Entertainment
Three Favorite Chicken Breast Recipes
Earlier this summer, we kicked off our new food series: one ingredient, three ways. So far, we’ve featured chickpeas and eggs, and this week we’re turning to chicken breasts. Because it’s so easy to make chicken breasts boring, I often forget how easy it is to make them utterly sumptuous. The three recipes today — from cookbook authors Odette Williams, Christina Chaey, and Dan Pelosi — are so delectable that I now have a freezer full of poultry. Set aside your memories of dry, pallid cutlets, and check out these the all-stars…
Odette Williams, cookbook author and writer of the newsletter Devour
“Here’s the thing about this chicken piccata: Everyone – and I mean everyone — loves it. It’s so simple and comes together lickety split, but it has a restaurant-quality specialness. Whenever I make this for my son’s friends, they think I’m some kind of magician. It’s a glossy, lemony, bold-flavored classic that always delivers.”
Odette’s Chicken Piccata
Serves 4
2 skinless chicken breasts (about 1 1/2 lbs)
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
6 tbsp cold, unsalted butter, divided
3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1/3 cup white wine
3/4 cup chicken stock
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1 tbsp drained capers
A handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
Cut each chicken breast in half, horizontally. Working with one at a time, place each piece between two sheets of parchment paper, and use a meat tenderizer or rolling pin to pound to an even 1/4 to 1/8-inch thickness. On a large plate, combine flour, a little salt, and a few generous cranks of pepper. Dredge each piece of chicken through the seasoned flour.
Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add two chicken pieces and sauté until golden (about three minutes per side). Transter to a plate and repeat with the remaining chicken, adding a splash more oil if needed. Set cooked chicken aside on a plate, somewhere warm.
Reduce heat to low. Add three tablespoons of butter and the sliced garlic, and gently sauté until they turn golden (1-2 minutes). Add wine and cook until the liquid is reduced by half (1-2 minutes). Add stock and cook to reduce for another 3-4 minutes. Stir in lemon juice, capers, remaining three tablespoons of butter, and parsley. (Some days I add in a little extra butter here.) Give the skillet a shimmy to help emulsify the sauce.
Return chicken to skillet and coat in sauce. Season as needed and serve — in the skillet or on a warmed serving platter, with sauce poured overtop. Ta da!
Christina Chaey, recipe developer and writer of the newsletter Gentle Foods
“I often buy chicken breasts and broccoli for the week — and nine times out of 10, I end up using them to make this quick sesame chicken recipe, developed by my old colleague, Rhoda Boone. It’s light yet comforting and super delicious. The recipe calls for steaming the broccoli in a separate pot (which isn’t as fussy as it seems, I promise), but if you’re making stovetop rice, you can instead throw the broccoli florets on top of the rice in the last two or three minutes of cooking; the broccoli will cook in the residual steam from the rice. Can you tell I’m an expert at making this meal?”
Quick Sesame Chicken With Broccoli
Recipe by Rhoda Boone
Serves 4
1 1/2 cups quick-cooking white rice
1 3/4 tsps kosher salt, divided, plus more
8 cups broccoli florets
1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp cornstarch
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
2 lbs boneless skinless chicken breasts, thighs, or a mix, patted dry and cut into 1-inch chunks
4 tbsp vegetable oil, divided
1/4 cup plus 1 tbsp honey
1/4 cup low-sodium soy sauce
3 tbsp rice wine vinegar
1 tbsp Sriracha
1 large clove garlic, finely grated
1 tsp finely grated ginger
1 1/2 tsp sesame oil
2 tbsp toasted sesame seeds, divided
2 scallions, thinly sliced
Cook rice with a pinch of salt, according to package directions. Set a steamer basket in a medium pot filled with an inch of water. Cover and bring water to a boil. Steam broccoli, covered, until crisp-tender (5–6 minutes). Drain and set aside.
In a large bowl, whisk cornstarch, pepper, and 1 1/2 tsp salt. Add chicken and toss to coat. Heat 2 tbsp vegetable oil in a large skillet over a high heat. Add half of the chicken and cook, turning occasionally, until chicken is cooked through and a light brown crust forms (about five minutes). Meanwhile, whisk together honey, soy sauce, vinegar, Sriracha, garlic, ginger, sesame oil, 1 tbsp sesame seeds, and remaining 1/4 tsp salt in a medium bowl.
