April 2009
9 posts
Grocery shopping and the economic decline. →
Have you changed the way you buy groceries over the last year? For me, I am much more conscious of the cost of groceries, and so I try to avoid impulse items and waste. On the other hand, I did sign up for the CSA again, and I still shop at Whole Foods (though I do shop LOADS more at Reading Terminal Market, which requires more planning, but is much cheaper.)
I was discussing this with Jenny...
This is your brain. This is your brain on salt. →
What’s needed is a perceptual shift, Kessler said. “We did this with cigarettes,” he said. “It used to be sexy and glamorous but now people look at it and say, ‘That’s not my friend, that’s not something I want.’ We need to make a cognitive shift as a country and change the way we look at food. Instead of viewing that huge plate of nachos and fries...
Frozen cookies.... better?
When last I made chocolate chip cookies, I fought my natural urge to bake the whole batch, then eat cookies morning, noon and night until they were all gone. I “flash froze” most of the batch and stuck them in a ziploc bag on the freezer door, where they could taunt bda every time he opened it.
Last night, I took pity on the poor man, and offered to bake a few for dessert. ...
Do you buy cookbooks?
I confess, I get nearly all my recipes off the Internet. I think of something I want to cook, then I just google until I find one that seems simple enough or has the ingredients I have on hand, then start cooking with my laptop in the corner of the kitchen. The only cookbooks I really use are How to Cook Everything/The Joy of Cooking for “hmm, I want to eat string beans, what are some...
DIY or Don't IY? →
Making your own bagels is worth it? Oh, Slate, tell me more! Great article on whether to make your own staple foods.
Cost-effective is great, but delicious-effective is even better. Two things that make me cry:
cooking something that takes forever (or just a lot of effort) that I could get more deliciously easily (or, why Helen has never tried to make french fries, despite her deep love for...
My not-so-secret love: brown food.
Last night, I made risotto.
I took a chance making this. Like Tom, bda is not a huge mushroom fan, and when he saw the dried mushrooms soaking in the bowl, it was dubious face city. But, I tasked him with shredding lots of pecorino romano, which quieted his fears. Lots of cheese is never a bad thing. I also liberally salted after adding the cheese (the romano was quite salty to begin with,...
Glass tupperware →
I had been thinking about this recently, for the same reason an the author in the link above — plastic tends to get stained, which grosses me out, and makes me want to throw it away. Glass seems so sturdy and permanent; you’re never going to chuck it because it’s crusty. Also, microwaving plastic freaks me out.
Also, stuff with lids can be stacked. I’m now one of those people who has actual...
Smitten with chocolate chip cookies
I made smitten kitchen’s crispy chewy cookies tonight. It uses fully 50% more butter than the tollhouse recipe, but half as much salt.
First off, they spread like mad. That’s the butter. Second, they weren’t salty enough. That was the half as much salt.
They were billed as crispy AND chewy. They were not chewy.
The nice thing about chocolate chip cookie recipes is, they are rarely more...
Pretzels!
The review: They’re not really pretzels. They’re pretzel dinner rolls. This was very appealing to me, actually. They were a lot of work for the 8 knots we got out of them, but that recipe could have been tripled easily. I think we could have polished off at least another 4, though, so…. serves 2.5. :)
The process:
Let’s start with how much better equipped Paul is than I am. The stand mixer...