Blog Posts by GQ Magazine

Photo by Romulo Yanes
By Luke Zaleski, GQ

2011 was all about dressed-up comfort food-hot dogs topped with kimchi, prosciutto-laced pea soup. The easiest way to bring that kind of cooking into your kitchen? The Michelin-worthy grilled cheese

See also: GQ's 2011 Holiday Gift Guide

You shoved it into your face as a little kid and used it to soak up cheap beer in college, but now it's time to elevate your grilled cheese sandwich to grown-man territory. "Think of it as a blank canvas," says Thomas Keller, who serves a buttery Gruyère-and-brioche version at Bouchon Bakery in New York City. In other words, experiment. Once you upgrade from Kraft Singles and Wonder Bread, you'll realize there's nothing Keller can do to a grilled cheese that you can't. Just remember a few tricks: Use a low, even source of heat-too hot and the bread will burn before your Gruyère gets a chance to melt-and let the finished product rest for a minute, like you would a fresh-off-the-grill porterhouse. It's not 3 a.m. after a frat

Photo by Gourmet

By Max Silvestri, GQ

If you've thrown a few drunken potlucks or impressed a date with a recipe you read in the New York Times Magazine, you may find yourself emboldened with unwarranted hosting confidence. Heck, you skim Bon Appetit in the airport and sometimes watch Good Eats: your parents ain't got nothing on you. Sure, they spent their entire lives putting great home-cooked food on the table for their family and friends, but they have never even read a blog! That arrogance may be how you end up inviting your parents to come spend Thanksgiving with YOU. A big mistake. You are in over your head, but I've compiled a simple guide to make your parents think you've got it figured out, even though your roommate breeds snakes and the novel you're working on is just a Word doc with 45 page breaks, chapter numbers, and no sentences. (If you start it after the first of the year and write 800 words a day, you'll be done by Labor Day. Why rush into it now?)

I've tried to make this easy.

By Stan Parish, GQ

You avoided candied-yams duty, but now you're responsible for the Thanksgiving dinner's grand finale. Relax-this dessert is all about playing it safe while looking like you went all out. You say "crisp" and they think "apple." Then you drop the plot twist: It's pear crisp (because pears are at their peak right now) with a hit of ginger (for zing, though the fact that it's a digestive aid doesn't hurt).

See also: The 2011 GQ Men of the Year

The "techniques" involved-slicing fruit; mixing butter, pecans, and brown sugar with your bare hands-are all skills a hyperactive 9-year-old could handle. I know, because I was 9 when my mom taught me how to make this dish. Look for Bartlett or Anjou pears, which have the sweetness to stand up to ginger and do well in the oven. The hardest step: remembering to pick up ice cream.

Pear-Ginger Crisp

Serves eight


3/4 cup pecans, coarsely chopped

1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

3/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 tsp. nutmeg

5

By Lauren Bans, GQ

He was dubbed "The Hipster Cop" a little over a week ago, a few days after pictures trickled online of a plainclothes detective-dressed more like an actor from Dead Poet's Society than NYPD Blue-patrolling the Occupy Wall Street protest. Then the Hipster Cop Twitter jokes started: "He only uses pepper spray ironically." "Sure I have a nightstick...I bought it on svpply.com." And in October, The New York Times ran the first interview with Rick Lee, a 45-year-old community affairs detective with an addiction to Ralph Lauren, a.k.a. The Hipster Cop. Or rather, a.k.a. The Country Gentleman. (You'll understand after you read this interview.)

See also: The 2011 GQ Men of the Year

GQ: Tell me about what you're wearing today.

Rick Lee: This is pretty average for me. For work anyway. The jacket and cardigan are Ralph Lauren. The tie is Burberry. The shirt is Ralph Lauren, too. These are J.Crew pants. And Ralph Lauren shoes. Lot of Ralph Lauren. My best friend works for

Photo by Ditte Isager




By Katherin Wheelock, GQ

Ina Garten has thrown more dinner parties than Martha, written six cookbooks, and spent forty years making meals for one man: her husband, Jeffrey. She knows a few things about crowd-pleasing food. She knows, for instance, that even if you like your eggs organic and your stock homemade, you might not pass up a bowl of Kraft mac and cheese at 2 a.m. on a boozy night. She also knows you'd be similarly powerless to resist an adultified version of that meal-a creamy, crunchy, oven-baked dish you can proudly serve to a tableful of grown-ups.

See also: The Most Stylish Musicians of All Time

The rules, like Ina, are gentle but firm. Use pasta the cheese sauce can cling to, like corkscrew-shaped fusilli or cavatappi, or good old elbow macaroni. The cheese is pretty much your prerogative; Ina likes a combination of Gruyére and aged Cheddar. Blanket the pasta with real breadcrumbs and a layer of thin tomato slices. If you think the tomato part is sacrilege, ask

Illustration by Brown Bird DesignBy GQ

Stretching, kick bridges, and yes, even planking, in your office will help you avoid the perils of office death. Use our guide to defeat the desk doldrums.

Your daily gym run is great-but it may not be enough. "If you do everything right in the gym and everything wrong the rest of the day, it's eight hours to one," says Craig Friedman of Athletes' Performance in Phoenix. Try these moves at home or (if you have a door) in the office.


See fully illustrated office workouts at GQ.com

Core Competency

It's the most important muscle group in the body-abs, glutes, lower back, etc.-and it softens to Jell-O in a desk chair

Plank Plus

Do a plank, then lift your left arm and hold it. Return to the starting position and raise your right. Do eight on each side.

Kick Bridge
Okay, this one's embarrassing in public. Lie on your back with your knees bent and push your butt off the ground into a bridge position. Lift one leg, then lower it. Switch legs. Do eight reps for each leg, two sets.

By GQ

Follow these simple steps and you'll end up with creamy scrambled eggs, crispy bacon and the best omelet you'll ever eat. It couldn't be easier, so get cracking!

Pietro Criscuolo, chef-owner of Dongió in Milan, makes his meatballs quickly. Photo by …By GQ

Pietro Criscuolo makes meatballs, he waits for nobody. Not even a reporter desperately trying to jot down his recipe. Criscuolo, 71, is standing in the middle of his family's Milan restaurant, Dongió, and is performing something of a meatball clinic.

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He cracks two eggs onto a mound of ground beef, tosses in a few spoonfuls of bread crumbs, adds plenty of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, a touch of salt, some more Parmigiano, a few more bread crumbs, and then kneads the mixture until all the ingredients are well integrated. Every now and then, he looks up at me, smiles with his big droopy eyes, and says something in Italian that I can't understand.

I'm having enough trouble keeping up with him as he speedily rolls out about forty polpette. Although truthfully, there is not much to be confused about. As Pietro's son Antonio says in somewhat broken English, The simpler the recipe, the better the taste. And Pietro's recipe is indeed