Hot Tip: Save your spoon with a clip

So I make these Norwegian cookies.  I told you all about them last year. Krumkake.  They take over my kitchen for two weekends each December.  There's smoke and fire and grease and burned fingers and spilled batter and in the end, lacy, crisp, amazing sugar cookies. Still, a huge mess. 

Well, this year I figured it out.  No, this doesn't prevent small kitchen fires and burned fingertips, those are going to happen either way, but oh does it  save on cleanup.

Sure, you don't make krumkake.  I understand.  Maybe you make pancakes, or pizzelles or something else with a drippy batter?  

This is a bag clip, but a standard binder clip would work too.  Clip it on the edge of your bowl and your spoon won't sink down into the batter.  Everything is right with the world. 

The Egg Test

I'm not a perfect locavore in any way.  I try to buy local, in-season produce, but then sometimes I find myself with a pineapple, or a banana, or a mid-winter red pepper.  But I try pretty hard. In the warmer part of the year, I get the majority of my food from a CSA and a farm market, and in the cooler part of the year, I rely on a buying club and can get almost everything I need from local folks.  Don't look too hard in my fridge at the pickles or the worcestershire. 

There are huge advantages to eating this way.  You can get to know the producers.  You understand what you're eating. You help the local economy.  Your food is fresher.  You get more variety, year round.  

One of the tiny drawbacks, however, faces me every time I go to use an egg.  I get my eggs from my CSA right now, and when that's over I'll get them from another fairly local farm.  That means that my eggs aren't always sold in new cartons that are clearly labeled with the date.  So sometimes, eggs are a gamble.  Did we get those eggs two weeks ago, or was it the week before that?  Which of the two cartons in the fridge is newer?

Hot Tip: Freezer Burritos for Easy Lunches

In the winter, lunches are easy.  Winter means any time when it's not 90 degrees out.  In the winter, I make lasagnas and chilis and pastas and I just make extra servings to freeze and lunch is handled.  On winter mornings, each of us just looks into the freezer and pulls out something wrapped in foil or dished out into tupperware and there it is, home cooked goodness to eat at our desks while staring off like zombies.  It's awesome.  In the summer, it's not quite like that.  In the summer, if I cooked the night before, there might be some leftover stir fry or pasta salad, but there's never that freezer bounty.  Summer foods just don't freeze like winter foods. 

Garlic Knots and Bread Drama

What I need to start doing is just bringing the camera with me to the kitchen no matter what I'm doing in there, in case something *really important* happens that I need to tell you about.  But I didn't do that, so we have no process horror pictures.

I think that means this isn't a fail, but is instead a hot tip, since I won in the end, but whoa was it a fail early on. 

Soak your bear - a retraction

Look, I don't know what the hell I'm doing.  I'm just making dinner, and in fact, lately I'm not even doing that.  Mostly I'm showing you pictures of my groceries, which doesn't sound that exciting, but hey, you're the one reading it, so who does that reflect on?


I mentioned in passing that the terra cotta bears that we're supposed to put in our brown sugar to keep it from seizing up don't work. 


I used this photo to illustrate that.

And then my cousin Michael, and as I've said before, I have a handful of those, but my first cousin's husband Michael, was like, "You gotta soak the bear," or something and I was like, "What?"

Hot Tip: Scavenging Sugar

When I make cookies, it's because we're having a cookie emergency.  I don't typically just have cookies around, so if I'm making them, it's because someone *needs* a cookie.  


A few days ago, I needed a cookie.   My chocolate chip cookie recipe is quick and easy, and relies on stuff I always have on hand (plus chips, which I try to always have on hand). 


And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I was out of sugar. 

Sharp knives

a knife and an onion. 

I got a new knife.  Everything is different now. 

Hot Tip: Fluffy Pizza

I really like the pizza I make at home.  We're pizza people, and having it available on-demand without delivery is fantastic.   I make big batches of dough in advance and divide them into pizza-sized baggies and then there's almost always dough around. 

Hot Tip: How not to make balsamic reduction

You make balsamic reduction by heating balsamic vinegar.  You stir this.  You can add sugar or other things.  It thickens and makes a glaze. 

How to Freeze Vegetables

Sous Chef Brian labeled the veg, and it's not that he has anything against carrots.

Whether we grow our own veggies or received too much in our CSA or scrambled to the farm market to get the last of our favorite produce before the end of the season, sometimes we end up with too much.   Freezing is a great way to keep the goodness of seasons past on hand and ready for a meal.  But just throwing most vegetables into the freezer isn't the best route to ensuring that today's harvest tastes fresh a few months from now.

I've acknowledged that my freezer overflows with homemade foods and preserved produce and bits of things (butter wrappers for greasing pans, ends of bread for making breadcrumbs, and all the leafy, scrappy ends of things I save for stock).   About once a week, I look in the fridge and figure out what's just not going to make it onto our plates in time, and then I get a pot of water boiling.


A few days ago my friend Kim was asking how we do this, and I blew her off and referred her to a website.  This is a bit more in-depth.  Just a bit.  This is slightly more serious than my "how to defrost peas" post.  

Hot Tip: Unburning cookies

Hot Tip: Freezing Tomatoes

Remember when I had all those tomatoes?   My cousin Michael, and I should be clear, because I have three of those, so my first cousin's husband, Michael, reminded me that I could freeze them to peel, rather than blanching them.  Just toss them in the freezer, whole, and when they defrost the skins come off.  I've done this with a handful of tomatoes, but never with a serious tomato bounty. At the time, I didn't have room in my freezer(s) for 27 pounds of tomatoes. 

