Hair and style

So... what's cooking?

No, not in the celebrity gossip world, where the only answer is: all things Miley Cyrus.

We mean, what's literally cooking these days in the Food Fanatic kitchen? Our friends from that site have listed a slew of recommended recipes below, so get your head out of the Wrecking Ball-based guter for a moment and scroll down now...

Today Instacart, a grocery delivery service, added an initial set of recipes to its service, helping customers purchase groups of items that combine into finished dishes. For the non-chef among us (hello, my name is Alex), this is a boon.

The news is small for the day: Instacart has curated a list of recipes that its users can access. However, the company told TechCrunch that it intends to greatly expand that list, and eventually allow its users to upload their own recipes.

Instacart is a physical grocery delivery service that is expanding its digital platform. Recipes are an interesting addition and an anti-pivot of sorts. Instacart customers want to quickly order food that can be used to feed themselves and others, and recipes make that a simpler process.

If Instacart can grow its recipe list in an inexpensive way, and effectively bake it into its search process, I can see it being a popular option. Also, I am likely willing to buy more total items - thus increasing Instacart's revenue - if I know where they are going. When I buy only what I need for the day, I spend less per order. Instacart doesn't like that.

This won't be the last non-ordering function that Instacart adds to its platform. Recipes are a natural expansion of ordering foodstuffs, and this addition to the platform could improve its unit economics. That and its recent expansion into Chicago, which I spoke about with Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta. When we first spoke about it, I was skeptical. Could the company's model work in Chicago, with its aggressive weather and huge land area?

But according to Mehta, in the first few days of Instacart's arrival in the City Warm Forgot, it is already a larger market than Mountain View, Palo Alto, and the East Bay combined. That's good news for Instacart, as Chicago is its first market outside of the larger San Francisco Bay Area.

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We spend a lot of time extolling the joys of coaxing deliciousness out of lesser-loved cuts of meat. Today, we're going to put our money where our mouth is with one of our favorite beef cuts, the flank steak. This long, flat steak comes from the belly-side of the steer, and is lean and muscular. This means lots of flavor without a ton of fat. But it also means you have to know a few tricks to make it tender and tasty.

Most flank steak recipes will call for a marinade (since marinating the beef helps to break down some of the connective tissue and tenderize it), but even without a soak in other delicious stuff, a flank steak is a great steak. Since it is usually a pretty thin cut of beef, it doesn't take long to cook (unless you want to braise it, which is another great option since it shreds so nicely) and tastes perfect at medium-rare or medium. The most important thing to know about flank steak is how to cut it: you want to slice this steak across the grain. What does that even mean?

This is a raw flank steak. See the striations that run horizontally through the whole cut?

That is the grain, and what you want to do is lay your knife perpendicular to that grain, and slice thinly. The result: tender, inexpensive, flavorful flank steak. Cutting across the grain creates shorter "strings" of meat, rather than long, chewy ones. A great trick up your sleeve. We pulled together a few of our favorite flank steak recipes (including a few stuffed ones, which is really great for a dinner party). If we missed your favorite method, let us know in the comments!