Sally's Kitchen & Stuff

Weekend project: Make some candy for halloween

I made a batch of cream caramels over the weekend that was so delicious that by the time sunday night rolled around they were half gone. :( Now I' have to make another full batch for passing out at halloween.

Here's a link to the recipe - it's not mine. Upon review and a few tests, it's a very versatile recipe - cook it to a softball and you can coat cheesecakes, brownies, or cookie bars with it. Cook it to a sauce and dribble over waffles. Cook it to a hardball and they will set into yummy pieces of caramel.

Of course, I'm not going to leave you guys on your own. Here's what I learned from making caramel all Saturday:

• Use a pot. I know, it says "a large saucepan." Two cups of cream boiling away in a saucepan would overspill by the time 10 minutes have passed in the boiling session.
• Do not skip ANY steps in a candy recipe. If it says to slowly pour in the second cup of cream after the first ingredients started boiling, DO IT.
• To test for doneness, have a few cups of room temperature water ready. Drop half a teaspoon full of the candy mixture in, and then pour the water out. That's when you find out if you have a softball or hardball.
• If a recipe calls for a candy thermometer and gives you precise temperatures, don't even think about eyeballing it. Candy making is like baking: it's more about science than food.
• It is OK to use salted butter. It'd crank up the sodium content, but it does add a little something to the final product. Ever had salt-water-taffee? Mmmm.
• Don't try to play with "making" chocolate until you have learned how to temper store-bought chocolate.
• Don't leave the stuff on BOIL. Make sure it "just" boils, as like just above a simmer. Make sure your element temperature is below medium or the sugar will burn. You might find that electric works much better than gas in this project.
• When you pour your candy to set, butter your pan and then line it in wax paper. Otherwise you'd never get the stuff out. I learned this the hard way on my first batch.

Good luck! And it can take up to two hours for your candy to form a hardball, but MAN is it worth it. Everyone's going to get caramel sauce and hard caramels for christmas this year.

Cook pork to well-done? *blah*

We had Stu's mom over for dinner last Saturday, and I made pork chops. Upon putting her knife into it, she asked me if it was cooked enough. The pork chops that she know of doesn't bounce back when she cuts into it - it should be solid. I showed her that there's no hint of pink juice coming out as she cuts into it, therefore, it is done.

Heck, even if you cook pork to medium, it's still ok.

You know how people are always paranoid about cooking pork until it's perfectly white even near the bone, dry as a hunk of rock, and over 160F? You don't have to do that anymore. Most people don't realize this, namely, my boyfriend, his mother, and pretty much all of our relatives. First of all, the first thing I do with pork is throw it in the freezer when it gets home. Freezing effectively kills all the parasites that MIGHT be in the middle of the meat, which, by the way, are most likely not there in the first place.

There are approximately 12 cases of trichinellosis per year in the U.S. Most of that from eating undercooked game meats. Since we eradicated the practice of feeding raw meats to pigs, the whole practice of cooking pork until it dries out is completely outdated. So, what do you do? Treat pork as you would beef. Bacteria lives on the outside of the meat, so as long as the outside is seared, you're fine. If you're paranoid about parasites, freeze it. If you don't want to freeze it, invest in a meat thermometer and cook it to 140F.

Making Hollandaise sauce - the easy way

Making hallandaise sauce from scratch can be daunting - there's the whole double-boiler thing, and the constantly whisking thing, and then there's the whole bit about adding boiling water a spoon at a time. There is, however, a simpler way to do this.

Dump everything into the same bowl at the same time, whisk as the bowl sits over simmering (not boiling) water until thick. That's it. Try it yourself - because we're not adding boiling water, there is no risk of the egg scrambling.

Here are a few additional things to watch out for:

• Use the freshest eggs you can find. If it's been sitting in the fridge for a week...don't make hallandaise with it.
• Make sure your bowl sits OVER not IN the simmering water.
• Use a wire whisk and don't ever ever stop whisking.
• If you're still failing, try melting the butter in the microwave first. Stick your finger in it to check that it's not too hot before adding to the eggs.
• Use fresh lemon juice when a recipe calls for vinegar.

Freeze your meats pre-cooked.

Generally I wait til there's a sale or special of some sort, then I bring it home, season with just salt and pepper and cook it right away in a few different ways - broil, fry, grilled - and chop into strips. Put them in freezer bags, label them, and throw them into the freezer as flat as possible.

When you get home from work, just defrost one in the microwave with some sauce inside the bag and add it to whatever you happen to be cooking. Teriyaki chicken can be had in 20 minutes, with quick-cooking rice; add some ham and cheese and you've got what I call "open-face chicken cordon bleu."

Summer: the season of the farmer's market

Ripe, juicy beefsteak tomatoes. Portabellas meaty enough to be a burger. Dark cherries glistening in the sun. Natural smoked meats in one stall, while a butcher serve up grilled meats in another. Unpasteurised fresh honey comb goes for $3, maple syrup goes for $10 for the bottle. Fresh ears of corn, $5 a dozen. So fresh you could just eat it after pulling off the husk. Last month, strawberries were in prime season. This month, the rasberries and cherries. Next month it'd be the reign of the blueberries.

I just live for the farmer's market. In Toronto, we run farmer's markets from the end of June until October, going from oranges to pumpkins. Even at the heart of town you can take the subway out to one. Makes you wonder why people even bother visiting the supermarket during the market season - prices are better, the produce is fresher, and you're supporting local farmers.

