New York
How Justine Doiron, a TikTok Cook, Spends Her Sundays
Justine Doiron didn’t plan on becoming a recipe developer when she moved to New York in 2016. She was fresh out of Cornell University’s hospitality program and had embarked on a career in public relations. Cooking was just a hobby then.
Today, she’s better known by her online moniker Justine Snacks and shares recipe videos with 2.3 million followers on TikTok.
Ms. Doiron, 30, first gave TikTok a whirl in April 2020. Since the app’s main audience seemed to be teenagers, she geared her content toward them with trending recipes for sushi cakes and pasta flowers. Eventually, her style morphed into what she’s best known for today: approachable, veggie-forward recipes paired with stories from her day-to-day life.
She recently published “Justine Cooks: A Cookbook” and has another one in the works. All of Ms. Doiron’s recipe testing, on and off camera, is done in the kitchen of her 250-year-old wood frame house in the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn.
“I’m really building out my dream life in the house, because this year’s been the year of Martha Stewart and Ina Garten, and their resurgence of this ‘nostalgia core,’” she said.
Ms. Doiron lives with her fiancé, Eric Lipka, 31, an intelligence analyst, their French bulldog, Walter, and their rescue cat, Gladiator.
EARLY TO RISE I wake up at 6 a.m. if not earlier. I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately, which I guess just comes with age and general anxiety about things (love that). I also really like my mornings to myself. I use the first hour of the morning to ingest coffee like it’s my job and write down my general outline and plans for the week.
TO MARKET TO MARKET I go to the Carroll Gardens Greenmarket as my grossest self. I’m just pajamas-to-jeans, a T-shirt, a puffy jacket, a coat, beanie, puffy eyes and S.P.F. on my face, and I’m out the door by 7:30 a.m. I like seeing everything at its fullest potential. I don’t like to feel like I might have missed out something.
Carroll Gardens has ACQ Bread Co., which is my favorite bread in the entire city — it’s everyone’s favorite bread. They have a line down the block no matter how early I am to the market. Every two weeks I get their Living Bread, which has seeds and sprouts.
GUILTY PLEASURE Afterward, I pop into Trader Joe’s. It’s a 10-minute walk from the Carroll Gardens market, so the amount of guilt I feel walking into Trader Joe’s with two tote bags filled of vegetables that aren’t theirs, to get five cans of chickpeas, some edamame and some coffee creamer, is crazy, but it’s part of my routine. Then I take the subway home.
LEISURELY BREAKFAST My big luxury is a big, slow breakfast, my shower and being lazy for the next 90 minutes. For breakfast, I toast two slices of the Living Bread I just bought, and then I like to boil jammy eggs. I’m a three egg kind of girl, and I mash them up with chili, flaky salt, red wine vinegar, black pepper and I just put that on the toast. It’s a great time to get avocado, so if I have blessed myself with a ripened avocado and have that available, that’ll go on there too. Eric, if he’s lucky enough, and awake and hungry, will get the same.
FIXER UPPER Our house is amazing, but when we got it it needed some tender love and care. I really want a Brooklyn garden in the backyard (which is just concrete, let’s be honest). We’re making garden beds that have good drainage, and I’m watching the sun and seeing where it’ll go. Soon, I’ll start seeds on the third floor of the house.
TEST KITCHEN I’m usually so excited and inspired by ingredients, especially right when I get them, because nothing hits like the vegetables you just buy. They’re at their peak gorgeousness and freshness. I’m currently in the throes of working on book No. 2, so I do a quick little recipe test, or a quick little, “let’s put these flavors together with this ingredient and kind of see where it nets out.” Maybe this will turn into an idea further down the line. We’re not super hungry since we had a late breakfast, so it’s a little peckish recipe test snack.
EARLY BIRD I’m such a morning person and a lazy night person that sometimes we meet our friends for just drinks or aperitivo. Agi’s Counter is in our neighborhood, and that’s my favorite place. I like to get the window seat (if you know, you know) and just get something super cozy there for dinner.
CLEAN UP I have kept this habit since my 9-to-5 corporate days. I can’t start a week without feeling some semblance of: normalcy, control, clean. I just straighten the house, do whatever laundry I can and make sure the kitchen’s clean. It takes me about an hour, and I do it while listening to a podcast like “Las Culturistas.” It used to be so much more intense, but I’ve relaxed now that we have a dog and a cat and I share the home with somebody else. I realize I’ve let go of a lot of control of things, but the cleaning has stayed.
