Food and Food History A la Carte
Aug 29th is Lemon Juice Day so it seems the perfect time to reflect on the usefulness of this sunniest of citrus. Is there anything in the kitchen as useful as lemon juice? It’s a must for cooking – adding tons of flavor to so many dishes but it’s also great for cleaning and staying healthy.
First, a few of my favorite cooks tricks featuring lemon juice: Continue reading “Jumping for Juicy Joy – Happy Lemon Juice Day!”
Back in Tips for Better Baking, I mentioned that the first thing to do when baking was read the recipe – ingredients and method – all the way through so you weren’t taken by surprise mid-bake.
Have you been doing so? Yes? Excellent. You would make Mary Berry proud. You might even make Paul Hollywood proud but he wouldn’t let on since he’s been practicing his inscrutable face in preparation for the new series of Bake Off – which, did I mention is coming VERY SOON?
What’s that? You haven’t been reading through the recipes before starting? Well, OK. Let’s not mention that to Mary or Paul and see if we can’t come up with a “save” of sorts.
At the end of Better Baking Tips, we talked about what do when you have no buttermilk and how to make your own self-raising flour from the good old plain stuff. But there are all sorts of things you might find yourself running out of so here are a few more last minute ingredient saves. Continue reading “The Old Bake and Switch (Useful Swaps)”
There’s been a lot of talk recently about how no one cooks anymore, more folks depending largely on take-away. I’ve no problem ordering pizza or Chinese now & again. I love the time-saving genius of my microwave. But everyday?
The cost aside (my wallet weeps at the thought), sodium content alone gives me pause – it makes my hands feel puffy just thinking about it. But yes, sometimes I don’t want to cook or shop; I’m too tired or busy or broke. So I embrace the leftovers (hence this posts inclusion in my Looking at Leftovers series) and the basic building blocks found in my kitchen cupboards.
Chicken looms large in the menus at TransAtlantic Towers. Chicken Pesto Pasta, roast chicken pieces, chicken stews, etc. We always have breast or thigh fillets in the freezer and keep an eye out for particularly good bargains during our regular shop). As a result, we quite often have cooked chicken in some form left over.
And while I’m perfectly content to grab a cooked chicken breast and nibble away as is, it’s nice to jazz it up a bit too.
If you have some left over chicken, why not shred it and use it in: Continue reading “Lots of Love for Leftovers (and No-Cook Meals)”
We were talking about leftovers – and then specifically about leftover bread.
Needless to say that one of the best ways to use up leftover bread is – as I said at the time – French toast.
So let’s talk about French toast. Or eggy bread, if you prefer that name. Continue reading “Still Looking at Leftovers: Bread, Part 2”
Welcome to the first in my ingredient-focused posts in my Looking at Leftovers series (check out the kick off post to see what the rest will be about). I figured we’d start big with bread. Why big, you ask? Well, first – bread is one of the most thrown away foods in the US and the UK. It’s a big part of the leftovers landscape.
Second – big also refers to the size of the topic. Bread itself is an enormous subject – the types, the ways to make it, the ways to use it, store it, serve it.
Leftovers is also a subject worthy of considerable time and effort. So, I was unsurprised when what was supposed to be a single post decided to expand into a multi-part “series within a series.” We’ll tackle the basic issue here and discuss ideas for tackling it, then I’ll offer up some recipes and variations in the next part. Continue reading “Looking at Leftovers: Bread, Part 1 (of 2)”