August 24, 2026

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Food and sports have always shared a natural habitat: the couch. This week, a new Roku series is pairing NFL fandom with hometown restaurants, Netflix is giving Dan Souza’s kitchen experiments a bigger screen, and three cookbooks are making a strong case for clearing some shelf space. Our late-summer food lineup is part game day, part science class, and part deeply specific Y2K flashback.

Quick Links

A Taste of the Home Team

Football season comes with its own food traditions, from parking-lot smokers to regional sandwiches eaten under extreme emotional distress. Premiering free on the Roku Channel August 24, NFL Hometown Eats pairs celebrity fans with NFL players for a three-city tour: Eva Longoria and DeMarcus Ware tackle Dallas, Rebel Wilson and Davante Adams eat through Los Angeles, and Joel McHale and Devon Witherspoon touch down in Seattle, loaded hot dog included. We’re absolutely in support of fewer stats and more snacks.

Fresh From the Feed

→ The Magnum croissant is exactly what it sounds like: an entire chocolate-coated ice cream bar shoved into a croissant, with the stick removed before serving. The hot-and-cold mash-up has pulled in millions of views and offers all the structural integrity of eating an ice cream sandwich in a paper bag.

→ So-called Japanese cheesecake presses coconut sablé or Biscoff cookies into Greek yogurt and lets the whole thing sit overnight. By morning, the cookies have softened into something closer to icebox cake. It is not really cheesecake, but it is breakfast, dessert, and less than a minute of work.

→ Taco Bell and Tajín have taken their former test-menu flirtation nationwide. The limited run includes a Tajín Taco, a Tajín Cheesy Gordita Crunch, and a pineapple-strawberry Freeze dusted with the chile-lime seasoning, because apparently even a frozen fast food drink can be underdressed.

Food Science Finds a New Home

America’s Test Kitchen’s digital series What’s Eating Dan? arrived on Netflix August 11, giving Dan Souza’s charmingly obsessive approach to food science a new home. Souza uses simple recipes, experiments, and kitchen tricks to explain what makes familiar foods behave the way they do. It is the rare streaming binge that may leave dinner better than it found it.

Cook These Books

→ In Ice Cream Queen, pastry chef Lokelani Alabanza pairs recipes with the often-overlooked history of Black ice cream makers in America. Her Tuscan cantaloupe sorbet was inspired by gelato di melone she ate in Italy and later served as a coveted special at a Tennessee creamery. The home version calls for ripe cantaloupes, syrup, salt, and little else, which feels about right for peak melon season.

→ Every Leaf, Every Stem turns Pierce Abernathy’s seasonal vegetable fixation into peach panzanella with fried basil, squash soup with kimchi and nori croutons, and rhubarb-fennel upside-down cake. There are also, by all accounts, a lot of dips.

→ Eat with Afia by Afia Amoako gathers more than 100 plant-based Ghanaian recipes alongside the family stories, food science, and traditions behind them. Expect roasted plantains, groundnut soup, garden egg stew, and, naturally, jollof rice.

Reel Meals

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Last Bite

B-Dubs Logs Back On

Buffalo Wild Wings is reviving six discontinued favorites for its new Throwback Menu, including Buffalo Chips, Mini Corn Dogs, Garlic Mushrooms, Beef on Weck Sliders, Hot BBQ Sauce, and the formidably named Buffalo Zoo cocktail. The chain is completing the Y2K time warp with a forthcoming Von Dutch collection of trucker hats and baby tees. The only thing missing is an away message.

Reel Meals Revealed

Coffee and Cigarettes! Jim Jarmusch’s black-and-white anthology puts Cate Blanchett, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Bill Murray, and Wu-Tang’s GZA and RZA around a series of cafe tables for conversations that grow stranger with every refill. The refreshments are modest, but the guest list is stacked.