X’s AI Bot Is Reporting Joke Posts as Actual News

If you pay for Twitter (sorry, X), you now have access to Grok, the company's AI bot. Part of that privilege includes access to a trending news feed in the Explore tab powered by the company's artificial intelligence. The only issue? It's garbage.

Here's how Grok's trending news feed seems to work: The bot pulls together the "top" posts concerning any given news story, then generates a summary of the news from those posts. Simple enough, and something that we've seen generative AI do before. But before you fire your human writers and editors and put Grok in charge of the news, you might want to see how exactly it's reporting works.

Grok appears to be aggregating joke tweets and spitting out an AI-generated answer as genuine news. You can see that from this post shared by X user BrettRedacted following the earthquake that shook much of the New York City metro area. The bot generated the headline: "Adams vs. Earthquake: 50,000 Cops in Subway Showdown," then reports how New York City Mayor Eric Adams is deploying the NYPD to "prevent further earthquakes," considering using "robo cops," and has ordered "every cop in the city" to "shoot the damn earthquake before it strikes again."

Sure, we live in weird times, but no reasonable person would ever believe that Grok's summary of the news was accurate. If you somehow couldn't decide for yourself, you could take a look at the top posts fueling that news summary, which in this case, are all joke tweets about the mayor's response to the earthquake.

Tweet may have been deleted

This is a sad but humorous example of the state of X in 2024. Past versions of the site would have been the place to be to follow both legitimate updates on breaking news like the NYC earthquake, and laugh at the jokes about the situation. Now, the site treats the jokes as news. You get what you pay for, I guess.

It doesn't take much foresight to imagine how this situation goes from sad but humorous to simply dangerous. What happens when Grok decides to "report" on something that seems at first glance legitimate, but is based on the rampant misinformation spreading across the site? An X user may check into the Explore page to see that their city is being bombed, or that a candidate in their election did something illegal, when neither "story" is actually true.

While we can't stop the site from pushing this crap, we can all collectively agree to not treat Grok, or any generate AI for that matter, as a legitimate news source, or an accurate summarizer of the day's top stories.

Ways to Stay Safe (and Impress Your Coworkers), According to Former CIA Agent

Every year, the federal government spends an estimated $3 billion of your tax dollars on the Central Intelligence Agency. Other than the supposed protection a sophisticated international clandestine espionage network provides the nation's citizens, what do we actually get for our share of CIA budget? Nothing!

In the interest of getting something for my taxes, and because I think espionage is kind of cool, I asked former CIA agent Jason Hanson to reveal the best life hacks his CIA training could provide.

According to his biography, Hanson spent seven years in the CIA as an agent with a top secret security clearance. After retiring from the agency in 2005, he started the Tactical Spy School in Utah, got $150k in funding on Shark Tank, and wrote some best-selling books (Spy Secrets That Can Save Your Life, and Agent of Influence: How to Use Spy Skills to Persuade Anyone, Sell Anything, and Build a Successful Business), all in order to “help good, honest Americans stay safer and be more prepared in the crazy and unpredictable world that we live in.”

Get off your phone

While Hanson teaches his Spy School students to drive defensively, escape from duct tape and handcuffs, and other cool-in-the-movies tricks, his most important piece of personal safety advice is so practical your mom probably said it to you: Stop looking at your phone all the time.

“You should be paying attention to your surroundings,” Hanson said, “Twenty or 25 years ago, we were walking around actually looking [where we were] walking. That's how we need to be. I use a flip phone, and I've never sent a text message in my life.”

Establish the baseline of any situation

Once you've switched off your phone, look around to get a feel for your location. Hanson isn't advising adopting the hyper-vigilant lifestyle of spies in war zones—just basic situational awareness. “Everything has a baseline,” Hanson explained, "If you walk into a Starbucks every day, you know the baseline of Starbucks.” 

So spend a moment taking the metaphorical temperature of any new situation you’re in; If something feels off, or out of place, trust your instincts and either proceed with caution or retreat. 

“One time I was almost kidnapped," Hanson said. "I'm out in the morning in a place I can't name and I saw two guys coming in my direction. They didn't match the baseline; they didn't dress like everybody else there; they basically stuck out like a sore thumb. They look at me. I look at them. And these two guys look at each other and step apart, trying to force me to go and between them. Well, as soon as I saw that, I turned the other way and took off running. If I had had my head buried in the phone, I would have walked directly into those two guys.”

