Summertime Cooking Hacks: How to Make Meals Without Sweating Over Them
"The best season for food is the worst season for cooking." These words, spoken by food blogger Dave Klopfenstein of Dave's Kitchen, couldn't be more true.
"The best season for food is the worst season for cooking." These words, spoken by food blogger Dave Klopfenstein of Dave's Kitchen, couldn't be more true.
People tend to skip toasting nuts in recipes or before adding them to salads because it seems time-consuming and the margin for error is high. However, skipping this step is a big mistake. Why? Because when you skip toasting your nuts (go ahead, you can laugh, we're all doing it), you sacrifice flavor and texture. And not just a little flavor, but a lot. Alton Brown recommends wok-frying peanuts before making your own nut butter for this very reason.
If you have a good food processor or blender, there's no reason not to make your own nut butters, whether you like almond, cashew, sunflower, or the perennial classic, peanut.
Even if you're a good cook, sometimes home-cooked food just doesn't taste the same as it does in a restaurant. Of course, there are some utensils and appliances in a professional kitchen that the average person doesn't have access to, but it's not just about the tools.
I've never had a black eye, but I was in a car accident that turned my entire ear dark purple a few years ago. Believe me; it was enough to get more than a few funny looks.
Steampunking Nerf guns by painting them is a pretty common practice among Steampunks, but unfortunately, the really amazing-looking ones involve literally taking the gun apart, painting it, and then screwing it all back together.
As I said in this earlier post, there's no easy way to explain or define the Steampunk aesthetic. There are a large number of Steampunk tropes or "cues", as I call them, that bring to mind the feeling of Steampunk. These cues combine to push past the "not-Steampunk" threshold into firmly "Steampunk" territory.
In the first part of this two-part guide, I covered cutting, grooving, beveling, making holes, and stamping/tooling. I hope you enjoyed that part, because we're pushing the accelerator to the floor and moving ahead at full speed!
Steampunk is a tremendously interesting phenomenon because of its reliance on science fiction, and fiction in general. Steampunk can arguably be broken down into two categories: the fiction, and the aesthetic. Sometimes these categories cross over, but they're often more distinct than most people suspect; that said, the aesthetic is firmly based in works of fiction.
Say whatever you want, but Steampunk is primarily a maker culture. Consider that Steampunk has existed since the 1960s and yet more or less languished in obscurity until approximately 2005, which is when it made the leap to costuming. That costuming was what provided the leap to the tangible, despite the fact that Steampunk art had also existed for years.
In these video clips, our expert will show you how to make your own homemade dog food, avoiding the possible poisonous contamination and low nutritive qualities of store bought food. Learn recipes for a health drink, a dog biscuit, lactose-free food, chapatti, vegetable curry, chicken curry, and oatmeal. Also get tips on what to feed puppies, why dry dog food is not the best thing for your pet, how to feed working dogs, what not to feed your dog, and more.
In this video series, watch as Chef J. Costilla teaches how to make candy apples. Learn the different ingredients for candy apples, how to pick apples for candy apples, how to combine syrup and water, how to make a chilling sheet, how to wash ad dry apples, how to insert stick in a candy apple, how to make caramel apples, how to make rocky road apples, and how to chill the candy apples. Candy apples are easy to make using this quick and easy step by step candy apple recipe from the experts at...
In this online video series, learn how to make pottery, from ceramics expert Betty Ingham. She will demonstrate important ceramics techniques such as how to throw on the potter's wheel - learn how to center, open, and form clay on the potter's wheel. She will also demonstrate how to use molds to create pottery such as serving trays. This pottery expert will give you tips on how to decorate greenware pottery using techniques such as scraffito and chattering. Additionally she will show you how ...
Recycling your garbage is noble and, in many places, mandatory. But it also can be very confusing. This guide will clear up the rules.
Apple released the eighth iOS 14.5 developer beta on Tuesday, April 13. The update (build number 18E5199a) comes six days after Apple's last 14.5 beta update, which Apple pushed out to both developers and public beta testers.
The average iPhone user has between 60 to 90 applications installed. On one of my devices, I have over 600. With a ton of apps to sort through, it can sometimes be challenging to find the one you're looking for without having to use the Search tool (which is even better in iOS 14). Even then, you may still come up dry.
Despite some of the biggest players in tech still lagging in terms of offering smartglasses options, there are nevertheless a number of smartglasses makers, including North and Vuzix, with consumer-grade smartglasses on the market right now.
An incorrectly scaled object in your HoloLens app can make or break your project, so it's important to get scaling in Unity down, such as working with uniform and non-uniform factors, before moving onto to other aspects of your app.
You know Moana's a rock-solid pick for Halloween this year. The question is, how far will you go to become Moana? Are you going to just slap on a cream skirt and a red bandeau? Or do you want to go all out and end up with the finished product like YouTuber Gladzy Kei did?
If you live with pets, you know where their tongue has been, yet you let them kiss and lick you all they want without even thinking twice about it. I've heard people say that a dog's mouth is very clean, and that their saliva, delivered by licking, can help heal wounds, but is that really true?
