Interior design trends reflect the times we live in, and nearly three years into a pandemic that’s made eating at restaurants pretty risky, it’s no surprise that kitchen renovations are high on the wish list for many people. In particular, so-called “hidden” or “invisible” kitchens have gotten quite popular over the last couple of years.

The appeal of hidden kitchens is pretty straightforward: Kitchens get messy, and hiding the mess is sometimes more convenient than cleaning it up. (Like when you’re hosting a dinner party and want your guests to think you’re less messy than you actually are.) But even if you’re a total neat freak, it can be nice to separate your kitchen from the rest of your living space—which is great news for anyone who’s stuck with an open-concept floor plan they didn’t ask for.

According to a exact New York Times article, the trend of hidden kitchens has been gaining in popularity over the past 2-3 years, particularly among wealthy homeowners with generous renovation budgets. Unsurprisingly, many of the examples of “hidden” or “invisible” kitchens featured in magazines and design blogs are incredibly expensive. But you don’t have to redo your entire kitchen (or build an entire addition for your pantry) to pull this trend off. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Literally hide your entire kitchen

The easiest way to try out a hidden kitchen is by literally hiding it behind a room divider, sliding doors, or any other physical barrier that’s in your budget and blends in with the rest of your decor. This is an especially good option for studio apartments and other spaces with open floor plans and small kitchens; it’s an easy way to physically separate your kitchen from your living space without undertaking a big, expensive project.

Close off your storage

With an invisible kitchen, the more space you have to put stuff behind closed doors, the better. If you have any open shelving, consider replacing it with cabinets or otherwise closing it off. The same goes for your kitchen island, if you have one. For a truly invisible vibe, try keep your cabinets in the same aesthetic neighborhood as the rest of your living space—they don’t have to match perfectly, but aim for consistency.

Renovate your pantry

If you want to go all the way in on the hidden kitchen concept and have ample pantry space to work with, you could turn it into an entire second kitchen. Depending on your needs, you could go for a design that maximizes prep space or one that prioritizes storage—whatever you wish your real kitchen had more of. (Some people go all-out and add sinks, induction burners, and even dishwashers to their second kitchen.) Whatever you choose, make sure your hidden kitchen comes with doors that close—after all, the ultimate goal is to keep clutter and messes out of sight.

Cooling Trend This Weekend

Highs will range in the low 80s today with sunshine. It will turn even cooler Sunday as an onshore breeze picks up. Expect highs in the 70s. Low clouds are possible in the morning.

Updated: 7:28 AM PDT Oct 15, 2022

Highs will range in the low 80s today with sunshine. It will turn even cooler Sunday as an onshore breeze picks up. Expect highs in the 70s. Low clouds are possible in the morning.

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Ever since influencer Avonna Sunshine spilled the tea on how she elevates her drugstore foundation to look and feel like prestige or luxury formula, TikTokers have been following suit. The new whipped foundation is taking over social media, and while it’s unconventional and a bit more timely, we understand why. All you need to provide your cheap foundation a luxury upgrade are a few utensils from your kitchen. 1.) A glass of water, and 2.) Handheld milk frother. Yes, you heard that right, handheld milk frothers are not just for whisking your morning Matcha latte.

In her viral TikTok, Avonna Sunshine, used Maybelline’s FitMe Matte and Poreless (about $10 at the drugstore and on Amazon) in the shade Matte and Poreless 338. She pours a bit of foundation from the jar into a container and froths for about ten seconds, which results in a thick creamy mousse. Intimidating at first glance, after the influencer applies the final formula, the whipped-up foundation blends seamlessly into her pours for a light dewy finish that looks like she’s wearing an Instagram filter.

Curious to see the results for myself, I put this trend to the test. First, I must say that this is a messy hack, and you most definitely don’t want to be wearing white... I learned that mistake the hard way. I also suggest covering up the container as best you can with a towel or saran wrap to avoid stains.

Honestly, I’m usually pretty skeptical of the hacks I come across on social media. I haven’t had the best luck with TikTtok trends, including self-cut layers, slugging, and flat iron curls, but after applying the same Maybelline foundation the influencer used, I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. This hack covered 90 percent of my blemishes while simultaneously feeling light on my skin.