I bought a couple of portabellos that smelled like grilled steak, a basket of cherry tomatoes that are bursting with flavour, corn, bell peppers ($2 for 4, orange sweet peppers) and ran out of time at the smoked meat stall. Tonight I'll whip up a portobello recipe, but right now, I'm enjoying a great fresh tomato salad. When cherry tomatoes are this good, you won't need much more than salt and pepper.

Carve up a handful of cherry tomatoes into halves, toss with a pinch of salt, fresh ground pepper, and a touch of olive oil. If you have some feta cheese handy, toss it in. Leave at room temperature for 20 minutes. Tomatoes are at their best normally when bought green and left to ripen on the windowsill in the sun, but farm fresh ones picked ripe are the best.

So what are you waiting for? Google one of your local farmer's markets and go shopping!

Don't slave over your chicken

I've always thought that the western roast chicken is way too much work. When the Chinese cook a chicken, we marinade it in soy sauce, throw it in a wok with a rack, put a bit of ginger and green onions at the botton with a bit of water, and just cover it until it's cooked. The result is always tender, juicy, yum. The whole idea that I have to rub down the bird with butter and baste it every hour is just so much trouble.

Of course, every mother I've met does turkey and chicken the same way: they slave over a broiling hot oven or wake up at 7 am to start prepping and nursing the bird. They rub, they spice, they baste every hour. So the first time I roasted a chicken I figured that if my grannie can do it in a wok with zero work, I can do it in an oven. So I just stuffed, tied, and left the bird in the oven for hours. No basting, no fussing, no rubbing all over with grease. (I did rub it with spices and salted it) I didn't even flip or turn it - it's on a roasting rack, so I figured it'd be alright. The result was the same - it's juicy. It's good. It's...well...it tastes the same as the other birds that other people slaved over, except with less work.

This is, however the time when I would actually recommend a meat thermometer. Take the chicken out 10 degrees early, cover, and let the internal temperature rise. Beef can be eaten rare, chicken, never.

There is a plus side to this method as well - opening and closing the oven cools the bird down and lowers the temperature so that it takes longer and more energy to cook your bird if you baste.

Another thing - pick a "roaster." An 8lb - 10lb bird is perfect. Smaller ones tend to come out dry.

Garlicky hands, what to do?

To remove the smell of pungent root vegetables from your hands, simply run the cold water (NOT THE HOT WATER!) and rub your hands on a stainless teel utensil. If you run the hot water your skin will absorb the odor. Do this RIGHT AFTER handling the vegetables, not after you're finished cooking. :)

Yes, it completely baffles me (and everybody else) why it works.

As for the garlic itself, after you peel and crush garlic, let it sit for at least 15 minutes before cooking. You're letting the enzyme Allinase mix with the amino acid Allin, which produces Allicin that contains a sulfur. It's been proven to slow down the growth of cancerous tumours. Yup. Garlic fights cancer.

Shopping around for a slow cooker.

Since I work late and have very little time in the evening, long elaborate meals (which I LOVE to make on weekends) aren't so appealing for this cook on workdays. So I've decided my next purchase will be a nice slow cooker with lots of room - enough for a roast, a pot of soup, or a stew for 8. Looking for the best one, however, brought up a whole stew (mind the pun) of other small appliances from the net. The covered BBQ-pit. A new rice cooker. (Ours is uh...old.)

Using individual appliances instead of your element all the time also saves a bundle on your hydro bill. So should I take over my counter space with gadgets that I'd actually use? Well, considering that a decent slow cooker is less than $50, and a slow cooking BBQ-pit is around $100, why not?

How Stuff Works: Slow Cookers Explained

Urban Legends: stuff that doesn't really work.

My granny was a great cook. She could saute, stirfry, steam, even make quick soups from nothing but a plain old wok. She also taught me things like sticking sour fruits in our bucket of rice to ripen them; storing persimmins in cold water streams in the country to keep them cold, rubbing a stainless steel spoon on your fingers to get rid of the smell of garlic.

The question is, do those things work?

"A Spoon dangled in a bottle of champagne keeps it fizzy"
The mythbusters busted this one.

"Searing meat keeps the juices in."
I fall for this one regularly, but really, I just do it to make things taste better. When you sear meat, it caramelizes the surface and create complex flavours that make great sauces. But it doesn't really keep more juices in than when you would, say, just stick the darn thing in the oven.

"Mayonaise spoils easily, so in a picnic, pack vinegrette based salads instead."
Complete BS. Both mayo and vinegrette contains vinegar. :) And they both keep well. Break out that mayo based potato salad!

"Always cook pasta with the lid off."
Lid on, lid off. Makes no difference, really. You'll endup losing a lot of heat with the lid off, thereby using more energy. I choose to keep the lid on and check periodically by bite. Who came up with this one?

"Putting a potato in an oversalted soup/stew will soak the salt up."
Martha Stewart announced this one, I believe. Doesn't work. Your best bet? Add more vegetables and water. Or if you're in a huge hurry, throw in a cup of raw sugar. Chinese cane sugar works well.

"Eating from aluminum cookware causes Alzhimers."
This was news to me when the bf mentioned it, so I thought I'd look it up. Turned out that the link is there, but the cause and effect is reversed. Aluminum does not cause Alzhimers, but rather, Alzhimers causes aluminum buildup.

