Unless you're a certified pastry chef working at a restaurant or bakery, you probably don't have a professional cake stand which lets you frost a cake easily without getting any extraneous icing on the plate.
Food editor Melissa Roberts shows a few different ways to thicken gravy. The first way that is shown is using either arrowroot or cornstarch. Both of these ingredients are gluten free and must be dissolved completely in cold water before adding to hot liquids as clumping will result if added straight. The next method to thicken your gravy is called a buerre manie'. A beurre manie' is French for needed butter. This method is a paste made by combining three tablespoons of butter and three table...
Whether you’re looking to save money or to avoid allergens, homemade body powder lets you know exactly what you’re putting on your skin.
If you’re looking to make top-notch nachos, you’ve come to the right place. This video will show you how to make cheese nachos.
Call them what you will—moss piglets, water bears, or by their real name, tardigrade—but these intriguing tiny creatures can come back from the brink of death. They can survive boiling, deep freezing, UV radiation, completely drying out, and even a trip to space—without the benefit of being in a spacecraft.
1. Before applying eye makeup, eliminate under-eye swelling by applying cold compresses to your eyes for ten minutes. Any fluid retention around your eyes will cause eyes to look smaller.
Most cooks know they should stir pasta a few times while it's cooking, for obvious reasons: as the noodles cook, they release a glue-like starch that makes them stick to one another. Stirring prevents them from clumping together in an unwieldy, inedible mass. Now Mark Bittman in The New York Times discusses a great technique from Italy that helps you produce a plate of tender, toothsome pasta evenly coated in rich sauce every time, but it involves stirring the pasta at the end of its cooking ...
The world of spices can be bewildering. They promise to make your food more flavorful if you know how to make the most of them. Unless you know a couple of essential tricks, however, it just seems like you're adding bits of colored powder to your food.
Magnetic ink is generally used by the banking industry to allow computers to read information off of a check, but that doesn't mean you can't have some fun with it. The guys over at openMaterials have figured out a great recipe for a DIY magnetic ink that you can use for an interesting art project—or just to mess around.
You have warm toast, but your butter is chilled to a rock-solid state. Sure, you could warm a bit of that butter up in a microwave before spreading, but chances are you're just as impatient as the rest of us, so you slap that frigid butter on and hope for the best. It always ends up the same, though.
Tardigrades are some of the toughest but least well-known creatures on our planet. These tiny animals, also called moss piglets or water bears, are definitely of this earth, but some can boast that they've also traveled to space.
Dried spices and herbs seem to be immortal; a peek in your parents or grandparents' cupboards will likely unveil cinnamon, basil, and oregano older than you.
I'll bet this scenario will sound familiar to you: you're in the middle of making a spectacular dessert that will knock the socks off of your guests, and you've almost finished gathering all of your ingredients to create your mise en place. The last ingredient listed is powdered sugar, and you reach for where it's stored, when—drat! You don't have enough for the recipe.
More than one in ten people in the US have type 2 diabetes — that's over 29 million people. It's characterized by excessive sugar (glucose) in the blood due to the development of resistance to insulin, the hormone that normally metabolizes glucose.
Instant ramen makes me nostalgic for my college days, when a bowl of this cheap noodle soup was my go-to comfort food for many all-nighters.
Ahh, coffee. That first sip of hot goodness in the morning is glorious, isn't it? There are days when you need it straight up: No extras, please. But what about those moments when you need a little something else? When that flavored French vanilla, hazelnut mocha, blah blah blend just doesn't cut it and you want a truly special flavor in your morning joe?
One of the great joys of cooking is taking the most basic of foods and preparing them in new and exciting ways. About two years ago, my wife opened my eyes to a delicious staple of Indian and Moroccan cuisine that is made in a very elementary way, the preserved lemon.
Prion diseases are a group of infectious brain diseases that causes extensive tissue damage, resulting in sponge-like spaces in brain tissue. Prions include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (often called mad cow disease), and chronic wasting disease in hoofed ruminant mammals.
The internet was blowing up recently over this mind-blowing, mouth-watering video of a woman making a cake decoration out of… wait for it… chocolate bubble wrap. Yes, that's right: she turned the ubiquitous packing material into the mold for an absolutely gorgeous cake embellishment that, deservedly, went viral. You can watch the video below.
Contrary to popular belief, sushi is not the raw fish that one gets at Japanese restaurants, but the rice that comes with it. It's hard to tell whether this popular misconception led to or came about because of the primary flavors that we think of in sushi are the fish. We often say a sushi restaurant has great fish, but almost never that it has great rice.
Lemons and limes might be among the most useful fruits in the kitchen and even beyond. Their bright, tart flavor livens up just about any dish, while their mildly acidic nature makes them incredibly useful when you want to clean your house safely. We already knew lemons were great for keeping fruits and vegetables from turning brown, deodorizing garbage disposals, disinfecting cutting boards, and neutralizing odors. But just when we thought we knew all the ways that lemons can be used around ...
Bamboo is easy to grow, but there are a few things you should know before starting. There are hundreds of species of bamboo and they can be roughly divided into either running or clumping bamboos. Almost all cold hardy bamboos are runners and almost all tropical bamboos are clumpers. Running bamboos send out root like rhizomes underground and can spread many feet each year. Clumping bamboos slowly expand and stay in a tight clump with canes close together. We grow dozens of cold hardy bamboo ...
I love cats (dogs too - but that's a subject for a different article...;o)). There are few things more enjoyable than welcoming an adorable little kitten into one's house; watching them inspect their mysterious new surroundings - timidly at first - and then quickly make it their empire.
If you ever want to make your own bouncy ball, all you need are basic white glue, borax, food coloring, cornstarch, and water.
In their cooked form, rice is great for making spam musubi, sushi, and other amazing meals. In their uncooked form, dry rice grains are unexpectedly useful for preventing your salt from clumping in your salt shaker, cleaning out the insides of weirdly-shaped, hard-to-wash containers, weighing down your unbaked pie crust, cleaning out your coffee grinder, and—if you act quickly enough—saving your wet cell phone from cell phone death.
Introduction The 3 major anonymity networks on the Internet are Tor/Onionland, I2P and Freenet. If you feel confused on which one is the "best" one to use the answer is simple. Use all three!