Health Tips Line

Bacon has a way of taking over a kitchen before it even hits the plate. There’s nothing quite like the smell of it when it’s cooking: smoky, salty, a little sweet and powerful enough to pull you in from another room, as if the skillet personally summoned you. One whiff and suddenly your attention is fully rendered. It’s the kind of aroma that builds anticipation slice by slice, strip by strip, until you’re practically drooling for that first perfect, crackly bite. And in your mind, it’s already plated perfectly: stacked beside fluffy pancakes for a lazy weekend breakfast , or layered into a BLT with juicy tomatoes, crisp lettuce and toasted bread. Bacon isn’t just part of the meal—it’s often the star of the show. But as simple as it seems, bacon can be surprisingly tricky to get right. One minute, it’s perfectly golden and gorgeous; the next, it’s curled, chewy, greasy, or burnt around the edges. That narrow margin between perf...

Tia Williams has never shied away from stories that blend romance, humor and emotional honesty. The New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Find , Seven Days in June and A Love Song for Ricki Wilde has spent decades building a career as both a novelist and longtime fashion editor, all while creating love stories that feel equal parts escapist and deeply relatable. Her latest novel, The Missed Connection , begins with every romantic’s dream—and nightmare. A casting director named Sasha Cruz finds herself seated next to a handsome stranger on a flight to Paris. “She falls desperately in love with him,” Williams tells us. He’s “dashing, [with an] Italian accent—a secret billionaire,” but the pair never exchange contact information. Determined to find him, Cruz hires a detective from her past to help and, as Williams teases, “antics ensue.” The contemporary romance combines funny mishaps with emotional depth, and since...

I’ve had multiple run-ins with raccoons over the years, most recently just last week. A very fat fellow, who stops by frequently, clawed his way up to the top of our fence and perched, arms wide, like Leonardo DiCaprio yelling, “I’m the king of the world!” Last year, I looked outside (prompted by my dogs’ insane barking) to find a masked bandit happily splashing around in the shallows of my pool. I’ve rescued a trash panda that was stuck in an actual trash can (I dropped a ladder in, and he climbed right out as I was still running away), and my friend who feeds and traps feral cats routinely gets a family of raccoon “porch porkies” who stop by to help themselves to the buffet line. And who can forget the raccoon who captured the world’s attention as she eluded rescuers and scaled a 20-story office building in downtown St. Paul? All of this is to say that raccoons are everywhere, and they don’t mind living (mostly) harmoniousl...

They say that butter makes everything better , and I tend to think that’s true. But riddle me this: Milk is white, and butter is made from milk, but butter is … yellow? If you explained this to an alien who knew nothing of Earth’s delicacies, they would likely expect tomatoes to turn pink when cooked into marinara or for cauliflower to turn purple while roasting. Neither of these makes sense, but honestly, the fact that butter is yellow doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either. To get to the bottom of this mystery , I talked to food scientist Bryan Quoc Le, author of 150 Food Science Questions Answered. Read on to find out what he said, plus everything else you might want to know about butter’s qualities and quirks. Get  Reader’s Digest ’s  Read Up newsletter for more food, fun facts, humor, cleaning, travel and tech all week long. Why is butter yellow? The explanation is surprisingly straightforward, even if it’s not something...