The Pasta Bowl I Use for Pretty Much Everything

January 24, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

Your weekly dispatch from the ‘Add to Cart’ newsletter

This post originally appeared on January 22, 2019, in Add to Cart — the weekly newsletter for people who love shopping (almost) as much as they love eating. Subscribe now.

If you know what you’re in the market for, shopping can be an intense experience. You can sift through reams of reviews from fellow shoppers or rigorous assessments from review sites, or scroll through roundups of products organized by top brands or affordability or any number of other factors. On the hunt for the very best, you can knock yourself out (and probably feel a little knocked out too).

But here’s the thing: Sometimes, you don’t know what you want. I added these Crate & Barrel pasta bowls to my wedding registry spontaneously — mainly because they matched the plates and smaller bowls I already had on there. When they arrived, my partner scoffed: They were way bigger than I’d realized — honestly, kind of enormous — and we assumed we’d have no use for them. We don’t even make pasta that much. We almost sent them back.

Turns out they’re our favorite dishes. Falling somewhere between a bowl and a plate, they’re the perfect vessel for weeknight dinners, like stew or a robust salad or really any lazily yet lovingly slopped-together combo meant to be eaten all at once. The sloped edges make it easy to scoop One Perfect Bite onto your fork without being neat about it, and the comically large surface area helps, ironically, with portion control. (The guideline: Prepare enough to fill the bowl just once, and that’s it; anything else is excessive.)

Going on a shopping hunt can be satisfying, but so can stumbling upon something you didn’t even know you needed.

Things to buy

• Tiger Sugar, the popular Taiwanese boba chain which claims to have originated the caramelized brown sugar milk tea of the same name, has merch. Whether or not you’ve ever actually had Tiger Sugar boba tea, you will probably want this Tiger Sugar sweatshirt.
• A 2020 resolution of mine was to be the kind of person who has a chic salt cellar on her kitchen counter at all times. I’m starting with this acacia wood salt cellar, though I still have my eye out for a bigger ceramic one.
• This deep yet lightweight millennial pink pan from new cookware startup Our Place, which comes with a steam basket insert and a spatula that nests neatly on the handle, functions as beautifully as it looks.
• Trying hard to resist this pizza tote bag by Brooklyn-based artist Stephen Powers.

Things to know

• Great Jones is keeping up the pace, today launching its latest product, Large Fry, a bigger version of its popular Small Fry frying pan. It’s got the same ceramic nonstick coating and shiny brass handle, but fits five eggs instead of two.
• Iconic NYC grocery chain Fairway is… going bankrupt and closing all its stores? Or maybe just struggling? It’s unclear, but Fairway stans are anxious.
• I very much enjoyed this deep dive into celebrity mom cookbooks from Romper, including this on-point observation: “[These] books are a bridge from entertainment to branded spatulas.”

Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy.