Sometimes, you just need to make everything ahead – it’s a potluck, or a kids’ party and you’ll be busy with other things later, or you just want to be relaxed at dinner time.
Guacamole is easy to make ahead (and even yummier, I think, if there’s been a chance for the flavors to meld), but if you just stick it in a container and put it in the fridge, the surface will turn an icky black-brown color. Acid helps, which is why most recipes call for lemon or lime (I much prefer lime in guacamole), but if you use enough
[Continue reading Keeping Guacamole from Going Brown]
Since they were little, when any of my kids bump their mouths, or have a sore lip, instead of giving them an ice pack, I’ll hand them a popsicle. They get distracted from their pain by the sweetness, and they are more likely to keep ice on for longer when it’s flavored! (And bonus if it’s red – if they have any bleeding, they won’t notice the blood — and we all know that kids will start crying anew if they see blood!)
Popsicle
When we
[Continue reading How to Comfort a Child with a Hurt Mouth]
A few years ago, I was in a kitchen supply store and I saw the most adorable “guacamole masher”. It had a cute cartoon avocado on the handle with a whimsical expression on its plastic face. The “business part” was exactly like the potato masher I had at home — and the adorable masher was priced at about 10 times what I’d paid for my potato masher!
I didn’t need to spend oodles of bucks for that toy, and I didn’t need it taking up extra space in my utensil drawer, either. As Alton Brown would say, it was a “uni-tasker”.
If
[Continue reading My Guacamole Masher]
Pasta is one of those things I buy in bulk when it’s on sale. I store it in a tall, airtight canister. But when it’s time to cook, it can be hard to cook just the right amount. I’ve tried the “spaghetti measurer” with the holes for different amounts of servings, but I find it really frustrating to use. For other varieties of pasta, I just weighed it out, but uncooked spaghetti isn’t as bowl-friendly as, say, elbow macaroni.
Now, I just put a drinking glass on my kitchen scale, zero it out, and stand spaghetti in the glass until I’ve
[Continue reading Measuring and Weighing Spaghetti]
I use bananas in a lot of recipes — banana muffins, smoothies, banana bread, empanadas, more muffins, fruit salsa, and more. It can be a problem having bananas of the right ripeness around, though. It seems like there are a whole bunch of almost-ripe bananas, and then, as if by magic, there are one or two overripe bananas. The minute they get ripe, the boys want to eat them, but the second they start to turn brown (which is when they start getting really good, in my opinion), none of the kids want them anymore. And one or two bananas
[Continue reading Freezing Banana Slices]
When I’ve got a jar that just won’t open, I tap the outside rim of the lid with the handle-end of a butter knife. Most of the time, this will break the seal and I’ll be able to open the jar easily.
If it’s jelly or some other sticky kind of thing, I’ll also run the top of jar under hot water for a minute. Sometimes some of the sticky stuff got caught in the threads, and the heat melts it, enabling it to open!
Another thing to try, if you’re
[Continue reading How to Open Difficult-to-Open Jars]
I love to eat fish, and all but one of my kids love fish, too. My favorite fish is orange roughy. A few months ago, I was talking to a friend and mentioned that I was making orange roughy for dinner. She told me that orange roughy are overfished and close to being on the endangered list.
I knew of a couple other varieties of fish that I don’t buy because of those kinds of issues, and I was starting to feel overwhelmed – how am I supposed to remember what’s okay to buy and what isn’t while I’m in the
[Continue reading Picking Your Fish]
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rocknroll_guitar/ / CC BY 2.0
My mother has always used index cards for all sorts of notes. She always has a little bundle clipped together with a binder clip in her purse, and she’ll whip it out to record how much she spent on lunch, or to note something she wants to mention to my uncle next time she speaks with him. Her grocery lists are kept on index cards, and a running to-do list, as well. She’ll even tape an index card to her front door to
[Continue reading Index cards]
Chocolate chip butterscotch cookies
When I bake cookies, I tend to lose interest after the first cookie sheet-ful is baked. After all, we’ve got our hot-from-the-oven cookie fix, but I don’t want all the rest of the dough to go to waste. I also don’t mind having ready to bake cookies available. Some folks just refrigerate the dough, but I find cold dough difficult to scoop. Other people scoop it out into cookie size dollops and freeze those – that way, when they want freshly baked cookies, they can
[Continue reading Homemade Slice and Bake Cookies]
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June 23rd, 2010 | 
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