All day I dream of eggs: scrambled, poached, over easy, hard-boiled, fried, baked, raw... Okay, the last one is a joke (unless you're Gaston, which means that you eat five dozen of them and you're roughly the size of a barge). But eggs are freaking good in just about any cooking prep, and more often than not are the foundation of your favorite baked goods.
It's that time of the year, y'all—when the air becomes crisp, the nights grow long, and people crave hearty, warm soups and stews. And of all the season's offerings, my hands-down favorite has to be chili: It's versatile, meaty, and above all else, it's damn easy to make. (Thank you, Lord, for the slow cooker. Amen.)
Few summertime drinks are as sweet, tart, and refreshing as lemonade. It can cool off even the hottest day and help you relax poolside, on the beach, or just sitting around the house.
Knowing if your meat is cooked properly is both the difference between a delicious meal and an inedible one... and the difference between making your guests sick and keeping them safe.
Even those of us most comfortable in the kitchen can be daunted by the idea of cooking for a whole houseful of people. Whether you have a large, well-equipped kitchen or a small one with just the essentials, it can prove to be quite a task to prepare food for a dozen or so people. It takes a certain type of recipe that allows for mass production, in respects to both technique and ingredients. And what I've provided below includes several recipes that you might normally make for just a family ...
Stop! Do not pour that leftover wine, coffee, or bacon grease down the drain. And those herbs that have been in your fridge so long they've literally turned on you? And what about when that recipe only calls for two tablespoons of heavy cream, a quarter cup of tomato purée, or three cloves of garlic? Unless you plan on using the leftovers again in the next week or so, don't bother refrigerating them because they won't last.
Ironing is a serious chore: hot, unpleasant, and frustrating all in one, but necessary if you don't want to look like you crawled out of bed just before work. While you might only turn to your flatiron when faced with wrinkled clothing, this little appliance packs the power to tackle even greater challenges—and here are our 10 favorites.
There's nothing in this life that we love more than making one ingredient or one food tool do multiple things. It saves money! It saves time! It makes us look smart at cocktail parties!
My years in the restaurant business have taught me many things. Some of those things are best left unsaid and other things require a PhD in vulgarity, but the one thing I learned that I keep coming back to night after night is that you do not have to spend a lot of money to drink excellent wine. This is especially true of champagne...I'm sorry, sparkling wines.
To say we're a nation of coffee-lovers is putting it mildly. Americans consume 400 million cups of joe in one day alone, but how well do we actually know our morning BFF? We know it comes from a bean, and that more coffee drinks exist than there are ways to skin a pig, but what else?
A few years ago I went hog-wild trying to achieve a zero-waste lifestyle. I didn't succeed, but the experiment taught me that we throw away things we could—and should—be using more.
Being able to sleep deeply and fully is one of the foundations for real health. When you go without it, you feel subhuman and incapable of dealing with the world—just ask a student who's had to pull an all-nighter or the parents of a newborn. In fact, many studies have shown that lack of sleep or irregular sleep is linked to acne, weight gain, and depression.
Minor mishaps occur all the time in the kitchen, whether you cut your finger while dicing an onion, scorched your hand in a grease fire, or burned the roof of your mouth because you were to eager to taste-test your killer pasta sauce.
There's an ongoing debate about whether or not it's safe or even desirable to rinse meat before you cook it. Many fall into the anti-rinsing camp, saying that it's not effective at dislodging bacteria, especially on poultry, as we've discussed before. Meanwhile, some argue that rinsing certain meats, like bacon, could be beneficial since it possibly prevents it from shrinking.
Macaroni and cheese is one of those dishes that automatically make me feel all is right with the world. I even like the boxed kind in a pinch. However, real macaroni and cheese is pretty easy to make and is worlds better than the boxed kind. It's also pretty easy to make really, really good macaroni and cheese once you know some essential pointers.
In case you haven't heard, chia seeds are off of the novelty plant grower and in your supermarket. Why? Because they're a nutrient-dense food loaded with calcium and fiber (18% and 42% respectively of your RDA per one ounce of seeds). There are even some preliminary studies that show chia might be useful in combating diabetes.
The beauty of a grilled cheese sandwich is that even a mediocre one still tastes pretty good (I find the same is true with pizza). However, chefs and cooking pros have come up with some great tricks that will turn a regular grilled cheese sandwich into something sublime.
Go to a chain supermarket, and chances are you'll see one type of garlic—maybe two or three if you're lucky. However, there's a mouthwatering slew of Allium sativum out there, far beyond those papery white bulbs most of us encounter at the nearest Stop 'n' Shop.
Foodies and big-time chefs like Thomas Keller go crazy for fleur de sel. This finishing salt appears in fancy eateries and cookbooks the world over, and in the early 2000s, it was not uncommon to see diners in a high-end restaurant sprinkle a pinch of fleur de sel on their plates from their own personal stash.
It's that time of year where you need to break out the grill and cook food over red-hot coals, whether it's the beginning, middle, or end of summer. Even if you're not a grill master extraordinaire, you can use these hacks to fool your friends and family into thinking that you're a barbecuing badass.