When in danger, retreat or run

Like anyone who has any practical experience with real violence, Hanson advises avoiding or running from danger instead of whipping out the ninja moves you learned in that Aikido class at the Y. “Listen, you do not want to be in a fight,” Hanson said. ”Fighting is a last resort. If you see that creeper ahead, you go in the other direction and avoid [them]."

Should you carry a weapon?

Hanson says that his personal daily carry includes a firearm, but dude lives in Utah where you can do that, and he's in the self-defense racket. If you can’t or won’t carry a gun, Hanson recommends a tactical pen. “I carry one every single day, it's a regular writing pen. But it's made of a much harder metal. So I can smash windows out, I can break things, and you can carry this all over the world. It's perfectly legal.”

How CIA training can help you at work

Personal safety is one thing, but the CIA’s knowledge can help you professionally, too. “Somebody I've worked with has a great saying: CIA officers are the world's best salespeople. The only difference is, you sell vacuums, and we sell treason," Hanson said.

Hanson's supposedly CIA-approved advice for getting ahead at work isn’t that far from his advice for maintaining personal safety: “Shut up, observe, and pay attention to what's going on,” he said. “Observing and paying attention to your colleagues, which is spying one-on-one, it's super easy to do. Julie over there loves Diet Coke, and one day, you bring her a Diet Coke. Phil loves baseball, so you bring him a Red Sox cap for his birthday. That allows you to get to know your colleagues for real, but it's also putting a good foot forward. So you hopefully get ahead in the place where most people don't pay attention to anything because they're only caring about themselves.”

Lie detection with the CIA

You don't need a polygraph machine to suss out dishonesty, whether in a work or relationship sense. Hanson has an easy-to-use, presumably CIA-developed technique to turn yourself into a human lie detector. The key, according to Hanson, is to determine the baseline for how your subject responds to easy questions, then spring a hard, confrontational question at them. If you’re interviewing a potential candidate for job, you might ask a few general questions and then fix a steely look on them and say, “When was the last time you stole something?”

"Ask somebody a question and pay attention to the first three to five seconds of the response,” Hanson advised. "As human beings, we’re just not born to lie ... If I’m being honest, I don't even really have to think about the answer, because I'm telling the truth. But if I'm lying to you, I may be like, ‘can you repeat the question?’ Or I may start stammering or freeze up because I'm trying to buy time for my brain to come up with a lie.”

Using the CIA's tactics against the CIA

If you’ve been thinking, “Steve, how do you even know this guy was in the CIA?” I had the same concern. He looks the part, and talks a good game, but he could be a fake. The CIA doesn’t readily give up information on its members—I couldn’t call them for verification—so I used Hanson’s own CIA techniques against him. After establishing his baseline behavior by asking easy-to-answer questions and carefully observing him, I turned things around and hit him with: “Are you lying about being in the CIA?”

Sadly, he didn’t prove that I am actually the master interrogator by freezing up and starting to stammer. Instead, Hanson told me it was a good question, and acknowledged that fact-checking his background would be difficult. But he suggested one method for telling a CIA guy from a fraud would be getting someone who you know is in the CIA and setting up a three-way conversation so the real company man could quickly suss out the impostor.

How do you join the CIA?

If you're hoping that secret agents will visit you in the middle of the night because they've been monitoring how successful you've been at Call of Duty, that's not how it works. Most people get into the CIA by applying on the website. Make sure you have a clean background, though—criminal charges, recent use of marijuana, and any use of harder drugs will disqualify you.

How to Choose Between Building an Addition or Buying a New House

It’s a fact of life that we tend to need more space as time goes by. We acquire new stuff, new hobbies, and new family members, and we need space for all of it. One day you wake up and realize that the charming two-bedroom house you bought 10 years ago is no longer so charming: You’ve got a garage filled with exercise equipment, your mother-in-law is sleeping on the couch, and the new baby’s room is actually your walk-in closet.

In these situations the obvious move is to buy a new, larger house. But sometimes it might make more sense to renovate your current home with an addition. Both are large-scale, expensive projects with distinct advantages and disadvantages, so how can you choose between moving your whole life to a new spot or radically upgrading your existing house? Here’s what you should consider.