"Wrapping celery in aluminum foil keeps it fresh"
I did a test of this last week. I washed and chopped, then wrapped one batch in saran wrap, and the other in aluminum foil. Both were kept in the veggie compartment of the fridge. One week later, both tasted the same, and the aluminum-wrapped ones are drier. I think it just needed to be in the dark.

"Drinking coffee cures a hangover."
A hangover is caused by dehydration. Coffee is a diuretic. Do the math. It can't possibly work. :)

"Carrots improve night vision."
Um, not really. Vitamin A is good for your eyes, but carrots contain an OBSCENE amount of beta-carotene (which is converted to vitamin A as your body needs it) and your eyes only need a smidgen. If you throw back a steak, there's vitamin A in it.

Feel free to add anything else in the comments!

Personalizing a "Frozen" meal

We all do it. Sure, we might have company over by 7:30 pm, but here we are, frazzled and just barely home by 6. Whatever should we do? We open the freezer.

What can we do to make frozen delights (ICK!) taste more delectable?

Vegetables
Turn the heat right up in a skillet, use two spoons of oil and a bit of butter spray. Add seasalt, a clove of REAL garlic, and saute until thawed. Then add chicken broth until cooked. If something goes awry and you have mushy overcooked veggies, puree it and use it as a sauce for your entree.

Appertizer - Meatballs
Panfry them! Forget the spaghetti and sauce and serve it with something off beat like soysauce + fish sauce + ginger + green onions.

Entree (uh oh. Now we're in trouble.)
Steaks will take you an hour to defrost, but will only take you 15 minutes to grill. If you have less time than that, go with chicken. 20 Minutes defrost (use warm running water - not hot), then it's a cinch to fry / saute / grill. If you're using frozen pre-cooked chicken, add seasalt and crushed garlic.

And whatever you do, DON'T EVEN think about using a "frozen entree" where you just stick it in the oven. They're undisguisable. If you must use pre-packaged stuff, use something that comes with separate packages of sauce. Just substitute your own and your friends won't be able to tell the difference. If anything says "add water," add wine or chicken broth.

Dessert
This one's tricky. Too elaborate and people will know that it came out of a wrapper. Pick something that is easy to make in the first place (apple blossoms is a good choice) and top with fresh fruits / real whipped cream. Don't try to pass off the frozen New York cheesecake as your own.

And that, is this week's lesson (hard-earned by yours truly) on "if you don't have time for it, fake it."

Yes, nobody noticed.

Cheap meals that feed LOTS of people?

Jamie wrote:
> um hi, i was just curious to ask if you have any ideas for big meals (10-12 people) that would cost less than 20-25$ at the most? or a way to reinvent pasta or rice based foods? i have a meet with my teen group every week and though i love cooking i'm just running outta ideas...
> do i dare? ...yup. HELP!
> p.s i love reading your blog, it's the only interesting one they feature.T

Thank you! I just love reading comments when I get back from a weekend!

If you have a grill, you can bring the whole group outdoors and ask them to bring some meat that they would prefer. If each person bring a little something, all you'll need is BBQ sauce. You can variate what you put on as a glaze - I love orange marmalade chicken wings, by the way. ;)

Roast beef is cheaper than you'd think: the cheaper, fattier cuts will put you back less than $20 - just pick whatever's on sale! The last time I went to a market to pick up roast beef, I scored a pot roast for $7.99, 4 lbs. That fed 8. So just double it and you can feed 16, and still have $ left over for the trimmings. The traditional chinese congee is a proverbial crowd pleaser. People that's NEVER heard of congee loves it. It's time consuming, but one pot of congee can easily feed 10+, and costs less than $10 to make. Sheperd's pie made with lamb and beef is another favorite - costs less than $15 to make and easily feeds 10+ with leftovers.

If you're used to cooking spaghetti and serving as is, may I suggest a baked spaghetti dish with cheese, cream, and salt? You can accent pasta & cheese with pretty much anything. Salmon? Chunks of meat? Surimi? The sky's the limit.

Take a walk in a chinese supermarket and pick up some chinese sausages, preserved meats, green onions. You might end up with $50 worth of stuff, but the preserved meats really keep, and you only need a bit of each. Get some glutinous rice (chinese sticky rice) and cook WITH chopped bits of preserved meats and green onions, and a dash of soysauce for color. If you have a rice cooker, this is a snap to make. With a pot, you're going to have to brush the sides and bottom down with oil, and it's still going to stick. But the results are well worth it. (order "sticky rice" with chinese sausages at dim sum and find out)

Rules of thumb:

• Choose cheaper cuts of meat. When you're buying beef steaks, you may find that the cheaper cuts of meat has better marbling and fat distrubution, and actually taste better than its leaner counterpart. Chicken thighs are cheaper than chicken breasts, and depending on the recipe, tastes practically the same.
• Flank steaks are relatively cheap, the size of a flattened soccer ball, and when sliced, feeds plenty of people.
• Congee is magical. It keeps atomically hot for hours, it cooks on its own on the most part, and whatever cheap ingredients you throw into it at the beginning, you'd have a wonderfully thick soup at the end.
• You can serve a meaty (meat bone soup!) soup over a scoop of rice to make it more hearty.
• Mac and cheese doesn't just have to contain mac and cheese - you can add whatever you want!
• Seek out recipes than can be easily doubled / tripled / quardrupled, with common ingredients. It'd take you just a bit more time to prep, but just as long to cook.
• Slowcookers are great for big batches. Bouillabaisse, anyone?

