How cost-effective is it to make pantry staples from scratch? - By Jennifer Reese
Although I love to cook, I've always secretly, darkly, suspected it is costlier to craft at home what you can buy at Ralph's. Obviously, homemade bread tastes better than Wonder, but does playing Martha Stewart really save you money? While packaged food is mostly lousy, some of it can be spectacularly inexpensive. Out of work and increasingly obsessed with our grocery budget, I decided to test my intuition and run a cost-benefit analysis on how much I'd save—if anything—by making from scratch six everyday foods that I usually purchase from Safeway and my local bakery. Except where noted, I chose the most affordable products and ingredients available (i.e., the 10-pound sack of generic sugar instead of a tiny pouch of organic cane sugar from Whole Foods) and priced everything down to the last grain of salt. Based on an estimate from my utility company, it costs around 32 cents per hour to run an electric oven.
50 Healthy Recipes to Kick Off 2012
Happy New Year! Many of us are thinking about our New Year’s resolutions and healthy eating is often at the top of the list. If you are setting a goal to eat healthy in 2012, here are 50 healthy recipes to help you get started. Beverages Easy Strawberry Mango Smoothie
10 Recipes Everyone Should Know How To Make
This is my list of recipes I think everyone should know how to cook. These recipes will be the ones that I make sure my kids know how to cook before they leave the nest. Knowing how to make all these basic dishes teach essential skills you need to know in the kitchen to be able to learn how to cook a wide variety of dishes.
Kitchen Helpers
I found these helpful charts last week and just had to share! Both of these beauties are from Chasing Delicious (aka one of the most fab foodie blogs out there)! Aren’t they faaaaabulous?! Buy them here.
end-of-summer bash: drunken watermelon on tap
I know what you're thinking: "What if I attached a faucet to a watermelon and filled it with spiked watermelon juice so party guests could serve themselves right from the melon?" Well, my husband finally turned that dream into a reality. After testing three different types of faucets and spending the entire afternoon of our housewarming party creating his masterpiece — only to have it clog just hours before guests arrived, resulting in a mad dash to Home Depot and the supermarket so he could do it all over again — he's now perfected the model so all you have to do is build it. Want to impress guests with a DIY watermelon keg of your own? Read on to find out how... 1.
Cook This, Not That!
Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to eat restaurant favorites like Outback Steakhouse Cheese Fries, Olive Garden Lasagna Rollata al Forno, or Pizza Hut Meaty P'Zones? Want to know how you can do both? Restaurant food is delicious, but it's high in unnecessary calories, sodium, and fat. Simply by cooking up home-prepared versions of your restaurant favorites, you can lose 10, 20, 30 pounds, or more! Now, from the same people who brought you Eat This, Not That!
How to Make Sauce Cooking Videos
Pan sauces are à la minute sauces made in the same pan in which ingredients, especially meats, have been sautéed, seared or pan-fried. Wise cooks know that the tasty brown bits, also known as sucs, that are left on the bottom of a pan, are as good as gold. By learning how to take advantage of these delicious, caramelized bits, you will be able to create quick and highly flavourful pan sauces, which will take each dish that you make to a whole new level. In this lesson, we will show you how to properly develop sucs and how to utilize them to build delicious pan sauces. We will also show you how to integrate your own personal twists to build both simple and complex sauces with many layers of flavor. You will learn how to safely and properly deglaze the pan and how to achieve the proper sauce consistency.
Beer and cheese — A pleasantly surprising pairing
When you think about pairing cheese with a beverage, the first one that probably comes to mind is wine. After all, wine and cheese are a classic duo that have been making each other look good for thousands of years. But America’s craft breweries are getting better all the time, and Americans are following suit, appreciating beer in the same way we’ve been taught to savor wine. Craft-beer devotees look for complexity and flavor, not just alcohol content, and they want a beer that has been made with the same time and care put into wine production. Pair India Pale Ale with Cheddar.
Rumbledethumps
A serving of rumbledethumps Rumbledethumps is a traditional dish from the Scottish Borders. The main ingredients are potato, cabbage and onion. Similar to Irish colcannon, and English bubble and squeak, it is either served as an accompaniment to a main dish or as a main dish itself. Cooked leftovers from a roast meal can be used. However, to make fresh rumbledethumps one needs to lightly sauté the shredded onion and cabbage in butter until the onion is translucent and the cabbage wilted, then add some potatoes mashed with butter, salt and pepper; after thoroughly mixing the ingredients, they are placed into an oven proof dish, and cheddar (or similar) cheese placed on top, if desired.