My overall opinion is that this is not every day since it does require extra time and supplies, but for a special event, it is certainly an extra step worth implementing for that soft focus finish. If you want to try the trend for yourself, scroll through below to check out everything you’ll need.

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1. CURTIS VISITS ACADIANA: Two of the state’s best 5A schools will face each other when John Curtis, No. 7 in the latest LSWA poll, visits No. 6 Acadiana in what should be a quickly played nondistrict game between two ground-based rushing offenses. The teams last met in 2020, when Acadiana won 21-13 — 40 years after the previous meeting.

2. ON THE REBOUND: The best some schools in 9-5A can hope for is to end the district season with one loss. Brother Martin and St. Augustine each lost to Edna Karr at the start of league play but would like to string together some wins — Brother Martin this week vs. Holy Cross and St. Augustine on Saturday vs. Rummel.

3. RUSHING LEADERS: The area rushing leaders list had a change at the top when Elijah Davis (1,360 yards) of Riverside moved up while P.J. Martin (1,205) of De La Salle rested against an overmatched opponent. Could another switch happen with Riverside against 1-4 West St. John? DLS faces 3A Mississippi champion Jefferson Davis County.

4. PLAYOFF-LIKE FEEL: McDonogh 35 has a five-game win streak since it began the season with a loss to St. Augustine. The Roneagles will play on the road against Kentwood (5-1), a strong 1A program. Coach Frank Daggs said the long bus ride before facing a good team will provide his team a playoff-like experience.

It crept up on us like these things often do. Over days, a subsonic current of a question, undulating from the maddening town square that is social media. Should we write about butter boards?

I’m Daniel Hernandez, Food editor at The Times. In this busy week in Tasting Notes, we muster the courage to confront the viral trend of butter boards; plus, our marquee podcast “The Times” dives back into my culinary investigation on fermented drinks from Mexico; and finally, we welcome our new — but familiar — deputy Food editor.

Do we have to say it?

The butter board is basically a cutting or serving board slathered with semi-warm butter and dressed with toppings like honey, zest or edible flowers. The concept originated with a lauded chef in Oregon. On Sept. 15, a TikTok-er who writes that she was feeling “in a silly goofy butter mood” decided to post a clip of her making a butter board.

In three weeks, it’s been viewed more than 8.5 million times.

The emergence of an official food trend is an alchemical mystery. Why do some things take off on socials, exceed all viral expectations and rocket into outer space? How does this happen, no matter how revolting or nonsensical the trend can be?

Here at Food, of course we saw the butter board hurtling in our direction. On internal channels, it kept popping up. A story in the New York Times pretty much cemented the trend as certified.

There are a few approaches a publication can take when confronting a new food trend. One is to glom onto it with reckless abandon, declaring it trendy yourself by doing little more than repeating fleeting material already recycled in other publications. Another is to ignore it, resisting any urge to add to a viral trend’s avalanche of media hits.

A third would be to confront a questionable trend head-on. After holding our tongues and our keyboards, the butter board boom became too annoying to bear. So thank you to my colleague Jessica Roy, who armored up and said, “Enough.”

“If you want to make a lovely display of finger foods for your guests, you have many options with minimal opportunities to contract food poisoning or your neighbor’s kid’s daycare cough,” Roy writes. “Did you know that you can have a butter bell in your home and have perfectly spreadable butter available for you to use at any time of day or night?”

Or, you know, you can also just toast some bread and spread butter on it. Mind blown.

Roy makes a case against embracing the butter board. Yet having to even state the argument in itself feels like a form of defeat. The vibe plays off of what happened after the Food and Drug Administration had to come out and tell the U.S. public to not cook chicken breast in NyQuil medical syrup. Buzzfeed News later reported that TikTok searches for NyQuil chicken multiplied by 1,400% after the warning. So did amplifying the trend neutralize it or make things worse?

Some of this stuff is just borderline criminal and done obviously in bad faith: Remember “mouth cooking?” Apologies if the memory is triggering.