Getting creative with ground beef

This one's for you, Ginny!

• Add orange or lemon zest in ground beef, form into thin patties, bread with flour, and pan fry. Glaze with orange/lemon marmalade. Drizzle sugared soy on top.
• Adding ground lamb (just a bit! the stuff takes over) to ground beef gives it more flavour and browns better for meat sauce.
• Make spoon sized ground beef patties with five-spice. Drench in egg and soy sauce. Deep fry. My grandma used to do this with minced any meat. Fish, pork, chicken, you name it.
• Mix with spices (it's like playing with food, really - ginger, honey, chilli...anything goes), pack onto the bottom of a ceramic plate in a thin layer, and steam.
• Make your own sausage patties by adding spices, fresh herbs, and other meats. If you throw enough salt in there it actually keeps pretty well frozen.
• Frittatas (an italian egg pizza) can be made with balls of ground beef, eggs, any sort of green leafed veggie, and potatoes. The effect is a whole meal in a slice of egg pizza. Just make sure you over-spice the beef.

Any recipe that calls for beef can be adjusted for ground beef. Szechuan beef? It actually tastes better with ground beef. Couple of things though - you MUST cook ground beef to well-done. And you should NEVER freeze ground beef unless you have a flash-freezer. Bateria can be on any part of the ground beef, and they multiply IN the lump in the freezer. When you take it out it's practically a colony. Yuck.

Making a perfect breakfast when you have ONE pan.

It's all about being resourceful, really. I have one really good pan. It's heavy, has a great copper bottom encased in stainless steel so the heat conduction on it is amazing. But I only have one. :(

So how do you make breakfast for two on one pan when you want to make over-easy as well as scrambled, and keep bacon hot? It's really quite simple. Cook the bacon first. Toast the bread. Then use the pan to cook the eggs, scramble one side not the other. Then take it OFF the heat and put the plate of bacon and toast on top. Wait five minutes. Bacon guaranteed to be still hot, eggs to be scrambled on one and over-easy on the other side.

BTW, if you haven't read my freezing bacon tip, here's a link. To unroll it, I usually just wrap it up in a dishcloth (it's too cold for my hands) and bend it a little to loosen, then use a butterknife to peel them out when they're being stubborn. Bacon go on sale from time to time, so I usually stock up.

Speaking of creative cooking...

A few things that I've tried that actually worked...

• I wanted to make potato and leek soup one day, and I had no potatoes. So I raided the snack cabinet. Half a tin of Sour Cream and Onion pringles did the job. I just had to boil the oil out of it.
• One day I simply had no salad dressing for the spinach salad. So I cooked the spinach and threw peanut butter on it. It turned out REALLY GOOD. Now the bf won't have spinach any other way.
• Seafood pasta. One problem. No seafood. The fish market's closed, the bf's coming home in an hour...sardines, canned oysters, and clam juice it is...he didn't even notice the sardines.
• Line the bottoms of pans with bumpy firm veggies (think carrots and califlower) when doing a roast. Then I grounded the whole bottom stuff up, added broth, and made a flourless gravy.
• I have nothing to glaze this roast with? What shall I do? Raid the pantry. Oh look...orange marmalade!

...and the ones that didn't work so well.

• Sugar and soysauce does NOT constitute teriyaki sauce. It's just sweet soysauce. Chinatown restaurants actually do this, but they do it with bags of MSG and sugar. You know when you order chang-fan? The sweet soy is MSG sugared soy.
• Caramels: Heavy Cream and sugar. That's all. Yes, add spices, but ground up cinnamon will NOT do. (the key is to get "essence" of cinnamon by either soaking and squeezing or getting a flavour shot.)
• Butter mixed with chocolate - good idea, since it melts better and spreads better. Bad idea: it NEVER sets.
• Roasted pears with cinnamon. Again, cinnamon powder seem to be a bad idea pretty much all around. It dominates.
• Hollandaise sauce made with peanut oil and butter flavoured spray instead of butter. No, it didn't emulsify. There simply wansn't enough solid there to hold on to the egg. I'll try this again some other time, maybe with Becel margarine.

Got any to share? Email me - sallysings at gmail dot com.

Make your own: spice blends

Pre-mixed seasonings are often much more expensive than plain old pepper - so unless you're obssessed about Montreal Steak Spice (as one ex just throws it on everything) and don't know how to replicate it, you can mix your own with common plain spices.

Cook's Theasaurus Spice Mixes of the world - illustrated, with some off-site links. You really can't go wrong if you look at this one.
About.com's Seasoning Mixes

Bonus: You can make your own gift basket of mixed spices.

Secret Ingredient of the day

President's Choice Creamy Seafood Sauce.

It's slightly tangy, has whole peppercorns in it, and goes perfect in scrambled eggs, alfredo sauce, served over dinner pastries. It also adds mucho calories, so I do hope you're not on a diet.

Dishpan hands should be nice hands.

The bf's been complaining about the redness on his hands from our harsh (ahahahahaha very funny) Toronto winter. I've got the perfect cure - something I've done since I was a lttle gal - Udder cream and rubber gloves.

Get yourself a bottle of Udder Cream. Rub liberally on your hands, slip on a pair of cotton gloves, then put good ole' yellow rubber gloves on top. Secure with elastic bands. Proceed to do a huge load of dishes with warm to hot water. The heat from the water will help the cream penetrate the skin, and guarantees milky smooth skin in 20 minutes. Who needs paraffin wax when you can just do the dishes?

