episode 20: cookie cutters, butter beans, and 2024 food trends

in the last newsletter of the year, we talk Ins and Outs of 2024, hi-chews, glamorous butter beans, and more!

and that’s a WRAP on 2023! I started this newsletter in January of this year and have thoroughly enjoyed learning and growing while writing about silly little food news. thank you all for reading and supporting - and I hope you have enjoyed this as much as I have, and i’m so grateful to have this space. yay!

I hope this episode can entertain you on your long drive to celebrate the holidays with your loved ones, or as an escape when your family starts rehashing the same arguments as last year, lol. happy new year, friends <3

2024: In and Out

last year the In and Out trend took the internet by storm, with everyone declaring the trends that are done and the trends they predict to stay. so, here is my 2024 trends list for food. some of the Ins and Outs are parallels, and some are completely unrelated. enjoy!

what do y’all think? I am open to edits and additions and fights in the comments :)

graveyard to 2023 ⚰️

because I have the memory of a squirrel, I’ve forgotten about many of the food trends and internet moments of the year, despite writing about it since January, lol. Bon Appetit did a nice little 2023 timeline of all the internet’s food trends this year. remember the green M&M from January? the advent of #WaterTok starting everyone’s hydration journey - or the summer of Grimace? take a little look down memory lane here.

Best Of 2023 🙌

looking back, I had such a great year of eating in this city! I compiled a list of my favorite eats of each month in DC. grateful to have had a ton of great meals while I traveled, but we’re stickin’ to the hometown here. see below for the list!

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sugar money 🍭

yet another story about price increases and climate change :( extreme weather in India and Thailand with high heat and lack of rain has weakened this season’s harvest of sugar. low supply means that retail prices for sugar and other sweets are set to increase almost 6% in the next year. you can read more here.

glow up of butter beans 🫘

move over chickpeas, its time for butter beans! she’s the new “it” bean! a new trend of interest in butter beans, also called lima beans, is growing. influencers are using these beans in a variety of ways, as a pasta substitute, a crispy topping, or the star of a main dish. you may remember lima beans as boring frozen beans if you grew up in northern states, but maybe you liked them better if you’re from the south, where they are prepared fresh. butter beans seem to have gotten more popular after the pandemic, when people were turning to different ingredients — aided by content of vegan influencers. they’re not as tough as chickpeas but not as soft as cannellini beans, and like many other legumes, they’re cheap! you can read more in this butter bean love letter here.

cookie cutter fortune teller 🍪

move over pollsters - a new fortune teller is in town, its the cookie cutter man! turns out, cookie cutter sales, particularly from the Ann Clark Cookie Cutter company, are a pretty accurate predictor of upcoming trends. cookie cutters are quite easy to make, so the company makes a huge variety of shapes and throws them into the market to see what sells. the company can then respond really quickly to making more of the top sellers in different shapes - for example, the llama was a huge hit in 2019, the mason jar in 2015, and this past year the gnome was a top seller - perhaps due to the cottage core trend. the shapes are determined by idea submission by employees, though not all get made - such as a surgical mask during Covid or a pistol shape that were both vetoed. so what’s coming in 2024? read more of this gem of a piece from Priya Krishna, here.

your favorite foods actually are less tasty ☹️

turns out that giant food manufacturers are gaslighting us - fun! many of us have recently eaten the processed foods of our childhood, like a Ritz cracker or a Twix, and discovered that they taste so different than what we remember. is it just a rosy recollection of our childhood? actually no - the quality of these products has actually, materially, declined.

in a phenomenon called “skimpflation,” as prices have gone up, manufacturers have changed recipes to cut costs and keep profit margins up. for example, Breyer’s reduced the amount of dairy fat in its ice cream by so much, it defied the legal requirements to be called ice cream - they had to relabel it to “frozen dairy desserts.” this practice has become more common, investigated by journalists at the Guardian who compiled a whole list of companies reducing amounts of key ingredients in products. this is a calculated decision, which is explained more in this Business Insider article, but essentially, manufacturers do this because customers notice a price increase much easier than a 10% reduction in the flavor of a product. so, they make these products worse instead of making them more expensive.

blooming chocolate 🍫

have you ever opened a chocolate bar to find little white marks on it? no, its not mold, its called chocolate bloom - and yes, its totally safe to eat. there’s two types of chocolate bloom, sugar bloom and fat bloom. sugar bloom occurs when the chocolate comes into contact with moisture, which draws the sugar to the surface. fat bloom occurs when chocolate melts and the fat re-solidifies in an unstable form on the surface. overall the chocolate is still safe to eat, but bloom can impact the flavor, making it waxy, crumbly, or grainy. you can avoid bloom by storing your chocolate properly wrapped in a cool, dark, and dry place, like a cabinet, not the fridge. you can read more about bloom here.

