Category: how to

Friday Links: Provisions

Squirreling away some nuts.

I don’t know if it is the season change or the fact that our ‘fridge and cupboards look like we are two months past an apocalyptic event, but I just dropped $300 at Costco.

Yes, I now have lunchbox snacks until February.

Yes, I bought dog food, which always jacks up the total.

However.

We are only two people in this house. How much food could we possibly need?

$300 worth, apparently, not including the other $80 that I dropped at Giant directly after, and the $40-50 I will spend at the farmer’s market on Saturday.

So this week’s post is all about provisions: what you need for a well-stocked pantry, a few tips for the bar, and how to do it all without taking on a second mortgage.

Essential Spices For Indian Food: Against all odds, I love Indian food. I have zero experience cooking it, though. My first attempt at tandoori chicken was really an overcooked piece of meat with cumin paste. My pantry is well-stocked, though, and I plan on trying again.

Bon Appetit’s Guide to What Every Kitchen Should Have: I love this list because it is simple and doesn’t focus on pre-packaged food. These staples mean dinner is always 15 minutes away. It does mean you have to cook (rather than simply heat up), which bothers The Teenager quite a bit, but that’s how things go.

Stocking The Broke Kitchen: Okay, so this one is a little controversial for me.  People have different ideas of what saving money means, and when I say “affordable,” I don’t mean $100. When I first moved to Seattle in 1996, I had $200 in my pocket. I managed to find a landlord who would take my deposit and last month’s rent on a payment plan so I could move away from a bad situation. So when I say “affordable,” I really mean like foodstamps-level broke. My budget for food was $25 a week, which I stretched by not eating breakfast and drinking lots of coffee with cream and sugar at my temp job. So I know from broke, as my Jewish grandmother would say.

Still, stocking a whole pantry with staples for $100 is pretty good.

Stocking A Bar On A Budget: Let’s face it: it gets dark early during the fall, and you are not always going to want to drag yourself out for a decent cocktail. But booze adds up fast, and if you are picky about your booze and want to drink the good stuff, your daily tipple can get spendy fast. Rein it in with this guide.

BONUS: Homemade Fireball Whiskey: Because life’s too short to drink something with anti-freeze in it. 

DOUBLE PLUS GOOD BONUS: Easy Dressing: Why not provision your closet with a capsule wardrobe while you’re at it?

So have fun stocking up, and tell me: what’s the one ingredient your pantry or bar can’t do without?

Friday Links: Tips And Tricks

Unitask no more!


Hot on the heels of last Friday’s quick dinners comes links to make your work in the kitchen more effective and more enjoyable.

And BTW, I refuse to call them “hacks.” We are not breaching a firewall or pulling a McGyver here. Just making kitchen life a little easier.

TIP: Salad Spinners – Unitask No More: My kitchen is pretty small, and storage is at a premium. Because we eat our weight in salad in the spring and summer, I have a salad spinner to make washing and drying greens easier. This link was a revelation. So many of these uses seem self-evident, but if that’s the case, why am I still not doing them? This link would have been a great reminder for the 20 pounds of basil I processed into pesto last weekend. #LessonLearned.

TRICK: No Link, But Hell YEAH: Use your microplane for grating ginger and garlic. It’s for more than grating cheese and zesting lemon!

TIP: Freeze And Grate Your Butter: I have been doing this for delicate pastry for years and have recently added it to crackers for more tender cooking and more time working with the dough. The key to flaky pastry is cold, cold water and cold, cold butter. This starts you out several degrees ahead of the game.

TRICK: Throw Away Your Pot Holders: This is one of my favorite articles from Cracked, and their first tip is something I have only recently starting doing: using side towels. I have a dozen (okay, not the lint free surgical ones, but chef quality towels), and I tuck them into my apron and use them like paper towels. Not having a laundry service to come pick them up is a pain, but I plan on getting more to store in the basement for the inevitable breakdown during “service” (the towel’s, not mine). Turns out, professional cooks know what they are doing. 

TRICK: How To Sharpen Knives…Without A Sharpener: If I had known this, I would not have spent the last three years with pitifully dull (and dangerous) knives. So revelatory for me that I snuck down to the kitchen in the middle of the night to try it when I found this link during a bout of insomnia.

I am not a fan of the listicle, so tell me in the comments: what’s your favorite kitchen tip or trick?

Friday Links: Quick Food

Like this pancake’s grin, I too, feel a little raggedy when dinnertime rolls around.

School is back in full swing, and even for those who homeschool, time is always an issue when it comes to dinner. While I love to cook, I hate making dinner. My energy naturally flags around four o’clock, right when The Teenager is getting home, dogs need to be walked, and dinner needs to begin.

This week’s quick links are all about how to make quick food that is fresh, delicious, and virtually thought-free. Always a plus at the end of the day!

Oh My Veggies Slow Cooker Lasagna: Easy, easy, easy, and perfect for this time of year as summer’s produce spills out of gardens and farmer’s markets. Personally, I am not an eggplant fan, so I would substitute something else, but I am guessing there is not much you can do to mess this up.

Slow Cooker Chicken Burrito Bowls: These are absurdly and inappropriately delicious. So good, in fact, that I am going to make some tonight instead of roasting some boring old thighs. Excellent the next day wrapped in a flour or rice tortilla.

Quinoa Corn Chowder: Sensing a trend? If you have not already been using a crockpot for easy weeknight meals, then you should absolutely break it out for this delicious, vegetarian (with veggie stock) chowder that is high in protein and zippy with sweet corn and jalapenos. 