Space

First, think about how much more space you actually need—and it’s best to be pretty loose here. Will one more room give you what you need? A bump-out in the kitchen? Or do you need a lot of new space for your growing family and collection of classic arcade game cabinets? If an additional bedroom, sun room, or expanded kitchen will solve your problems, an addition might work. On the other hand, if you need to double the size of your house it’s probably best to buy a new one.

The other space consideration is whether you actually need more space, or if you just need to be more efficient using the space you already have. If you have a bedroom currently being used to house garbage bags full of old clothes or boxes of stuff left over from your last house move, paying for a storage unit and reclaiming that space makes more sense than either an addition or a new house.

Finally: Do you have the space to spare? If you can technically squeeze an addition on your property but it will cost you most of your outdoor space, it’s worth asking yourself if it’s worth it. Sure, you get more space inside, but if you lose the ability to enjoy fresh air, you might not be happy in the house and wind up moving anyway.

Costs

If you decide that you do need more space, costs will be one of the most important considerations—and the most complex. If you have to finance a new home or an addition (which most of us will), your first stop is to compare the costs of that financing. Right now, for example, getting a home equity line of credit (HELOC) to pay for an addition averages about 9% interest, while average mortgage rates are around 7%. Plus there are closing costs to consider, which can eat into the equity you’re able to cash out—those average close to $7,000 when purchasing a new house, and closing costs on equity lines can run into thousands of dollars.

Of course, depending on how much equity you have in your current home, you might need to borrow a lot more to buy a new house than to put in an addition; new home prices average nearly $500,000 across the U.S. Additions can be a lot cheaper than that—the average home addition costs about $50,000, though the high end can shoot past $150,000. Finally, consider moving costs: Local moves can cost more than $2,500, and moving long-distance can cost as much as $10,000, depending on how much stuff you have and how far you’re moving. In other words, it will almost always be cheaper to add to your home than to sell and buy a new one.

One more thing to consider is the relatively low return on investment (ROI) for additions. Most additions only return 50-65% of your investment in terms of higher sale price. But choosing an addition likely means you’re not moving any time soon, anyway, and the additional space will make your existing home more valuable, increasing your equity stake.

Adding up the total cost of an addition versus all the costs associated with buying a new home and moving will make it easier to decide which option works best for you.

Intangibles

Money isn’t everything, of course, and there are other things to think about when choosing between a new home and an addition:

• Location. If you love your area, have kids in a good school, and/or have a tight relationship with your neighbors, moving might be unhappily disruptive. Unless you can find a larger home in the same area, an addition will allow you to maintain consistency in other aspects of your life.

• Inconvenience. An addition is a major construction project. If you have to remain in the house while it’s being done, you’ll be living in a loud, dirty, and disruptive environment for weeks or months. Or you’ll have to add rental costs to your bottom line, which might shift the math on which option makes more financial sense.

• The unknowns. No house is perfect, but you know the house you’re in. You know its foibles and drawbacks, its secretly terrific features, and the problems that always crop up. A new house is a mystery—it might be terrific! It might be a leaking, foundation-cracking, drafty mess. Sometimes the devil you know is preferable to a quagmire.

• The neighborhood. An addition makes your house larger on the outside as well as the inside, which might make it stick out in your neighborhood like a sore thumb—and might irritate your previously friendly neighbors. Having an oddly-shaped, too-large-for-the-block house can also hurt your chances of selling down the road. Ideally, an addition will look like a natural extension of the house and not something glued on by aliens who don’t understand how humans work.

The choice of moving to a new home or adding on to the one you already own is never easy. But crunching those numbers and considering the intangibles will guide you to the right decision.

Use 'DiffusionBee' to Generate AI Images Right on Your Mac

Generating images using AI is fun, and occasionally even useful, but the image generation typically happens on a server someone else controls. If you’d rather have a native Mac application for the job—one that works entirely offline, making it completely private—DiffusionBee is what you’re looking for.

This Mac-only application can download AI models for generating images, then run those models entirely on your computer. Generating only takes a few seconds on Apple Silicon devices; older Intel-based Macs are also supported but image creation takes longer—around five minutes in my tests.

Credit: Justin Pot

The application offers a number of different AI tools you can use—everything from generating an image from text to modifying existing images. You'll need to download models before you can do anything, and those models will take up a few GB on your computer.

