as everyone with a fancy cookbook knows, a complicated recipe—with ingredients and spices and sauces not otherwise in your larder—can sometimes cost as much as a night out on the town. Photograph: Matthew Korfhage The main takeaway from this meal kit grocery comparison, I guess, is that meal kits are better than expected at keeping costs down—whether through economies of scale or carefully managed logistics. Most of the large meal kit companies seem able to portion out a two-person meal for the same price, or even significantly less, than you'd pay trying to DIY a new recipe at the grocery store. This is a surprising, maybe even impressive result—though it doesn't take into account all the leftovers I had from my grocery excursions, and the new cornucopia of condiments now in my fridge and shelves after buying too much cream cheese or chili crisp. (As if too much chili crisp were ever possible.) But if you want to get your money's worth from a meal kit, the lesson goes, order the meals you're least likely to make for yourself. What a meal kit offers is the ability to try out a new recipe, a new set of spices, a new set of ingredients, at the same price or sometimes less than it would have cost to experiment in the aisles of a Trader Joe's. The more complex or spice-filled the recipe, and the more sauce packets they send—really, the more ingredients on the list overall—the more likely it is you're actually saving money versus your own hypothetical attempts. Adventure, it turns out, is cheap at twice the price.
WIRED
10-05-2025
- Health
- WIRED
Green Chef Has the Tastiest Gluten-Free Recipes I've Made From a Meal Kit
Gluten-free cuisine has a deservedly bad reputation. This is not because wheat has a monopoly on good taste: Entire countries and cultures would disagree. Rather, it's that cooks far too often make things that desperately need gluten to be what they are: pancakes and waffles, say, or Southern fried chicken. Or, lord help us, pizza. And so every time I've tried out gluten-free plates among the many meal kits I've reviewed, it's been with a little bit of fear—lest I find myself endlessly chewing a tapioca pancake, or breaking my own heart over a tray of limp zoodles. Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Which is all a prelude to say: The gluten-free meals from HelloFresh's organic meal-kit brand Green Chef were a hell of a nice surprise. More than half of Green Chef's recipes are gluten-free, a quality that the brand attests with hearty, full-throated validation from the Seattle-based Gluten Intolerance Group, which offers certification for gluten-free ingredients and restaurants. More on that validation and what it means, in a bit. But first, I'll say that among a week's worth of gluten-free meals from Green Chef, I didn't miss the gluten. I didn't miss it, because aside from a swap of gluten-free amino sauce (here's one popular brand) in lieu of a little soy sauce, none of the meals would or should have had gluten in them anyway. Rather than make pale imitations of gluteny things, Green Chef's meals were dishes that never needed wheat in the first place. This might include a kale and quinoa grilled chicken bowl with North African spice, steaks in red pepper sauce with green peas and rice, or a rice bowl topped with cabbage and honey ginger shrimp. Each was a fully realized and appetizing meal, which took between a half hour and an hour for me to prepare after receiving a box of ingredients and recipe cards from Green Chef in the mail. None felt like an ingredient was missing. Here's how Green Chef works. Organic, Hearty, Quite Often Gluten-Free Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Founded in Boulder, Colorado, Green Chef was once a competitor to HelloFresh (7/10, WIRED Review), the German-founded meal-kit brand that has helped establish meal kits as a successful business model in dozens of countries. When HelloFresh snapped up Green Chef in 2018, the meal-kit titan positioned Green Chef as its organic alternative: Green Chef advertises that all of its produce and eggs are organic, unless specified otherwise. (The meat is currently the same meat, mostly, used by HelloFresh's other brands, mostly higher-end commodity cuts from legacy American purveyors and producers.)