Social media platforms are chaotic, nefarious and warp our values and sense of reason. It’s been said and proved many times over. The systems privilege outrage over any other response, so hate-watching something gives it just as much power as watching it out of love. Algorithms purposefully manipulate our emotions.

This, I’m sorry to say, is why I am currently holding back on fully responding to the apparent affront to Mexican food that is “Mexican Week” on the Netflix show “The Great British Bake Off.” The episode became available in North America on Friday, but clips on social media all week have shown unforgivable butchering of Mexican food phrases and practices on the program.

Folks have been warning us in exact days that it’s actually worse than we think. I almost can’t look. But if trends persist, the truth is, I won’t be able to hold out for long.

Other stories

Here are other don’t-miss stories that came across our plate this week.

— Sylvia Wu moved from China to the United States before World War II and by 1959, horrified by the faux-Cantonese dishes she found normalized in Los Angeles, decided to open Madame Wu’s Garden restaurant in Santa Monica. For decades, she served smartly dressed Hollywood A-listers. “Everybody in this town knows Madame Wu,” Merv Griffin once told The Times. She died on Sept. 29 at 106, writes obituaries editor Steve Marble.

— If you haven’t caught up with Jenn Harris’ terrific new video series on dumplings, Episode 4 might be the best spot yet to do it. She goes to Koreatown to trial mandu at Pao Jao Dumpling House, CHD Mandu and Myung In. (Can someone make mandu go trendy please, to help drown out the craziness?)

— Earlier this year I published a feature on the wonders of Mexican fermented beverages on the streets of L.A. This week on “The Times” podcast with Gustavo Arellano, we discuss tepache, tejuino and pulque. We also hear from the vendors themselves, and from listeners who dialed in with their own memories and methods with these fascinating rustic ferments.

— “It’s time to open that bag of chips again,” says a Trader Joe’s executive, announcing that the so-L.A. grocery chain is returning to offering in-store free samples of its favorite products.

— A bunch of SoCal names are adding themselves soon to the barrage of chefs planting more flags in Las Vegas, reports Stephanie Breijo, with more in her weekly news bites column.

— Remember, tacos in our city are Michelin-starred, so don’t much need any colonizing, sloppy treatment; Harris reminds us, with three inventive tacos to try now in Los Angeles.

— Everyone on the Food team this week is delighted with the arrival of a new leader in our ranks. Some of you may know her byline or her cookbooks. Dear readers, please welcome Betty Hallock, deputy Food editor. Her return, I think, is as clear a signal as we can send at this point: L.A. Times Food is seriously back.

Hallock, returning to Food as deputy editor, has co-authored four cookbooks.

(Jessie Cowan)

“Butter boards” are all the rage on TikTok. Ick.

The trend is straightforward: Take a cutting board. Smear a bunch of butter on it. Put some other stuff on there. Serve it to your guests.

Like most “hey, try this!” ideas on TikTok, it’s probably not a great one.

In case this trend has not yet surfaced in your algorithm, here’s the gist: Let butter come to room temperature and artfully smear it onto a flat surface. Scatter with, well, whatever — fresh herbs, chile flakes, flaky salt, sure. Maybe some figs or teeny-tiny mushrooms. Perhaps some flower petals that you’ll excitedly tell your guests are edible. They will smile and say, “Oh! Isn’t that interesting!” before discreetly navigating around them.

Eating butter that has melted into the scars on your nasty cutting board? Gross. Spreading out a meltable food so that maximum surface area can be breathed on by partygoers? Also gross. Did we learn nothing from the pandemic?

Butter deserves better.

I love parties. And I love butter. If you want to make a lovely display of finger foods for your guests, you have many options with minimal opportunities to contract food poisoning or your neighbor’s kid’s daycare cough. If you want to serve butter, a butter dish or butter bell is elegant and practical (and if you’re going to someone else’s party, they make great host gifts). Did you know that you can have a butter bell in your home and have perfectly spreadable butter available for you to use at any time of day or night?