The text-to-image generator is perhaps the most straightforward: Just type what you want and you'll end up with it. You can also provide an image and ask for it to be redone using a text prompt. The results are obviously always dead-on, in exactly the way you'd expect from an AI tool (which my sarcastic way of saying that you might need to try a few different prompts before you get the results you want.)

Sometimes you're going to have to re-try a few times with a slightly different prompt. Credit: Justin Pot

Other functionality includes the ability to remove objects from photos, the ability to create optical illusions, and the ability to upscale low-resolution images. It's essentially an AI image-making playground, and it's completely free, so give it a shot if you've got a Mac.

The Best Apps to Keep Your Spring Cleaning On Track

An app can’t clean your home for you, but when you’re dreading the task or feeling overwhelmed by the mess, apps can help keep your cleaning on track. Before you open the one that will summon a professional cleaner (not that there's anything wrong with that), try these options, which can keep you organized and motivated.

(All apps are available for both iOS and Android, unless otherwise noted.)

The best app to keep you motivated to clean: Tody

Credit: Tody

Tody is helpful for anyone who needs visual representations of their progress or who enjoys gamifying mundane tasks. The simple interface shows you what your most pressing needs are, with graphs that indicate which rooms you should focus on for the day. There are also game options, where you compete against in-app characters to earn points by cleaning. Most of the app’s features are free, but you do have to pay for premium features—a one-time fee of $9.99.

Android | iOS

The best for scheduling: Sweepy

Credit: Sweepy

Don’t know what to do? Don’t know where to start? Sweepy—widely beloved by cleaning geeks around the internet—generates a schedule for you every day. You tell the app how much you want to clean every day and it does the work of planning that out for you, then tracks your progress. Your kids or other household members can even join, but you can set it so they only earn in-app points when you approve their work. It’s free to create rooms and tasks, keep a cleaning history, and engage in challenges set by the app team, but $8.99 per month gets you the smart cleaning schedule and multiple household members. 

Android | iOS

The best free cleaning and organization app: Clean My House

Credit: Clean My House

You might not want to spend money on an app that functions like a regular old to-do list, but try Clean My House for Android before you revert to your handy notes app. It sends daily notifications about what you need to do, so it’s a good option for people who need little reminders to get going. 

Android only

The best for higher stakes cleaning jobs: Forfeit

Credit: Forfeit

This app also makes an appearance on my list of best ones for staying accountable to goals, but it works here perfectly: With Forfeit, you put down between $1 and $50 before you start your task (in this case, cleaning a room, or your whole place), set a time limit, and upload proof of getting it done before your deadline—or else you lose your money. Get it done and you get the money back. If you struggle with the motivation to clean, this might be your way out. 

Android | iOS

The best app to stay focused on your cleaning: Home Routines

Credit: Home Routines

Home Routines is similar to the others here in that you create your checklist and indicate how often you want to tackle each task, but it’s novel in that there is a built-in timer and it works offline, so you can turn on airplane mode, buckle down, and complete your tasks within the timer limit. If you’re prone to distractions, this is the one for you. It costs $4.99 to download.

iOS only

The best app for cleaning multiple rooms: Spotless

Credit: Spotless

Spotless helps you set task lists for every room in your home and has a simple interface that enables you to indicate how clean different areas are at a given time, which gives the app the information it needs to prioritize tasks for you. When everyone in your home has Spotless, their app will be updated in real time when someone else cleans, so no one ever ends up going over a chore that’s already been taken care of. It’s free, but setting up unlimited tasks will cost you $4.99. 

iOS only

The best app for decluttering: Toss

Credit: Toss

Toss is free and easy to use, but packs a punch: It will help you declutter, not just clean, your home. You’ll get a task every day, like clearing the utensil drawer or your medicine cabinet. You can skip any task you want, but if you choose to accept the day’s assignment, you can mark down how many things you threw away, and the app will track them all. After a while, you’ll see just how many mismatched socks or old cables you’ve gotten rid of, which is great motivation to keep going.  

iOS only

13 of the Most Infamously Confusing Movies You Can Stream Right Now

Madame Web didn't set out to confound the few who saw it. The comic book movie just ended up that way—because of incompetence, lazy filmmaking, or something else, we may never know for sure.