Take a kitchen inventory

When was the last time you checked what you've got in the freezer? Do you know what's in your freezer? Do you think there might be a colony of dead lobsters that have evolved their own political systems by now? (I'm quoting Gaiman, in case you thought that was a stroke of MY brilliance.)

Sometimes stuff just piles up. All the little things we pick up at the grocery store (on impluse, *ahem*) and not use, all the little new sauces that seemed really cool to have around the house but never use, all the tins of white asparagus and shitake mushrooms that...that...tastes GROSS but you can't bear to throw out. Then you finally go grocery shopping for the umteenth time without  a list - again - and pick up more stuff - that you can't use - and find out - woefully - that you no longer have room for more crap.

Sounds familiar?

Time to take a kichen inventory.

You will need:
Scissors.
Disposable mini tupperware containers.
Sticky labels (I just use the little ones)
A Sharpie marker. (they don't smudge when the paper gets wet)
Transparent office tape. Scotch tape will do.
Old coffee/cookie tins lying around, we'll need those as well
Have a garbage bag handy, and have another bag for the food bank.
For inventorying, I use soft sheets of magnet cut into little bits and the upper half of my fridge.

• Take everything out of your pantry. Pasta, cans, dried herbs, cookie mixes. Take it ALL out.
• Check the expiry dates. If it's expired, it goes in the garbage bag.
• Now look at the rest of the stuff. What will you NOT eat? For me, it's the cans of shitake mushrooms. Some of the cake mixes also. Non-perishable foods you're not going to eat goes into the food bank baggie.
• Put all the herbs that are still in baggies into mini tupperware containers, then label and mark the expiry date on the SIDE of the container. If there's no expiry date, write down the month/year of when you bought it. Dried herbs usually lose its intensity in 6-12 months. You can toast it a bit before you use it to release flavour if it's getting too mild.
• Stack the containers, then turn sideways and put in a drawer, in an orientation where you can read the labels at a glace. You can use a cookie/chocolate box to put them in and keep them from rolling around.
• Organise cans by type - fruit? Veggie? Meat? Tomato paste based? Fish? Soup? Keep cans in a LOWER cupboard. I started doing that after one rummaging expedition turned into a bump on the head.
• Used coffee tins are great for keeping things like couscous, rice, and pasta. If you live in a cold/dry climate, you can get away with storing spaghetti in an open jar. I just pop the whole bag in there, top side up, and pop the lid on it. Label the side with a big label, and turn it so it faces you. Again - heavy things, lower cupboard.
• Things that are not used often - yeast and cake mixes in my case - can be stored in a higher cupboard.
• Make little magnets with some glossy paper, glue, and sheet magnets. Then cut out little dots from the leftovers. Use this to keep track of what you have in the cupboards. It's like...magnetic poetry for organizing!

You can do the same thing with the freezer as well. The whole idea is to have everything organized, LABELED, and easily recognized at a glance. Just remember: tupperware is your friend.

Grocery List generator (a firefox extension)

None for you internet explorer suckers. ;)

Here's the downlink
and here's where I first saw it: on Lifehacker.

Freeze: soup

The meat bone soup recipe I have listed on this site is utterly freeze-able. It doesn't contain anything that would fall apart after rapid reheating. That's why I always make a HUGE pot that would fill up 6 24 oz containers AFTER we had our fill.

Here's something about freezing stuff with tupperware containers: buy high quality stuff. If you ever drop a cheap container with frozen soup in it, it'd crack. Those "reusable" and disposable containers just won't do it - the plastic isn't flexible enough at sub-zero temperatures. But the high quality ones are expensive, and we can't have them sitting in the freezer for a month! We can't live without them! So here's a easy solution.

Line the bottom of the containers with Saran wrap. You want it to not only be completely flush gainst the sides and bottom, but hanging over the edge, with enough to fold over the top. Fold the sides of the wrap OUT, and pour cold soup in. Put a lid on it, and freeze for 24 hours. When it's nice and solid, just pop it out and wrap the tops with the extra. I have hunks of soup (ha) in the freezer that's about 6 weeks old (you can store them for up to 3 months) and every week or so I have a soup dinner. Even though it's just soup, you can add a lot of variety.

• Buy store bought dumplings of different flavours, and add them to soups after steaming.
• Add shrimp or egg noodles
• Add cooked rice, and let simmer for an hour for some almost instant congee
• Store some of it in clear stock (more goodies for the other container) to add flavour to stirfrys

Freeze: Cheese

• Before you grate a block of cheese, throw it in the freezer for 15 minutes. Firmer cheese is easier to grate.
• If you have a food processor, grate a whole kilo at a time. Buy big blocks at a discount. Spoon into individual freezer packets (I use Glad Press 'N' Seal for the freezer) by serving size. The key is not to PACK them. Freeze them loosely in a package, and it should crumble when you open it up. I do this to my mozzarella, and half of my cheddar.
• Only freeze your cheese if you don't just plan to cut it up in blocks and eat it. Defrosted cheese is better cooked than eaten raw, since the freezing process does effect the texture. General rule - the less moisture the cheese holds, the better it'd hold in the freezer. It won't taste any different though, so if you're just going to crumble it and use in sauces (blue cheese), go ahead and freeze it.
• You can freeze blocks as well, just make sure they're tightly wrapped, and defrosted in the fridge. Don't try to freeze soft cheeses such as mascarpone. Hard cheeses (like aged white cheddar) actually tastes better if you freeze it for a couple of months and defrost in the fridge.