You can freeze tomatoes whole, though, when you have the space.  You can't use them on a BLT afterwards (well, you can but you shouldn't) but for cooking, it's fantastic.  So recently, I got a smaller load of plum tomatoes in my CSA and I just washed them and popped them in a gallon zipper bag in the freezer.  


Then when I started feeling guilty about how I don't do much to take care of the 100 year old man* who lives on my street and looks after the block, I

Couscous fail

Couscous is delicious and easy and you can do anything you want to it. Which is one (3?) of the reasons I've never been making couscous for dinner, thinking to myself, I should take pictures of this for the blog. It's easier than a grilled cheese sandwich.

So while dealing with the farmshare foods (making salad, washing things, determining if anything needed to be frozen) on Tuesday, I decided to do up some couscous for our lunches, using the fluffy chard we got. I sauteed up some chard in garlic and cooked the couscous in homemade veg stock and chopped sundried tomatoes, and a fontina rind. Black pepper. Done. It took 10 minutes.

Grilled Pizza, again.

I contacted Maya, the winner of the bowl covers, and she said the following:

I can't even remember the last time I won a contest! My senior year in high school my name was picked first out of a hat to choose a passage from Hamlet to memorize. But I don't think that counts.

She selected this bold, fun print and they're on their way. 

Anyway, I said there'd be food. 

Sometimes you and your friends get together and make your own ricotta, make up some pesto, and grill up fantastic pizza, but you're not at home and you don't take photos of the process and then somebody jumps in and takes photos once it's over and tells you you should post it.  And you know, it's good pizza and people like to hear about good pizza, so you post it. 

Sometimes that happens.  And it's nighttime, and you're grilling and you're eating outside, so the photos look like this.

And sometimes one of your friends makes a salad that sounds mind-numbingly simple but might be life-changing. Chickpeas. Red Onion.  Tomato. Oil. Vinegar. Scapes. Nom.  

And sometimes eggplant gets that rich smoky flavor that makes it seem like it's not just a veg with a bit of tomato sauce and a blanket of mozzarella...like there's something way more complicated going on.

Hot tip on pesto.  

I used a ton of basil and a good amount of parmesan and pine nuts and olive oil... it was like two a half cups of basil, 1/3 cup oil, 1/3 cup pine nuts and 1/2 cup parm...one garlic clove, black pepper, salt...  and it was kind of lame. I mean it tasted good, but not super basily.  A little too salty.  Then I let it sit an hour and it got awesome.  Like fight over the leftovers awesome.  Dip your finger in the bowl, again, awesome.   So let your pesto develop. 

Olive Oil Spritzer

I've mentioned that some people (my mother, my mystery Sunday night dinner guest, etc) think I have a lot of kitchen stuff.   I don't think so, really, but that's because I use it.   I'm quick to donate or sell whatever I'm not using, and I can't handle the idea of not being able to store all my stuff.  

So while Sous Chef Brian thinks I'm a hoarder, and mystery Sunday night dinner guest thinks I have way too much stuff (she has three blenders, FYI), and my mother, who is constantly buying me kitchen stuff seems shocked at it all every time she's in my kitchen, I think it's well curated.  I think I have the right kitchen stuff for me.  Minus the immersion blender of my dreams, and maybe a functional food processor.  But even if I had these things, where would they go?

That's a lot of lead-in to talk about my olive oil spritzer.  From time to time, I'll talk about the things I use every time I cook, and this is one of them.   

How to defrost peas

Let's say you're making pasta, and adding frozen veg.   Like maybe your sundried tomatoes turn out to be the unchemically processed kind, and you discover they should have been in the fridge, not the cabinet, and you're out of fresh veg, because it's the end of the week, and you're like, "Well then, peas it is."

Here's my hot tip on defrosting.

Make pasta.   Add frozen peas to colander.  

Drain pasta over peas.  Voila!  Defrosted peas.

This translates to corn as well.  Less so to broccoli and leafy greens and not at all to meat.

Dinner:  garlic, wine, stock, chicken, red pepper flake, pasta, peas, parmesan.

Email me with your own hot tip, or a suggestion, or complaint, or whatever.

Dal Makhani, sort of, and rice

Let me preface with this, I have no effing clue what I'm doing.  I had to Google half the words in this recipe to even start.

Free Vegetable Stock

I didn't get a photo of all the jars finished, so here's a midway shot.

I've talked about making stock briefly before, and I've talked about using stock a lot.  This is ridiculously easy, and it's absolutely free, except for the cost of a few peppercorns.  

I used to be bullion-cube happy.  I used to use a lot of the heavily-flavored, powdered vegetable flavoring that comes wrapped in foil.  This fixes that.  I still use beef bullion occasionally, since I never have on hand the part of a cow that one might use to make stock, but I don't see any use for chicken stock, since I have veg stock, and that fits my agenda since I'm deathly afraid of chicken.  But a flavorful enough veg stock meets 98% of my stock needs.

Also, I don't compost, so things I might compost instead turn into this, compost soup. 

Butter fail

I use the defrost setting on my microwave to soften butter.  You only need a few seconds.  Just don't accidentally set it for a few minutes and walk away. 

That's my kitchen tip of the day.