However, many films created by auteurs are intended to confound their audience, begging moviegoers to unravel the plot threads to find the story's real message. More often than not, they are successful. But some movies leave audiences frustrated and still searching for a movie's meaning after the credits roll. Here are a baker's dozen films that have a reputation for baffling and bewildering audiences.

Tenet (2020)

There have been a multitude of blog posts and YouTube videos claiming they can explain the plot of Christopher Nolan's time-travel adventure. While it does boast some eye-popping action set pieces, even the Oscar-winning director admits that this film, which stars John David Washington and Robert Pattinson, is "not all comprehensible," so if you watch this mind-bending thriller, just enjoy the ride.

Where to stream: Digital rental

Dune (1984)

Honestly, almost any film directed by the surrealist David Lynch would fit on this list, but none of them have required a glossary to explain the world Lynch crafted from Frank Herbert's sci-fi masterpiece. When you also consider that director Denis Villeneuve managed to craft two hit films from the same novel, you start to wonder if Mulholland Drive is really that complicated.

Where to stream: Max, Digital rental

Enemy (2014)

Speaking of Denis Villeneuve, the director's follow-up to the moody Prisoners reunites him with that film's star, Jake Gyllenhaal. This absolute head-scratcher about doppelgängers got little attention upon release, as is the fate for most of A24's non-horror offerings. (Its marketing team doesn't seem to have figured out how to sell films that don't have a cool hook.) It has gained cult status in the decade since its release, while its Canadian-born director has moved into big-budget filmmaking with Arrival and his pair of Dune adaptations. 

Where to stream: Kanopy, Cinemax, Digital rental

Barton Fink (1991)

The Coen Brothers' film about a pretentious screenwriter trying to unlock his creativity took home a slew of awards at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, including its top prize, the Palme d'Or. But why? Is it because it satirizes Hollywood so well, or is it for its metaphorical take on heaven and hell? Chances are it's both, but when you see John Goodman running down a fiery hotel hallway with a shotgun at the film's end, you may wonder what message the directors were actually trying to convey. 

Where to stream: Digital rental

Inherent Vice (2014)

Joaquin Phoenix plays an investigator trying to find his missing ex-girlfriend and her wealthy new beau, but that one case grows to three in an entertaining film filled with a great '70s rock soundtrack, puzzling contradictions, and a labyrinthine plot that demands multiple viewings. The good news is that Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's equally complicated novel is a film you actually want to revisit.

Where to stream: Paramount+ with Showtime, Digital rental

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Your favorite director's favorite movie has such an unusual and mysterious ending that you'll have to watch its subpar sequel, 2010: The Year We Made Contact, to understand what it all meant. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, this classic's groundbreaking special effects still (rather amazingly) hold up, making it worth a look.

Where to stream: Max, Digital rental

Tinker Tailor Solider Spy (2011)

This film boasts a cast of every great British actor in the last 30 years, but condensing John le Carré's complex, intricate spy novel into something digestible was something the filmmakers could not achieve. Instead, seek out the 1979 BBC adaptation starring Alec Guinness as former spy George Smiley, which tells its story of double agents and betrayal in just over five hours.

Where to stream: Starz, Digital rental

Under the Skin (2014)

There are plenty of subreddits dedicated to explanations about Oscar-winner Jonathan Glazer's film about an alien (Scarlett Johansson) who seduces and harvests humans (we think) but then begins to sympathize with them (it's a theory). It all boils down to one powerful scene with a baby alone on a beach that, for some, nails the film's theme or, for others, muddles the plot. 

Where to stream: Kanopy, Max, Digital rental

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays an avatar for the film's writer and director, Charlie Kaufman. He struggles to put on a play inside a life-size replica of New York City he's built with the MacArthur Grant he was awarded. As the years go on, the distinction between the play and the real world becomes muddled, leaving the actors (and the movie's viewers) struggling to figure out what's really happening.

Where to stream: Digital rental

Annihilation (2018)

As evidenced by the over 20 percent disparity between critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, this visually stunning yet bizarre sci-fi film starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac left moviegoers with more questions than answers. It's about a biologist trying to discover what happened to her husband while inside a phenomenon called "The Shimmer," but it's likely the film's ambiguous ending left audiences flummoxed and frustrated.