If you're having reservations, just think of all the frozen meals you heat up in the oven that contains cheese. Frozen pizza, anyone?

How much does grated cheese cost, anyway?

I used to use grocerygateway.com when I lived farther than a couple of blocks from the grocery store. It was a tad more expensive than a visit to No Frills, but in the dead of winter, it's definitely worth it - but I'm digressing. This is about grated cheese.

How often do you use grated cheese? Mozarella, for example. You can put it on pizza, swirl it in pasta, splatter over onion soup, sprinkle it on chicken before baking, cover macaroni in Mac'n'cheese. And every single time you take it out of the fridge, you grate it. You NEVER ever SLICE mozarella. So why buy it in a block?

The price of Black Diamond Mozzarella in a block at GroceryGateway: $13.80 /Kg
The price of Kraft Shredded Mozzarella Cheese at GroceryGateway: $20 / Kg
The time to grate 1 kilo of cheese with a food processor: 30 seconds.

How many 30 seconds are there in an hour? 120.
How much does it cost to grate cheese? ( 20 - 13.8 ) X 120 = 124. $124 bucks an hour.

Keep a chalk board / cork board in your kitchen

I used to keep a chalkboard in the kitchen when I lived in a house and the kitchen was bigger. It was very convenient for writing down recipes as I go with dirty hands. It was also good for letting everyone know what we're having for dinner ahead of time. Not to mention that with an old flea market salvaged painting frame painted gold, it made a great wall decoration.

You can make your own chalkboard. All you need is a sheet of cut tempered masonite, and some chalk board paint. You can get masonite cut to size at a decent sized art supply shop. I got mine from Loomis & Toles, but you can get it pretty much in every art store. It's quite cheap - a panel of 24" by 30" will set you back a mere $6.

Now that I live in an apartment with my boyfriend, and the kitchen and dinning area is meshed into one, I really don't want to be eating chalk dust. So I went with the second best - a cork board. They're quite a bit more expensive since it's manufactured, but if you're really in a pinch, here's a little trick. You can even brush color it to make it look like a corkboard.

You'll need:
An old frame. Flea markets are full of these. I have 4 in the storage closet.
1 Sheet of styrofoam, cut to the inside size of the frame, with a little extra on each side
1 sheet of muslin
A regular stapler with staples
White Glue

Get some sheets of styrofoam. If you've done some online shopping, maybe a large frame, or anything delicate aand flat, then you'd have some sheets lyring around. I got mine from the metal dance pad I ordered from Innex. Directron.com offers free styrofoam if you're willing to pay for shipping. It can't be that expensive - it weighs little more than air! You can also get foam board at your local art shop, or check out places such as freecyle.org.

Next thing you'd need is a sheet of muslin big enough to wrap the sheet of styrofoam in the front, and enough give to staple it into the back. Muslin is coarse untreated cotton and can be colored with fabric dye. Have fun. It's also used as a fitting material - tailors use it to make patterns. It's cheap at $2/yard, and thumbtacks go right through them.

Assemble your board with staples on the back, and mount it with an old frame with white glue. There! Homemade clothboard. Thumb tacks would go right into it with no resistance, it costs nearly nothing to make, and you can color the fabric to match anything in the kitchen. If you don't have a frame, just use a binder clip and a nail to hang it on the wall.

Mine is a repository for grocery lists, blank sheets for writing recipes on, and new recipes I have to try out printed on 1/4 letter sized paper. One corner I reserve for a blob of putty. When I want to try out a new recipe, I just putty it to the cupboard above the stove.

Every kitchen needs one: A Strainer.

Like this stainless steel strainer by Oxo. You don't have to buy a $20 one, of course. I picked mine up at Canadian Tire for a measely $5. You can probably find one at a dollar store.

You can use it to

• strain homemade stock
• crush soft fruit (like mangos, bananas, papayas, etc.)
• sift flour and icing sugar
• drain pasta (who needs a colander?)
• Use as a catch-all when dumping that last bit of soup in the sink
• Steam veggies (in a pinch)

Handy tips of the day...

From the friendster discussion board...

Corri/
Keep roses in ice cold LEMONADE. It keeps them alive longer and if they're looking somewhat wilted, it makes them look fresher.

Shawna/
Cut the bottoms off flowers every other day, and they'll last much longer.
Give them warm water.
Lillies don't like flower preservative.

A perfect beef roast every time...

• Know thy oven. Sure, it SAYS 200, but that does not mean it's 200. It could be 160, it could be 250. You just never know. Get one of those tinny inexpensive hanging oven thermometers and check out all the notches. How hot IS it when that dial says 200? In my compact oven at home, it's actually 275. No wonder those cookies always burned when I first moved in.
• Don't hurry. 375 does cook a roast faster, but 200 will give you a uniform medium rare in 4 hours. So you spend $80 on a prime rib - have some respect for it, will ya? An animal died for that hunk of beef. It deserves slow-roasting.
• Don't use a meat thermometer. I don't care if everybody swears by them, but if you want to be a roast-meister, learn to tell how much fat is in the meat by the marbling. Learn to tell how much bone there is by weight and size of bones. Learn to intuitively judge thickness/time ratio. If you're a traditionalist like me when it comes to slow roasting, it should be perfect everytime regardless.
• Sear the outside EVERYTIME. Just because you've got that dial on broil it does not mean you're searing the outside of the roast! In order for the outside caramelization to happen without losing half the juices of the meat, sear 4 minutes each side on medium heat in a heavy-bottomed pan.
• Don't over season. If you're going to salt it, use coarse salt and cracked pepper, and RUB with garlic, not COVER in garlic. None of that ground salt and pre-ground pepper. If you use pre-ground stuff, instead of helping to protect the roast in the oven, you'd just get a dry salting hunk of meat because the fine salt would draw moisture out.
• Practice DOES make perfect. Like grilling a steak and testing for doneness, roasting beef is no different. In the beginning, follow the charts. But eventually you'll see that no chart can compete with experience and human intuition.

