Summer is here, and temperatures are rising. Instead of shelling out for an expensive new air conditioning unit, why not build one yourself with a few bucks worth of old computer parts?
Eating vegetarian isn't just for vegetarians. There are plenty of reasons, health and economics-wise, to consider forgoing the meat for a meal or three. Rather than get deep into the world of fake meat (although there's many a tasty alternative to be found there, to be sure), you should consider getting to know your humble-seeming fungal friend: the mushroom. Thanks to their hearty flavor, cooks tend to treat mushrooms like meat, albeit one with its own unique characteristics. Mushrooms are e...
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.
Marinades are among my all-time favorite tricks as a cook for several reasons. They're easy like Sunday morning, they let time do what it's supposed to, which is work for you, and you get a huge return for relatively little effort on your part.
Every few months I get together with a friend and we have a ‘masala making session’! We spilt the cost of the materials, the work load and then, split the masala. It takes a few hours but once it’s done, cooking is just so easy and so fast. All you have to do is add in the veggies or the meats and cook. Watch this how to video to learn how to make large quantities of masala sauce for all your Indian recipes.
Soba noodles and vegetables are a great healthy and satisfying meal and it's good for your heart! In this video series Jane Murphy shows you how to take a traditional lo mein or chow mein type Chinese dish, and make it heart healthy by making it with soba noodles and lots of veggies.
This is a video which demonstrates how to cook lemon Cornish hens. This will be a great addition to your dinner repertoire. No one will be able to keep their hands off it.
Freezing is a great way to preserve the nutrients and lengthen shelf-life of food. No need to waste extra apples from the fall. Freeze your apples to be used in a variety of ways at the date of your choosing.
To the end user, mobile apps are sometimes expensive. To the developers, those costs are justified for all the hard work put into making the apps. Sometimes app creators will meet in the middle by putting their apps on sale or giving them away for a limited time to gain more traction in the App Store.
What is old is new again. In this case, a classic arcade game gets the augmented reality treatment. In a new promotion playing off its ad campaign featuring actor Craig Robinson (The Office, Hot Tub Time Machine), Pizza Hut has turned its pizza boxes into a virtual Pac-Man game via web-based AR technology.
With the Wigle WiFi app running on an Android phone, a hacker can discover and map any nearby network, including those created by printers and other insecure devices. The default tools to analyze the resulting data can fall short of what a hacker needs, but by importing wardriving data into Jupyter Notebook, we can map all Wi-Fi devices we encounter and slice through the data with ease.
Being a city dweller does not mean you cannot save the planet — or your food scraps. Climate change and resource management are big issues. Composting in any size space is not only possible, but it gives you a chance to reduce greenhouse gasses and reuse food scraps. Right now, about 40% of all food in the US goes to the landfill. In addition to planning meals and using your food in creative ways to reduce the amount that goes to waste, you can compost.
Are you looking for a little microbe magic? Think composting. Composting is a great way to reuse food and plant waste that you would otherwise throw into the trash, which would just end up in a landfill somewhere. During the composting cycle, microbes reduce this organic waste until it can be fed back into the soil as rich, crumbly compost. When returned to the soil, compost feeds plants and improves the nature of life underground. Sound like a great idea? It is — and it's easy.
Hear me out. No, really. Before you sharpen your pitchforks and give me anecdotal evidence of your Chinese restaurant syndrome, I think you need to know a few things about monosodium glutamate. First of all, it's a naturally-occurring chemical compound that can be found in anything from tomatoes to cheese, and is used in all kinds of foods from KFC to breakfast sandwiches. So spare me the comments on MSG and Chinese food—you probably eat MSG on a daily basis without even knowing it. (And also...
Ah, butter—the (literally) heart-stopping star of the dairy world. Everything tastes better with it, from pie crusts and cookies to veggies and steaks. Hell, you can even fry things in butter if you want the best-tasting fried foods of your (short) life.
Salad isn't very exciting—and neither is salad dressing. You're either eating rabbit fodder drenched in a too-sour vinaigrette or too-heavy, leaf-wilting dressing like Thousand Island or French.
If you spend a lot of time reading about food, chances are you've heard about bone broth. It's all the rage these days, from high profile chefs like Marco Canora building menus around it, to celebrities like Salma Hayek using it as self-prescribed beauty regimens.
Gravy is a relatively simple dish, yet it's remarkably easy to mess up. We've all experienced the disappointment of excitedly pouring gravy onto our mashed potatoes, only to realize it's too runny, too lumpy, or too bland. And because gravy is so simple, even if you don't mess it up, it's still challenging to make it memorable and delicious.
If you have a local Trader Joe's, you know first-hand how enchanting the frozen aisles are—almost every item offers the promise of a delicious meal or dessert. (We're always tempted to open the package and eat the cookie butter cheesecake, stat.)