EARLY TO BED Eric and I are together most of the day, but we like to prioritize hanging out all in the same room. He might be logging on and finishing up some emails, while I read and prepare to fall asleep. I’ve really gotten into reading. I loved “The Wedding People” by Alison Espach and I’m getting back into reading Maggie O’Farrell — I leap at her books anytime they’re available on the library’s Libby app. I’m in this phase of my life where I completely understand how lucky I am to have so much peace and so much freedom with my schedule. I use that freedom to go to bed on the earlier side.
New York
Driver Who Killed Mother and Daughters Sentenced to 3 to 9 Years
A driver who crashed into a woman and her two young daughters while they were crossing a street in Brooklyn in March, killing all three, was sentenced to as many as nine years in prison on Wednesday.
The driver, Miriam Yarimi, has admitted striking the woman, Natasha Saada, 34, and her daughters, Diana, 8, and Deborah, 5, after speeding through a red light. She had slammed into another vehicle on the border of the Gravesend and Midwood neighborhoods and careened into a crosswalk where the family was walking.
Ms. Yarimi, 33, accepted a judge’s offer last month to admit to three counts of second-degree manslaughter in Brooklyn Supreme Court in return for a lighter sentence. She was sentenced on Wednesday by the judge, Justice Danny Chun, to three to nine years behind bars.
The case against Ms. Yarimi, a wig maker with a robust social media presence, became a flashpoint among transportation activists. Ms. Yarimi, who drove a blue Audi A3 sedan with the license plate WIGM8KER, had a long history of driving infractions, according to New York City records, with more than $12,000 in traffic violation fines tied to her vehicle at the time of the crash.
The deaths of Ms. Saada and her daughters set off a wave of outrage in the city over unchecked reckless driving and prompted calls from transportation groups for lawmakers to pass penalties on so-called super speeders.
Ms. Yarimi “cared about only herself when she raced in the streets of Brooklyn and wiped away nearly an entire family,” Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, said in a statement after the sentencing. “She should not have been driving a car that day.”
Mr. Gonzalez had recommended the maximum sentence of five to 15 years in prison.
On Wednesday, Ms. Yarimi appeared inside the Brooklyn courtroom wearing a gray shirt and leggings, with her hands handcuffed behind her back. During the brief proceedings, she addressed the court, reading from a piece of paper.
“I’ll have to deal with this for the rest of my life and I think that’s a punishment in itself,” she said, her eyes full of tears. “I think about the victims every day. There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t think about what I’ve done.”
On the afternoon of March 29, a Saturday, Ms. Yarimi was driving with a suspended license, according to prosecutors. Around 1 p.m., she turned onto Ocean Parkway, where surveillance video shows her using her cellphone and running a red light, before continuing north, they said.
At the intersection with Quentin Road, Ms. Saada was stepping into the crosswalk with her two daughters and 4-year-old son. Nearby, a Toyota Camry was waiting to turn onto the parkway.
Ms. Yarimi sped through a red light and into the intersection. She barreled into the back of the Toyota and then shot forward, plowing into the Saada family. Her car flipped over and came to a rest about 130 feet from the carnage.
Ms. Saada and her daughters were killed, while her son was taken to a hospital where he had a kidney removed and was treated for skull fractures and brain bleeding. The Toyota’s five passengers — an Uber driver, a mother and her three children — also suffered minor injuries.
Ms. Yarimi’s car had been traveling 68 miles per hour in a 25 m.p.h. zone and showed no sign that brakes had been applied, prosecutors said. Ms. Yarimi sustained minor injures from the crash and was later taken to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation.
The episode caused immediate fury, drawing reactions from Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and Mayor Eric Adams, who attended the Saadas’s funeral.
According to NYCServ, the city’s database for unpaid tickets, Ms. Yarimi’s Audi had $1,345 in unpaid fines at the time of the crash. On another website that tracks traffic violations using city data, the car received 107 parking and camera violations between June 2023 and the end of March 2025. Those violations, which included running red lights and speeding through school zones, amounted to more than $12,000 in fines.
In the months that followed, transportation safety groups and activists decried Ms. Yarimi’s traffic record and urged lawmakers in Albany to pass legislation to address the city’s chronic speeders.
Mr. Gonzalez on Wednesday said that Ms. Yarimi’s sentence showed “that reckless driving will be vigorously prosecuted.”
But outside the courthouse, the Saada family’s civil lawyer, Herschel Kulefsky, complained that the family had not been allowed to speak in court. “ They are quite disappointed, or outraged would probably be a better word,” he said, calling the sentence “the bare minimum.”
“I think this doesn’t send any message at all, other than a lenient message,” Mr. Kulefsky added.
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