Peanut Butter Magic.

If you're not allergic to it, that is. I buy organic peanut butter, which is the only peanut butter you SHOULD buy. If you're getting the commercial kind, you're feeding your heart transfat. In the manufacturing process of peanut butter, hydrogenated oil acts as a glue between the peanut butter solids and fats - that's why commercial peanut butter doesn't separate. If you go to a local market and get the shop-churned stuff, it does separate, but it's nothing you can't fix with the twirl of a butter knife.

Chunky peanut butter is great for cooking. It's lower in fat, but melts on hot foods just as well as butter.

• Add a dollop of chunky PB to frozen spinach, and a little spoon of mayo as well. It's the only way my bf will eat spinach, so maybe it'd even work on kids. Just add it during the cooking process.
• Satay dipping sauce: peanut butter, splash of milk, spoonful of flour, salt, sugar. The ingredients vary - play with it. Add spices. Add HOT spices.
• Brush chicken with peanut butter, then roll in breadcrumbs, and bake.
• Throw a spoonful of chunky PB in a stirfry.
• Use instead of coconut cream in a curry.
• Use PB instead of butter on corn and steamed vegetables.
• Serve over asparagus instead of hollandaise.

Be creative! Where else do you use butter?

In a pinch and other kitchen miscellany

It doesn't cost a lot to make great food. Just use some imagination. I've electrical taped 5 cheap steak knives together to make a temporary egg slicer, and used parchment paper (unbelievably strong stuff when wet) to lift roasts off a pan.

Most of my recipes, anyhow, are geared to a budgeted household...and people who are too busy to cook everyday.

 

Penny pinching

• Don't have a casserole pan? Line your roasting pan with a most clean towel, then cover with parchment paper and glue the leaky parts with 1 part water 2 parts flour and a pinch of salt.
• Need to decorate a cake but don't have an icing bag? Roll up some parchment paper and cut yourself a decorating tip. An alternative would be a zip lock baggie with a tip cut out, but that's more effective with filling up pasta shells.
• Don't buy anything pre-grated. You can do it yourself, and it's not really that much work. Spray the grater down with cooking spray if you dread cleaning it afterword.
• Don't get a glass cutting board. They're expensive, and they DULL YOUR KNIVES. Splurge on a bunch of acrylic ones instead and replace as they get rough.
• To avoid freezer burn, wrap with plastic wrap (keeps the air out) then zip-lock bag them.
• Do make a bunch of sandwiches at the same time and freeze them. To avoid a soggy sandwich, try to let in as little air as possible when you zip-lock, and then let it thaw in room temperature IN THE BAG and only take it out when it's ready. You can freeze chocolate the same way.

Weird stuff that works

• Can't get the burned starch off the bottom of the pot? Throw in a handful of salt and add a layer of water, bring to a boil. Rinse, and wipe the bottom off with a paper towel or a j-cloth. Whatever's going ON that cloth, it's NOT going to come off. If there's still stuff on the bottom, repeat the process with vinegar and water.
• Don't have a dutch oven and want to put that plastic handled pan into the oven? Wrap the handle with a moist kitchen towel. Wet it every 30 minutes if you're baking any higher than 350. I use my pan to make frittatas all the time.

Cooking Essentials, if you have NOTHING ELSE

• Whisk made of acrylic - $1
• Nylon spatula - $1
• Nylon soup scoop - $1
• Good, big heavy bottomed pan - $30 & up
• Big, and I mean, big enough to feed 20 - heavy bottomed soup pot - $30 & up
• Metal tongs - $5 and up, or you can use chopsticks. $3 a pack of 8.
• A roasting pan with a rack - I got mine for $10 at Benix & Co. and I've had it for 5 years.
• A decent rice cooker - these things are getting cheaper and cheaper. - $20
• Wooden spoons, replaced every 8 weeks. - $2 for 3 at a dollar store.
• Metal strainer for pasta - $5
• Aluminum foil and parchment paper - $2 each roll.
• Lots of Tupperware containers and zip-lock sandwich bags.

Nice to haves

• Dutch oven - it's amazing how much food you can make in that thing.
• Slow Cooker - There are lots of good slow-cooker recipes out there, and it's nice to come home to the smell of food.
• Rice Cooker - yeah, it's in the above list, but it is sort of a "nice to have." You'd use less oil in your rice (none at all) and it's cooked perfectly every time.
• Ceramic oven pans for all those nice casseroles
• Bread pan for those great banana loaves. It's cheap too. And you can make Cinnamon buns in it.
• Food processor - a luxury, but great for making sauces, cutting veggies, emulsifying sauces, chopping nuts, kneading dough. It will save you a bundle of time in the long run, although they are QUITE expensive.

Dinner party!