A slow cooker can be both your culinary companion and your go-to gadget in the kitchen. That's right: the idea of slow cooking is no longer for Southern housewives or purveyors of the Ladies' Home Journal anymore. The times, they are a'changing!
Juicing fruits and vegetables is very beneficial to your health. For some, it's a trend; but to me, it's a part of my morning routine.
Tofu has been a staple food in Asia for over 2,000 years, but due to the health craze of recent years, it's enjoyed a surge of popularity in the Western world. Derived from the milk of soy beans and typically coagulated by calcium or magnesium salts, tofu can be found in consistencies ranging from extra-soft or silken to extra-firm. Based on which firmness you prefer, there are a myriad of ways to prepare your tofu for consumption.
Alcohol is a marvelous thing. It might even be responsible for saving civilization. And we're always fans of hacking our booze intake, whether it's learning how to drink all night long without getting drunk or how to discreetly get your drink on without anyone knowing.
You can find chili peppers in practically every cuisine. From the sweet Italian variety to the spicy Thai bird's chili and the smoky Mexican chipotle, peppers are ubiquitous and universally loved. But if you find the range and scope of these little fireballs overwhelming, you're not alone.
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.
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.
Everything you thought you knew about cooking pasta is wrong. When I took cooking classes in Italy, they taught me to bring a large volume of salted water to a rolling boil, add a drop of olive oil so that the noodles wouldn't stick together, and wait several minutes until it was al dente (which literally means "to the tooth," i.e., firm and not mushy when bitten).
I grew up in a household where bacon was considered its own necessary food group. My mom saved the bacon fat in a jar and reused it in other dishes, which my friends considered vile, unless they were also from immigrant families or the American South, where saving bacon fat has never gone out of style.
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.
What kind of cake goes best with the Super Bowl? If you guessed a football-shaped cake, you guessed right. In this video recipe, Betty Crocker shows you how to whip up a super easy American football cake that's also a pull-apart cake, because Super Bowl fans don't have time to slice and serve.
Jerky is not only delicious but it is a great way to bring a protein rich energy snack with you anywhere. This video will how you how to make a great beef jerky at home. You will want a think slice of meat and you can create your own fantastic flavoring.
Just like any meal choice you can make more or less healthy options when eating sushi. Some ingredients are particularly calorie packed. If you’re watching your weight know where the hidden calories are and if your really conscientious you can try sashimi.
Change things up and for your next dessert or for an after school snack, try serving banana pudding. Banana pudding is easy and combines the creamy fun of pudding with the fruity flavor of bananas. It’s a clever way to sneak in an extra serving of fruit.
If you’re doing some spring cleaning and decide to throw in a little home improvement in as well you may want to remove old caulk. As we all know, old caulk is unattractive and will make areas look dirty or unfinished.
In this tutorial video, learn how to get started using the Akai MPC 4000 drum machine. Our expert music producer will give you a tour of the basic interface for the MPC, and then show you how to load, chop, and slice samples, layer a beat, use the sequencer, and create a basic hip-hop beat of your own.
In this video series, watch as master Korean chef Kathryn Lynch teaches how to cook bulgogi, tak gogi, and dae ji gogi. Learn the ingredients for bulgogi, how to score meat, how to slice meat, how to prepare garlic, how to prepare scallions, how to mix coat sugar, how to mix coat soy, how to mix scallions with garlic, how to coat sesame oil, how to heat oil in a wook, and how to serve bulgogi, tak gogi, and dae ji gogi.
In this video series, watch as master chef David Postada teaches how to make American-style potato salad. Learn all about this American-style potato salad recipe such as how to choose potatoes, how to boil water, how to hard boil eggs, how to dice potatoes, how to cut celery, how to cut onions, how to slice green onions, how to a dice a pickle, how to peel and dice eggs, how to mix mayonnaise, and how to prepare the potato salad. An American meal without potato salad is like Stevie Wonders wi...
In this tutorial video, learn how to get started using the Akai MPC 2000XL drum machine. Our expert music producer, Amir Tauheed, will give you a tour of the basic interface for the MPC, and then show you how to load, chop, and slice samples, layer a beat, use the sequencer, and create a basic hip-hop beat of your own.
In this online video series, learn how to make zucchini bread from expert homemaker and cook Carolyn Saylors. She will teach you what ingredients you need to make zucchini bread, how to beat eggs and mix the sugar and oil, how to mix vanilla and flour to make zucchini bread, how to add oats and cinnamon to the zucchini bread dough, how to add baking soda and salt to the zucchini bread dough, how to shred zucchini for zucchini bread, how to add walnuts and shredded zucchini to the zucchini bre...
While there's an art to surviving the all-nighter, there's also an art to staying awake throughout the day when you're operating on little to no sleep. In 1964, the record for sleep deprivation was set by 17-year-old Randy Gardner, who stayed awake for an incredible 264 hours and 12 minutes. Now while we're not out to challenge Randy for his title, we can certainly look to him for inspiration in beating back our own fatigue.