If you must butter a board, don’t use one that you use to prep ingredients. Both plastic and wood cutting boards get scarred by your knives. Bacteria nestle into those grooves, just waiting for a nice room-temperature medium (like butter?) to come along so they can catch a ride back to the surface.

Also, set out butter knives or other implements so your guests aren’t rubbing hand-torn, potentially even pre-bitten bread into what is already a troubling potential disease vector. Justine Doiron, whom the New York Times credits with posting the original butter board video, says not including a spreading implement was her “biggest mistake.” (Because, beware of double dippers.)

Before they were on TikTok, butter boards had been credited to the cookbook “Six Seasons: A New Way With Vegetables” by Joshua McFadden. In that regard, it joins sushi and beef tartare in the pantheon of foods I would cheerfully eat if prepared by a professional chef but studiously avoid at a housewarming party.

Again: Butter? Good. Great, even. Parties? Fantastic. A pool of rapidly melting butter smeared on the cute decorative cutting board that you used to slice up a block of Unexpected Cheddar before your guests arrived: Bad.

I’m not aware of any reports of food poisoning or other illnesses related to butter boards just yet. But do you really want to be the first?

Besides, it hit everyone’s For You page on TikTok two weeks ago. It’s already not cool anymore. Your great-aunt just posted about hers on Facebook. Sorry.

TikTokkers aren’t exactly buttering up to this fatty food trend.

The “butter board” is the newest culinary craze on the social media site — but many are slamming it as both unhygienic and unhealthy.

The dish — which is a riff on a charcuterie board — is made by smearing mounds of butter across a wooden board and garnishing it with sauces, spices or fruits. Party-goers are then invited to scoop up the substance with pieces of fresh bread.

The hashtag “#butterboard” has garnered more than 234 million views on TikTok — however hygiene concerns are making many stomachs churn over the prospect of facing such a spread at their next shindig.

“I just don’t trust people not to double dip,” one disturbed viewer wrote beneath a clip explaining the phenomenon. “And what about kids and their Petri dish fingers swiping through them?”

“Wood board = bacteria. Add to that the double-dipping guests and you have yourself quite the germ-fest,” another remarked beneath another viral video showing a butter board.

“Nasty..everyone be double dipping. No thanks!” a third detractor declared on a separate clip.

The butter bread trend has been gathering steam on TikTok, with content creators claiming it’s the perfect appetizer for the fall season, calling on hosts to whip up the snack for Thanksgiving dinners and football viewing parties.

One butter board video — posted by a TikTokker named Kiki — has gone viral on the app, with a whopping 7.9 million views.

Kiki is seen piling pounds of butter onto a board before topping it with sea salt, crispy prosciutto, crispy shallots and chili-infused olive oil.

But in addition to concerns about hygiene, others wondered whether the calorie-laden creations could cause serious health concerns.

“Heart attack on a board,” one detractor declared before another chimed in: “Is cholesterol just not a thing now?”

Another expressed confusion about the trend in general, stating: “We actually used to make food, now we just eat ingredients?”

But Kiki isn’t the only TikTokker to whip up butter board and gain millions of views in the process.

Others have been creating their own version of the snack boards including a content creator by the name of Norma, who seasoned mounds of butter with chives and chili oil.

Meanwhile, other creatives have fashioned their own boards by switching out butter and replacing it with cream cheese, goat cheese or Nutella.

But “clean eating” cooks have blasted butter boards, including personal chef Kelly Scott, who has humorously claimed she’d create a petition to stop them from being made.

“I think I speak for everyone when I say this trend has got to stop,” she stated in a clip that clocked up hundreds of thousands of views, adding that it was so ludicrous that “guacamole boards” would probably be the next craze to take off.

Elsewhere, TikTokker Colleen Christensen also poked fun at the new culinary craze, sharing a video that showed her looking shocked and repulsed as a cook smeared honey over the top of their butter board.

She sarcastically claimed viewers could create their own butter board simply by toasting a slice of bread and spreading butter over the top of it.

But some people have defended the trend, claiming it’s harmless — and delicious — fun.

“Just let people have fun with their silly little butter boards,” they declared.