I hosted a dinner party on Sunday night, with just a few people over. My plan was to cook for 6 - easy. On the menu:

Chicken & Leeks Soup with Rice
Pan-fried Mixed Vegetables served with Roasted Garlic Butter
Soya Garlic Spareribs on fragrant Rice
Spiced Coconut Tapioca Pudding

There are a few tricks you can use to make dinner parties a breeze:
1) Prep food beforehand. Do the shopping a day ahead, if not two. Before you start putting things in the fridge, sort out the food that you are going to serve. Prep (wash, chop, mince, marinate, etc) and put into tupperware containers.
2) If you are making a soup, do it the day before. Let it cool, then refrigerate.
3) Cook vegetables LAST MINUTE. Meats and sauces can usually wait in the pan and be heated up before serving, but vegetables will wilt and brown if you let it sit.

What makes a good stirfry?

The quintessential Chinese dish. I remember being 19, moving into a rooming house. One of my house mates was an older man of about 50 or so with a daughter about my age. When I told him how old I was, he said, "you're a daughter then!" Thereafter he always saved some steak for me if he was making some. One time we had so much leftover that we went to a supermarket together and picked up some side ingredients for a stirfry. He exclaimed, "this is the best stirfry I ever had!" I was so proud.

So what makes a good stirfry? It's common sense, really. You need a wok, a wok spatula, peanut oil, and a gas stove. Granted, not everyone has these things, so in a pinch, you could use a nice big skillet, a nice wide spatula, and a electric stove. Peanut oil is essential to a good Chinese stirfry. You need something that would heat up to very high temperatures without burning. Olive oil is a no no, and butter is a no no no no no. Grape seed oil would work, in a pinch.

Chop your vegetables in a way that they would all cook at the same time. Carrots take longer to cook than say, mushrooms. So make sure your carrots are diced smaller than your mushrooms. Make sure you drain everything before a stirfry - any water clinging to food will 1) cool the oil down 2) splash the oil in your direction.

Make sure your oil is HOT before you put anything in. Hold on to one handle of the wok, and scoop up, turn, scoop up, turn. Make sure everything touch the oil at the bottom of the pan in turn. Toss and toss and toss. There shouldn't exist a moment where the food is just SITTING at the bottom of the pan. If you did everything right, the stirfry process should take less than 5 minutes. Don't forget the soy sauce.

Leftover chicken

I wonder how many chickens I have consumed in my life. Wait. I don't really want to know. But needless to say, I've never wasted a chicken in my life. One of life's greatest questions:

What do you do with leftover chicken?

You could make chicken salad sandwiches. But that's quite uncreative. I knew people who slapped leftover chicken and gravy together between two slices of white bread and called it a meal. I call it a portable heart attack. Not that I'm anyone to talk. I'm making chicken a la king tonight - it's simple, it's easy, and it uses last night's leftover chicken. Anyone can do it. All you need is:

1. A baking dish
2. 1 cup of rice
3. Campbell's cream of chicken soup
4. Be creative. You can add mushrooms, carrots, celery, onions - anything that would hold up well in boiling water.
5. Leftover chicken

You can create something out of your imagination, or you can check back tomorrow for my spur of the moment creation.

Garlicky stuff

Oh garlic. Oh the great garlic. Oh the almighty garlic. Sorry. I've slaughtered many of your kind over the years. I must say I can't live without you.

Contrary to popular belief, there is no need to mince garlic. EVER. Unless you want to taste chunks of garlic in your food, there's no need for that. Most of the time, garlic flavoured oil will suffice. I'm not suggesting you make that at home; botulism will get to you. You can, however, flavour the oil right before you cook.

Take a clove of garlic, unpeeled. Just pull it off the head. Lay it flat side down on the cutting board, and put a flat side of a knife to it (make sure it's a BIG chef's knife), now push down and apply firm pressure until it cracks. The skin should come off easily enough, and you've crushed the garlic, releasing the oils. Now put a few cloves in the oil you're going to cook with, and turn up the heat. You want to lightly brown the garlic, not fry it until it's black. Dark garlic is BITTER.

If you really must mince garlic, go right ahead. I prefer the jar variety. Just make sure you don't throw garlic in before everything else - remember that dark garlic is bitter. i.e. overcooked garlic is bitter. So if you add it first, it'll be bitter by the time you're done.

To Peel or Not to Peel

Apples - yes. There's a lot of wax on apples.
Carrots - no. You're peeling CARROT off of it.
Potatoes - no. It's too much work. I've gotten away with making mashed potatoes without peeling them.
Pepper - roast. Put in bowl, cover with saran wrap. Wait a few minutes. Peel.
Tomatoes - yes. The stuff tastes like paper and catches in your teeth.

Here's how to peel anything soft. Boil some water, and cook the tomato/pepper in it for roughly 30 seconds, max. Fish it out, and blanch in cold water. Slice open the top layer and it should peel very easily.

Freezing Bacon

If you use bacon for cooking, and not eating it every morning, one pack will last you weeks. To freeze bacon, use a long strip of tin foil. I usually don't even bother detaching it from the box until I'm done. Lay one slice of bacon along the edge, and roll in towards the box once. Lay another slice on top, roll again. Repeat until all slices are wrapped, then cut the tin foil at the end. bend the tin foil at the ends of the roll to cover the ends of the tube so you don't get any freezer burn. Now just stick it in the freezer.

To use, simply bend the whole roll a little bit, then peel off the top layer of tin foil. It should've loosened itself when you were bending it.