Transfer first batch of chicken to a plate. Heat remaining 2 tbsp vegetable oil and cook remaining chicken. Add sauce to skillet, along with the first batch of chicken. Toss well and cook until sauce is reduced and thickened (about two minutes). Fold in reserved broccoli, toss to coat, and remove from heat. Divide chicken and broccoli among four plates and top with scallions and remaining 1 tbsp sesame seeds. Serve with rice on the side.
Dan Pelosi, food writer and author of Let’s Party and Let’s Eat
“I grew up deeply immersed in chicken-cutlet culture. There was a pile available to eat at all times. Throw a cutlet onto a plate with any other food, and it just makes sense — kind of like a purse that works with every outfit. No one can resist a good chicken cutlet, and I can proudly say mine are some of the best out there. There’s parmesan and lemon zest in the panko coating, and brown mustard in the egg wash. It adds depth of flavor without complicated ingredients. You can use these cutlets as a salad base (or topping), for chicken parm or a sub, or just with a pinch of salt or squeeze of lemon on top.”
Grossy’s Chicken Cutlets
Serves 3-4
3 lbs boneless skinless thin-cut chicken breasts
1 cup flour (any kind, including gluten-free flours, will work!)
2 eggs
2 tbsp spicy brown mustard
1 cup plain panko (breadcrumbs work too — I just prefer panko)
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
Zest of 1 lemon
Salt and pepper
Olive oil, or other neutral frying oil
Get set up to coat your cutlets. I like to do them all in one pass, as the process sort of kidnaps your hands — so you might as well just get it over with at once. Grab two small trays or plates and two medium bowls. Place your cutlets in one tray. In one bowl, add flour. In the other bowl, add eggs and mustard. Whisk to combine. In the other tray, add panko, parmesan, lemon zest, salt and pepper. Use your hands to combine.
Set the trays and bowls out on your countertop and start coating your cutlets in this order: flour, egg, panko. The desire to perfectly coat each cutlet and not make a mess while doing it should be abandoned immediately — perfection doesn’t taste good! As you coat each cutlet, place them on a tray.
Grab your largest frying pan and fill it with oil (it should be about 1/4 inch deep). Place the oil over medium heat for a few minutes to get it ready for frying. Grab a pair of tongs if you have them — they’ll help you handle the cutlets as you fry. Line a baking sheet with paper towels and set it on the counter, near the stove. Working in batches, place cutlets in the hot oil (do not crowd the pan), and let them fry on each side for about 4-5 minutes. Be sure to move them around in your pan as there will be hot spots, and we want cutlets to cook evenly! Once they’re golden-brown, remove from the oil and rest them on the lined baking sheet. On your first round of cutlets, cut into one of them to ensure they’re cooked through. Note your timing, and adjust as needed for the next rounds.
You can keep cutlets warm in a 200°F oven during and after your fry. (Just don’t leave them TOO long or they’ll dry out.) From here, you can use them however you’d like. Serve hot or at room temperature (room-temp cutlets make an amazing sandwich). Enjoy!
Thank you, Odette, Christina, and Dan! Do you have a favorite way to make chicken breasts? Tell me all about it — my freezer beckons!
P.S. More great chicken recipes, including easy curried-chicken sandwiches and a five-ingredient chicken dinner (with lemony spinach — yum!).
(Chicken piccata photos by Matt Russell. Sesame chicken photo by Chelsea Kyle, with prop styling by Alex Brannian and food styling by Rhoda Boone; sesame chicken recipe by Rhoda Boone, originally published on Epicurious. Chicken cutlets photo by Dan Pelosi.)
Entertainment
NYT Strands hints, answers for July 23, 2026
Today’s NYT Strands hints are easy if you’re a veteran.
Strands, the New York Times‘ elevated word-search game, requires the player to perform a twist on the classic word search. Words can be made from linked letters — up, down, left, right, or diagonal, but words can also change direction, resulting in quirky shapes and patterns. Every single letter in the grid will be part of an answer. There’s always a theme linking every solution, along with the “spangram,” a special, word or phrase that sums up that day’s theme, and spans the entire grid horizontally or vertically.
By providing an opaque hint and not providing the word list, Strands creates a brain-teasing game that takes a little longer to play than its other games, like Wordle and Connections.
If you’re feeling stuck or just don’t have 10 or more minutes to figure out today’s puzzle, we’ve got all the NYT Strands hints for today’s puzzle you need to progress at your preferred pace.
NYT Strands hint for today’s theme: Hail to the chief petty officer
The words are related to the military.
Mashable Top Stories
Today’s NYT Strands theme plainly explained
These words describe military titles.
NYT Strands spangram hint: Is it vertical or horizontal?
Today’s NYT Strands spangram is vertical.