And speaking of crockpots, stay away from that cream-of-crap soup that proliferates in so many recipes for the crockpot. Make your own dry mix, then use that as directed when a recipe calls for cream-of-______ soup.

Cook Once, Eat 50 Times: Take one day and cook 50 meals, then shine your crown and brush off your cape because you are a queen/king AND a superhero. These are meat-heavy, so sprinkle in some vegetarian action, too. 

When all else fails, I am a big fan of breakfast for dinner, like the gluten-free blueberry pancakes above. The Teenager likes hers with a slice of bacon grilled right in there.

What quick foods do you reach for on busy weeknights?

Sharp Knives: The Key To World Domination



Again, perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. Do you sense a trend towards hyperbole here?

However.

A dull knife in the kitchen is a recipe for disaster. In my kitchen right now, the knives are speeding towards the iceberg while Jack and Rose are waltzing on the deck. In short, they have not been actually sharpened beyond a few passes on the steel in, oh, say, a year.

This is culinary blasphemy. You know it’s bad when your 15-year-old comments on it.

So. Sharpening it is.

If you have never sharpened a knife, this is a simple how-to that utilizes two different methods: the steel and the stone.

There is a clear distinction between these two implements, though, in that only one of them actually sharpens the knife.

Honing

As a knife is used, the blade suffers microscopic (sometimes even visible) dings and bends in the blade. A steel doesn’t sharpen so much as it hones the blade. Passing a knife evenly on both sides straightens the edges in a knife. There is very little of the blade material removed, but by straightening the knife, it may seem as if the blade is actually sharper. It’s straighter, but not technically any sharper.This is why a knife should be honed every time it’s used, just after the chopping, dicing, and kung-fu fighting. Alternately, you could get super attuned to your blade and use your best judgment, but if your judgment is often clouded by lazy, just get into the routine of honing after each use.

Sharpening 

On the other hand, a stone removes bits of the blade itself, producing a new, sharp edge. This can be done with a grindstone or whetstone but not with a Curtis, Joss, or Rolling Stone. Thankfully, this is only recommended three or so times a year, really depending on the amount of use the knives get (way more for professional chefs or seriously dedicated and prolific home cooks).

Let’s start with honing, since that’s what you will be doing most often.

How To Properly Hone (Steel) A Knife

1. Hold the steel up in the air. Don’t wave it like you just don’t care. This is serious. Keep your fingers below the butt of the steel so you don’t accidentally slice off the tip.



Alternately, you can stand the steel on a cutting board and hone in downward strokes for safety. If you are accident-prone, this may be the technique for you.



2. Hold the knife in your dominant hand (you will be moving this hand and need some control. Now is not the time to work on ambidexterity) and place it against the steel at an angle between 12 and 15 degrees. You can move the knife either towards you or away from you, but start at the widest part of the knife (the heel) and slide it along the steel while moving towards the narrowest part (the tip).

Maintain the angle the whole way, the do the same thing on the other side.

3. Use strokes with more pressure to begin with, gradually using less pressure as you work. A good place to start is about four pounds of pressure, which can be measured by pressing your knife on a pastry scale. Lacking a pastry scale, just guess and do it until it is sharp.

4. Test your honing skills with the classic slice-a-piece-of-paper gambit.  Or just try it on a tomato, one of nature’s most ridiculous vegetables to cut. A properly honed blade should slice cleanly through the skin and into the tomato with minimal pressure.

If you hone your knife and it is still not slicing and dicing cleanly and with ease, that’s a good indication that it’s time to actually sharpen.Now that you are a pro at honing, let’s move on to sharpening.

How To Sharpen a Knife

1. Take the easy way out and drop your knives off at that guy’s stand in the farmer’s market, you know, the one who sharpens them while you shop. If you only have a few knives in rotation, this is actually not a bad idea. I mainly use a chef’s knife and a paring knife, so for me, this is a good idea. But I am a big fan of DIY, and I hate paying for something I can do myself.

This is a #judgmentfree zone. Take this option if you want. If not, keep reading.

2. Your sharpening stone may require pre-soaking, but many can be used with just a sprinkle of water. For properly sharpened knives, you will need two types of stone, one coarser than the other. The easiest purchase is a combination stone with one coarse side and one fine side.

Start with the coarse side and wet the surface before you begin.

3. Use the same angle on the sharpening stone as you did on the steel (about 12 to 15 degrees). If you are having trouble gauging what that angle is and happen to have a matchbook handy, it’s approximately that steep.

4. Hold the knife in your dominant hand and place the fingers of your other hand on the flat of the blade to apply even pressure. There are two techniques for sharpening:

  • The simple back and forth: move the blade back and forth as you also move from the heel of the blade to the tip.
  • The sweeping arc: sweep in one movement from the heel of the blade to the tip in an arc across the sharpening stone.

Pictures don’t quite do the process justice. Here’s a quick video on one way to sharpen your knives with a steel.

Whichever technique you choose, repeat it on both sides. You are actually grinding material away in order to bring both sides of the blades together.

When you can feel something on the blade called a burr (like a wire edge), it’s time to flip the stone and move to the finer side. This polishes the sharp surface you created. Pressure lightens as you finish your polishing,

If this doesn’t help your knives, chances are A) you are not applying enough pressure as you sharpen, B) your knives are super dull and just need more, or C) your knives are cheap and not very good and it is time to replace them. If that becomes an option, ditch the 16-piece knife block and spend your ducats on the only four knives you actually need.

Sharp knives are a safety essential in the kitchen. How often do you sharpen yours?