Have you ever bought a bunch of leafy lettuce with the intent of making a beautiful salad only to find it wilted in your refrigerator a few days later? What did you do? Did you:
A. throw it away then eat a pound of chocolate because you were so riddled with guilt? Or…
B. revive it and have your salad after all?
If you chose A, you are not alone. I am ashamed to admit how many bunches of lettuce, chard, kale, spinach, [insert your favorite leafy green here] have gone into my refrigerator only to die. But I have learned there is another way.
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Tagged as:
food storage,
wilted greens
If it weren’t for cleaning out the inside of a pumpkin, I think I would cook with them more often. It takes me forever to scrape out all of the stringy stuff inside. This has made me lazy and I mostly use canned now. But we bought a few pumpkins for Hallloween decorations, and never carved them, so they have been sitting there taunting me… (I’m not sure how to cook big pumpkins though, I’ve only cooked with small sugar pumpkins – anyone have suggestions?).
Tonight I decided to go for it. Just cut the top off of a sugar pumpkin and dove in. I made a rendition of Ruth Riechl’s pumpkin “soup” or gratin or whatever you want to call it (it doesn’t really resemble soup, at least not the way I made it. Tasty though. Then again most things are tasty with enough melted cheese).
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Tagged as:
nablopomo,
pumpkin
A new batch of mini-pies are cooling in the kitchen right now. Once the taste tests are done I will share the results with you. I have four crusts in the test: all butter, butter + shortening (both of these are repeats from round 1), butter + lard, and Cook’s Illustrated fool-proof pie dough which uses vodka.
But for today, I thought I’d share a few tips about making pie dough. [Continue reading...]
Tagged as:
nablopomo,
pie crust,
video
Sunday night, Dan and I were cooking dinner when we found ourselves in negotiations over the last half cup of brown sugar. He wanted it for the ham, I wanted it for the sweet potatoes and acorn squash. Just as Dan offered to split it with me, leaving us both a little short of what we really needed, I remembered the Molasses Episode of Good Eats in which Alton Brown made white sugar into brown sugar. But… was there any molasses in Dan’s kitchen? I checked the baking pantry and came away happy. We both had enough brown sugar to cook without compromises, and dinner was saved (cue heroic music).
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Tagged as:
brown sugar,
how to,
ingredients,
nablopomo