Meet The Mashable 101: Our list of the content creators shaping the internet today
NYT Strands spangram answer today
Today’s spangram is Navy Ranks.
NYT Strands word list for July 23
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Recruit
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Admiral
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Ensign
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Navy Ranks
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Lieutenant
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Commander
Looking for other daily online games? Mashable’s Games page has more hints, and if you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now!
Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you’re after? Here’s the solution to yesterday’s Strands.
Entertainment
The World’s Richest Man Just Promised An AI Version Of The Odyssey, But It’s Never Going To Happen
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Every day, we get another reminder that the internet isn’t real life. For example, right-wing voices have been hating on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey for months, backlash that mysteriously began when the director cast a Black woman and a trans man in prominent roles. The haters spent plenty of time, energy, and endless social media posts trashing the film and predicting it would fail because it’s woke garbage. Of course, when the movie actually premiered, it was a critical darling that made over a quarter of a billion dollars in its first weekend.
In a sane world, that would have ended the discussion. The movie thousands of people thought would fail succeeded; end of story, right? Well, you’re not in a sane world, bucko, you’re in Hellworld. Case in point? Spurred on by comments from his loyal army of sycophantic followers, Elon Musk has now pledged to use his pet AI Grok to create a more “historically accurate” version of The Odyssey. His fans are excited, but I’ve got some bad news: not only would such a film be a critical and commercial flop, but there’s no way in hell this movie ever comes out.
The Odyssey: Video Game Cutscene Edition
Why am I so confident that Elon Musk’s Grok-powered version of The Odyssey will never come out? Simple: while Musk has achieved massive financial success (he was, for a moment there, the world’s first trillionaire), he has spent much of the last decade promising things that just never happened. Like, he previously promised SpaceX would be landing humans on Mars by 2025 at the latest; not only did that never happen, but SpaceX’s stock value is currently tumbling following several engine failures and an aborted flight.
The list goes on. Fully self-driving cars straight out of a sci-fi movie? He made the promise, but that never happened. The Hyperloop, announced in 2013? The project shut down in 2023. The pledge to have a million robotaxis on the streets by 2020? Yeah, that project died quietly amid the global COVID-19 pandemic. For all of his successes, this is who Elon Musk is: a relentless hypeman who promises more than he can deliver and tries to cover up his failures with more breathless announcements that he thinks his biggest fans will respond well to.
This AI Movie Is Its Own Trojan Horse
That’s what this AI Odyssey announcement is about. After years of being lauded by liberal fans as a real-life Tony Stark, Musk went fully right-wing, complete with pivotal endorsements of Donald Trump and a temporary role in Trump’s government. As such, Musk has become one of the most popular figures in conservative circles. While his political allegiances shifted, one thing never changed: Musk’s absolutely palpable desire for people to like him. Accordingly, he spends plenty of time on X, engaging with conservative fans and platforming both conservative thoughts and movies (like Citizen Vigilante). By and large, his fans hate Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, so he has pledged to give them an alternative.
Once again, Musk is telling his fans what they want to hear. Hate that “woke” movie everyone’s talking about? Well, he’ll make his own, and he’ll do it without help from Hollywood! That’s the promise, at least, and Musk’s fans are eating this up with a fork and spoon. None of them seem to think that this project, like so many others, will quietly disappear. Or that the man who has spent years running a social media platform into the ground might not actually be the best guy to deliver an actual film and not sloppy shorts that look like a PS4 cutscene.
Elon Musk’s Movie Is Already History
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Musk actually makes his more “historically accurate” version of The Odyssey. Why does anyone think this thing will be watchable, much less better than Christopher Nolan’s version? Not only does the proof of concept suck, but Musk’s rejection of Hollywood has seriously reduced his talent pool for things like voice acting, art design, and so on. Plus, the very announcement brings up an obvious question: why has Musk given himself until the end of the year to make this film? Nolan shot a real movie with real people in only three months, so why will it take Grok’s prompt engineers almost twice as long to make their own?
The answer is simple: this movie is never going to see the light of day. Elon Musk’s biggest fans are frothing at the mouth about Nolan’s The Odyssey right now, but soon enough, they’ll have something new to obsess over, like Spider-Man saying something too woke in Brand New Day. As they move on, the once and future (?) trillionaire will move on as well, making even more promises he never plans to keep. With any luck, all of the people demanding an AI version of The Odyssey will start clamoring for an AI adaptation of another ancient text. May I suggest The Bible, complete with a historically accurate, very brown Jesus Christ?