Where to stream: Pluto TV, Digital rental

Asteroid City (2023)

It starts as another kitschy Wes Anderson film, this one about aliens making contact with humans in the small titular desert town. As the characters deal with the uncertainty of this development, it suddenly becomes a meta-satire about...storytelling? If you're already a fan of Anderson's style, there's a lot to love here. If not, it's doubtful this disjointed star-studded gem will sway you. 

Where to stream: Prime Video, Digital rental

The Fountain (2006)

Brad Pitt reportedly dropped out of this film because he found the script Darren Aronofsky co-wrote illogical. Pitt was replaced by Hugh Jackman, who searches for eternal life over three different timelines. The stories never coalesced for the few who saw it, and it's now considered one of the biggest box office flops ever. 

Where to stream: Digital rental

Naked Lunch (1991)

Critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert said in their televised review that they admired David Cronenberg's adaptation of William S. Burroughs' novel about paranoia and addiction but couldn't recommend it. It's not hard to see why. Cronenberg integrates elements of the Beat writer's life and work into the screenplay, but the film's mystical elements and talking bugs make the plot almost incomprehensible.

Where to stream: Max

Pancake Mix Makes the Easiest, Tastiest Frying Batter

Surprisingly, some people absolutely despise boxed pancake mixes. Making pancakes is “easy,” so why buy a pointless mix? Well, my boxed-carb friends, the haters fail to see how versatile this mix really is. Not only can you make killer apple fritters with pancake mix but it makes a versatile and flavorful batter for almost anything. Today, I made a highly snackable mound of veggies with a tempura-esque batter I whipped up from pancake mix, and you can too.

It’s not that I have a hard time eating vegetables, I’m a big fan (go broccoli!), but they can get boring even for the biggest veggie enthusiast. Having an easy-to-remember batter recipe to lean on can make it a breeze to use up leftover red peppers, asparagus, squash, or those last sweet potatoes you can’t seem to finish. The ratio of pancake mix to water is 1:1, which means (for me at least) this batter couldn’t be easier to remember.

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Here are tools that can help make frying easier and more consistent:

• Candy Thermometer with Pot Clip

• Frydaddy Electric Deep Fryer

• Deep Fryer Pot with Draining Lid

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How to make tempura-ish vegetables with pancake mix

The batter thinly coats the broccoli, pepper, and hot dog slices. Hot dogs aren't a vegetable, but let me live. Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Traditional tempura batter is objectively simple to make—it’s a mixture of flour, egg, and ice water—but occasionally using something like complete pancake mix can feel approachable and thrifty. Plus, there are other ingredients involved that give this recipe aeration and that malty flavor you know and love from pancake mix.

1. Heat the oil and prep the veggies

The batter comes together in moments, so it’s best to prepare everything else before adding water to the pancake mix. Most vegetables (and fruits that we view as veggies) taste great lightly battered and fried, so use whatever you like. I usually end up slicing the stray pepper, remaining broccoli florets, sweet potatoes, or mushrooms for this. Cut them into bite-sized, or two-bite pieces. Heat about a half-inch to an inch of neutral cooking oil in a pot or skillet, whatever vessel you like for frying. Aim for 350°F to 375°F degrees. 

2. Make the batter

Like I mentioned before, complete pancake mix can make for a versatile batter. You can make a thick and doughy batter, or a light and thin batter akin to tempura. I used three-quarters of a cup each of water and complete pancake mix. I added the water in three additions while whisking to minimize lumps and got enough runny batter to cover about two cups of vegetable pieces. If you decide to make your batter thicker, keep in mind it may take extra time to cook.

3. Dip and fry

Dunk the veggies in the batter and coat them thoroughly. The batter is runny so you’ll want to flip each morsel again just before moving it into the hot oil. I used a fork to flip the veggies and then scoot them into the pot. Allow the veggies to cook for about a minute on each side, or until crisp and lightly browned. Drain them on a paper towel lined plate or a wire cooling rack. Between each batch, use a slotted spoon to scoop out stray chunks of batter floating in the oil.

I like to give everything fried a sprinkle of salt as soon as it comes out of the hot oil. Serve your pan-pura veggies with a flavorful dipping sauce, and enjoy them immediately, as they’ll start to lose their airy, crunchy quality if they sit around.