12 Things That Delighted Us Last Week: From Our “Boyfriend” Sweater to Alo Dupes

“Buying sports bras always felt like a chore to me,” says our senior writer Lauren Ro. “A lot of them are expensive, and the sizing is often tricky to figure out.” So when she started hearing about an activewear brand on Amazon called CRZ Yoga that was supposedly comparable to Alo, Ro thought it was worth a try. The sports bra she bought quickly became the only one she wanted to wear while working out. Two more bras and countless high- and low-impact workouts later, she reports, “For affordable, well-made workout gear, you can’t beat CRZ Yoga.”

“Even though I bake professionally, I hate my stand mixer,” says cookbook author Jessie Sheehan. “It’s a hot and wildly controversial take, I know, but I am all about easy baking … and a stand mixer does not an easy-peasy baker make.” Instead, she uses this cordless hand mixer whenever she can. It “weighs almost nothing (comparatively speaking) but is still a workhorse that can cream butter and sugar with the best of them,” she says.

Below-freezing temperatures and zealous radiators raise the question, How do you stay warm without feeling like you’re running a fever? The answer for four Strategist staffers, it turns out, is a 100 percent cotton Gap sweater. “It’s the ideal weekend-with-the-kids sweater: I feel put together wearing it without having to be too precious about it getting mucked up,” Ro says. Last weekend, a fellow mom even asked if the sweater was La Ligne.

Strategist junior writer Bella Druckman is but one of many on a quest to (mostly) rid her kitchen of plastic. Her latest upgrade is this stainless-steel rice cooker that replaced the nonstick one she’d been using since college. Perhaps most important, she says, it’s easy to clean. “If you’d rather not hand-wash it, you can stick the inner pot in the dishwasher and forget about it until the next time you’d like to make some plump, fluffy, and microplastics-free rice in less than half an hour,” she says.

After learning the intricacies of tofu presses — they vary by price, material, and size — Strategist writer Martha Tuber went on a hunt for a small one made with minimal pieces and, of course, that churned out a super-flat, uniform block of tofu. She landed on this plastic-free option, which she says is “the most self-explanatory and low-lift press I tested, and it’s attractively sleek, to boot.” Simply “plop the tofu inside, top it with the brick, and let the water drain out of openings on the bottom and sides” — et voilà.

“If you’re going to have children, or bake with children, you’re going to have to accept the multicolored, waxy, sweetened confetti we call ‘sprinkles’ into your heart,” write Strategist contributors Fanny Singer and Greta Caruso. For those who are anti artificial dye, they recommend these nonpareils from Supernatural that are cane sweetened and colored only with natural vegetable dyes.

As a self-proclaimed “amateur bed-rotter who believes they could go pro,” Strategist writer Erin Schwartz has always wanted to live life à la Princess Margaret — lazing in bed while listening to the radio until an 11 a.m. bath. “My normal bed attire of a Hanes boys’ tank with the hem chopped off and ratty sweatpants wouldn’t suit,” Schwartz writes, but a pair of pajamas fit for a fancy prince would. These Salter House pajamas, made of Japanese organic cotton “with a small woven grid pattern, feel substantial yet cozy,” they say. “I’ve spent all day in these and felt princely rather than zhlubby.”

Chef David Lebovitz loves peanut butter but with one caveat: It should be crunchy, not smooth. The same principle applies to this crunchy “everything” butter made of eight types of nuts and seeds, which he counts among the things he can’t live without. “It’s amazing to put it on a piece of baguette in the afternoon, but I really try to parcel it out and just enjoy it au naturel,” he says. “It’s the best thing you can put in your mouth.”

This week’s installment of “Don’t Dillydally” includes Shark’s latest addition to its hot-tools lineup, the wet-to-dry styler called the SilkiPRO Straight. “While I’m still putting my sample through its paces, Chinea Rodriguez over at The Cut noted that the SilkiPRO straightened her type-4 curls in just 20 minutes,” says our writer and hot-tool expert Dominique Pariso.

Lori Taylor Davis’s introduction to makeup came through mascara — specifically, this one from L’Oréal that was one of the first makeup products her grandmother allowed her to use. She says her grandmother also used to use it: “It has been around forever. When you put it on, it stays on, but it comes off with soap and water.”

Sure, recipe developer Kristina Cho has used her mooncake molds to make mooncakes, but she has recently been using them to make everything from mooncake ice-cream sandwiches to mochi to Chinese five-spice shortbread. The latter, she says, “was almost like a half-shortbread, half-gingerbread cookie, both of which are relatively stiff, so they held their shape and the impressions and didn’t spread too much in the oven.”

Before her business trips, Robin Arzón inputs her travel plans into an app called Flykitt that generates a personalized jet-lag-fighting kit with vitamins and red-light glasses that will arrive at your doorstep. Best of all, it works: After a recent flight to London, she says, “It was bedtime there when I would still be out wrestling with all the things in a New York day, but I felt ready for bed. I was like, This is bizarre. I’ve done nothing but be on a plane.”

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