Entertainment
R-Rated Supernatural Thriller Hides Its Dark Truth In The Tapes
By Robert Scucci
| Published
2024’s Shelby Oaks is a unique watch because it effortlessly integrates found-footage filmmaking into a more traditional storytelling framework. Much of the first act plays out like a true crime documentary, establishing the mystery and the characters navigating it. Then the perspective shifts to the footage the documentary is about, and suddenly we’re in a straight-up supernatural thriller. While I’m a huge fan of found footage and analog horror, I can’t recall another film that switches filming styles depending on the scene, which makes Shelby Oaks, as far as I can tell (but please correct me if I’m wrong), a sample size of one.
Granted, I haven’t seen every found-footage film ever released, and I have my blind spots like everybody else, but my main takeaway was that Shelby Oaks earns serious points for its camera work and the layered storytelling built around it. While the ending was a bit predictable for my tastes, everything leading up to it was solid, and I’m glad I sat down with this one because it’s incredibly fluid in its delivery, allowing its mystery to unravel naturally.
From YouTubing To Doom Snooping
Shelby Oaks starts out like a documentary, introducing us to Mia Brennan-Walker (Camille Sullivan). Mia’s younger sister, Riley (Sara Durn), disappeared 12 years earlier while working on a project for her YouTube series, The Paranormal Paranoids. While investigating a prison, three of Riley’s collaborators, Laura (Caisey Cole), David (Eric Francis Melaragni), and Peter (Anthony Baldasara), also disappear. Their bodies are eventually recovered, horrifically mutilated. The only lead police have is one of the group’s two recovered video cameras, which contains footage of Riley during what many assume were her final moments.
This entire opening sequence blends documentary and found-footage filmmaking while establishing Shelby Oaks’ central conflict: Mia believes Riley is still alive, everybody else thinks the YouTube channel was an elaborate hoax, and her husband Robert (Brendan Sexton III) is ready to leave her because her obsession with the case has consumed her life after years without answers.
That all changes when a man later identified as Wilson Miles arrives at Mia’s doorstep carrying a tape labeled “Shelby Oaks,” the town where Riley was last investigating. After handing over the tape, Wilson tells Mia, “She finally let me go,” before blowing his head off on her front porch. It’s a horrific sequence that comes completely out of nowhere, but it’s enough to convince Mia that whoever “she” is may have imprisoned Riley as well.
While examining the tape and some of Riley’s personal effects, Mia comes to the horrifying conclusion that Riley had been stalked by a demon ever since suffering night terrors as a child, and that those experiences likely fueled her fascination with the paranormal in the first place. Her amateur sleuthing sends her down a twisted path involving demonic hellhounds, incubi, and the revelation that Riley, and possibly Wilson, were caught up in something much larger involving forces she doesn’t begin to understand until she discovers what, who, and where Wilson escaped from.
This Could Totally Become A Franchise
Everything about Shelby Oaks is expertly crafted, but I’m most impressed by how effortlessly it shifts between filming styles. It almost feels like the camera zooms out from the initial source of terror, giving us a more conventional supernatural mystery centered on Mia and her investigation. She repeatedly combs through the recovered footage for clues, but those investigation scenes aren’t presented as found footage themselves. That approach lets you experience Riley’s terror firsthand before stepping back to piece everything together alongside Mia.
Once I got to the big third-act reveal, I was a little underwhelmed because my immediate reaction was, “Oh yeah, that makes sense,” and then… that was it. Sometimes that’s just how movies go, and I’m not too upset about it because Shelby Oaks takes enough creative swings to make the entire experience worthwhile.
What I’m more interested in seeing, though, is a prequel that unpacks what else is on those tapes. Shelby Oaks ends in a way that hints at a sequel, though it works perfectly well as a standalone film. A prequel, however, would be next level. My thinking is that the tape Mia receives from Wilson is just one of many recorded during the 12 years Riley was missing. A found-footage compilation built around those tapes could make for some incredible worldbuilding that pushes Shelby Oaks into franchise territory, and that’s something I’d absolutely like to see.
I’m just spitballing here, however, and right now all we have is Shelby Oaks. Overall, I was impressed with the filmmaking and the buildup leading into the third act. I’ll admit I was a little underwhelmed by the conclusion, but I’ve also seen a ton of movies like this, so maybe I’m just being a tad cynical. I’d definitely recommend it to my horror-loving friends.
As of this writing, you can stream Shelby Oaks on Hulu.
Royals' Salvador Perez hits 317th homer, ties George Brett's club mark
NYT Strands hints, answers for July 23, 2026