hi-chew origin story 🍬

we love a hi-chew! interestingly, this candy came about because of the social taboo in Japan of removing food from your mouth in public. this was, and is, considered a social taboo, such as taking gum out of your mouth and throwing it in the trash. when the flavor of your gum ran out, you had to throw it away in private, or simply keep it in your mouth until you were finished. so, Taichiro Morinaga, the founder of the candy, went to America in 1888 to learn about candy making. he then made a chewy candy packed with flavor that would dissolve in your mouth - and you would never have to throw it away. this was revolutionary candy, and got popularized in Japan in 1918. yum!

end of the year, end of this aditieats aditibops 🎶

and that’s a wrap on the 2023 playlist! if you want over 25 hours of every song i’ve ever put on my instagram story, this is for you.

okay so my mom was right 🍪

my mom never let me eat cookie dough as a kid, which was sad and made me jealous of the other kids. but of course, moms are always right - raw cookie dough can definitely make you sick. this is because the dough contains uncooked eggs and flour, both of which can carry salmonella and/or E. Coli, which are killed when you bake the dough. if you want your cookie dough fix without the bacteria, you’ll need to make cookie dough by pre-heat-treating the flour in the microwave and either using pasteurized eggs or omitting the eggs altogether.

my favorite glassware, if you even care 🍸

half the reason I order a cocktail is the hope that it will be served in the cutest glass ever. the Nick and Nora glass is the superior glass for cocktails that aren’t served with ice. it’s like if a coupe and a martini and a red wine glass had a baby - it has a long stem for holding, but the mouth isn’t too wide like a martini glass where the liquid can spill, but its deep enough to hold a drink’s worth of liquid. this glass has a cool origin story; in the 1930s film The Thin Man, based off of the book, the characters named Nick and Nora Charles were seen drinking from a long-stemmed glass. the famous bartender Dale DeGroff liked them so much, he brought them back to his bar in the 1980s. now someone buy me one!!

f*cked up food

mmmmmm, festive…..

restaurant review: tonari’s dessert bar 🍰

I know i’ve gushed about Tonari before, but I have a new thing to spotlight: the Tonari Dessert Bar experience! I got to do this for my birthday this year and it was so fun. at the restaurant’s “Hole in the Wall Dessert Bar” Chef Mary Mendoza, the pastry chef, made an 8-course cocktails and dessert menu 6 guests at a time. it was so cool, it was enough creative delicious food to make you feel full but not stuffed, all while trying new and creative desserts. I loved the soufflé pancake with butter ice cream and the yuzu welcome drink, and of course their famous white chocolate rice pudding. the menu changes every few months, too. so cool!

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dc happenings

• new bartender-owned bar Snappys opened

• Purple Patch’s new burger spot, JOIA Burger taking over Taqueria Nacional space

• Fresh Baguette coming to Cleveland Park

• Fancy Radish chef going over to DC Vegan

• Kevin Tien’s team opened Doki Doki Sushi in Chevy Chase

• Bar Del Monte opening in Mt. Pleasant

• Pursuit Wine Bar on H St closing

• Seven Reasons opened in City Center

• Treehouse Rooftop Lounge opened in Union Market area

• Dos Toros taqueria opened in Dupont

• Chopsmith lunch spot opened in NoMa

• Andy’s Pizza opened in Western Market

• new bagel spot in old Bethesda Bagel space?

• Mah-Ze-Dahr bakery closed in Navy Yard

• new Greek restaurant Balos opened in Dupont

• new Osteria Mozza opened in old Dean and Deluca space in Georgetown

• Right Proper opening new location in Eckington

• Sticky Fingers location in Columbia Heights closing, reopening in Tacoma

• Reverie reopening in Georgetown from Chef Spero

• a panaderia is opening in the LJ Diner space

• Union Kitchen in Shaw closing

• Oh! Naan kitchen opening in Logan Circle

• DC Harvest closed on H St

home cooking: salmon 🍣

I grew up in a vegetarian household, which had really instilled in me a fear of touching raw meat. I am terrified of buying meat or fish at the butcher (interacting with someone at the grocery store? huh) but also i’m just scared of cooking it incorrectly. but, we are growing! and despite my lack of owning an air fryer, I am finally, years late, discovering how easy and tasty frozen salmon is! (ok aditi its not 2016!) anyways, I made this salmon cucumber salad in my cleaning-out-the-fridge mode and it was solid, just needed some more acid and spice. if you have other go-to salmon recipes, send them over!

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happy new year everyone! <3