Baking

That Moment You Find Rust on Your Favorite Skillet I pulled my grandmother’s 10-inch Lodge skillet out of the cabinet last spring and found a constellation of orange spots across the cooking surface. It had been pushed to the back of the shelf after Thanksgiving, unwrapped and forgotten for four months. My stomach dropped — this was a pan that had been in the family since the 1980s. Here’s what I’ve learned after restoring that skillet and roughly a dozen others since: rust on cast iron is cosmetic damage, not structural failure. The pan isn’t ruined. It isn’t even close to ruined. Cast iron is a thick slab of iron and carbon that will outlast every other piece of cookware in your kitchen by decades, as long as you don’t crack it with thermal shock or drop it on tile. Rust is just iron oxide forming on the surface, and it comes off easier than you’d expect. ...

Why 2026 Is the Year Pressure Cooking Finally Grew Up I burned my first Instant Pot meal in 2019 — a chicken tikka masala that came out gray, stringy, and tasting faintly of regret. The recipe blog I’d followed had listed “15 minutes” in the headline, conveniently ignoring the 12 minutes of pressurization and the 10-minute natural release. Total time: 37 minutes. Total satisfaction: zero. Seven years later, the pressure cooker recipe landscape looks completely different. The Instant Pot community — which now spans multiple subreddits, dedicated cookbooks from publishers like America’s Test Kitchen, and an entire generation of food creators who built their followings on one-pot meals — has collectively figured out what works and what doesn’t. The bad advice has been corrected. The liquid ratios have been dialed in. And the recipes that survive to 2026 are genuinely the ones worth making. ...