Frugal kitchen tips
March 3rd, 2008
The Urban Vegan has a helpful guide to money saving tips in the kitchen. She mentions baking your own bread, freezing cooked beans, using leftovers as well at 22 other helpful tips. My top picks from the list are:
- Buy in season - This is a huge, huge money saver, when you make your meals based on what’s cheap/available vs. what a particular recipe calls for you can save enormous amounts of money
- Pack a lunch - This should go without saying, the lunch you pack is going to be fractions of the lunch you can buy, and you can make it healthier
- Stock up - savings for buying in bulk are significant, if you run out of room in your cupboards start storing cans under your bed (you’re not using that space anyway)
- Avoid bottled water - Even if you dont care about the environmental impacts of bottled water, it’s absurdly expensive, you’re much better off getting a water filter and filling up a reusable water bottle. Further most bottled water is most likely not any cleaner, more sterile or safer in any way.
- Cut down on the Lattes - This one wasn’t on there, and of course it’s your choice, but brewing coffee at home can save a bundle, and with lattes is easy to mimic the majority of lattes you can buy. Just do the math for a second, (1 $3.25 latte/day×(5 days/week)×(52 weeks/year)=$845 year on coffee. That doesn’t include a tip. You could buy 2.5 complete organic locally grown fresh butchered pigs for that much money.
Matryoshka egg
February 15th, 2008
With eggs inside of eggs inside of eggs… It’s apparently not all that rare, just unusual for consumers to see, but today there’s a story — complete with pictures — of a woman finding a large egg with an intact smaller egg inside. I did some cursory interweb searching and found a knitting blog with a post with another such egg (and no, that blog is not in my RSS reader).
via - Fark
This is Why Your Fruit Salad Sucks
February 8th, 2008
If you’ve ever wondered why citrus at restaurants always tastes better and looks prettier than yours at home, this is why. Seriously, though, it’s called supreming, and it’s worth the small effort.
Super Bowl Weekend
February 1st, 2008
Hey, you over there, put down the Lays and jar of onion dip. Yeah you. I know it’s Super Bowl weekend, and the football fan in me knows that such an event allows, nay demands, a certain type of food. We call it Football Food. But you can make your own. And it will be better — much better — and more bacony.
Simply Recipes has an authoritative round-up on Super Bowl recipes featuring everything from classics (potato skins, hot wings, various and sundry dips) to the truly frightening. Okay, so I was honestly curious about the Beer Cheese Cupcakes with Bacon Cheddar Frosting — if that’s not a manly dessert, what is? — but then I saw the “beer” in question: Budweiser Select. What’s a sell-respecting beer drinking to do? Guiness cupcakes, of course.
Penance…
With all of the talk of bacon around here lately, I thought I’d throw a crumb to our vegetarian friends. 101 Cookbooks has posted a delicious-looking recipe for Carmelized Tofu. Go forth, yea veggies, and eat soy.
Gourmet Kitchen on a Shoestring
The ever-wonderful Wisebread has a guide to putting together the kitchen of your dreams on a tight budget. They hit on, among other things, buying bulk spices and growing your own herbs in pots, two things that will not only save money (as they mention), but give you better quality, fresher ingredients as well.
They recommend Ikea as a good source for good-quality pots & pans and utensils on a budget, which can be true, but they’re forgetting the best place of all: your friendly neighborhood kitchen supply shop.
Stacked steamer structure
January 19th, 2008
Say that ten times fast. Alton Brown has put up a swanky design for stacked metal steamer baskets on the front page of his website (I’m not linking directly to it because it’s a pdf and if you haven’t already, you should explore his site). Thwarting the specialized steamer pots and bamboo steaming racks (which rock, by the way) with a classic Alton Brown appliance mod.
It pretty much involves using a threaded rod to attach multiple baskets together. I only have one thing to add to his how-to, make absolutely sure to use stainless steel hardware. I’m pretty sure that everyone can agree that oxidizing metal is not good eats.
Bitter chocolate keeps your heart healthy
January 15th, 2008
The American Heart Association’s journal Circulation recently published a study in which it would appear that dark chocolate it good for the heart, specifically the flavanols, which are essentially the bitter anti-oxidant compounds you find in cocoa and tea.
Hot on the heels of this research, an editorial in The Lancet points out that some of the most delicious “dark” chocolates have had all of the good stuff (flavanols) removed and are instead just loaded with delicious sugar and fat. Both of which will cause your heart to seize like the 1.5L engine in a ‘85 blue Honda Civic run for 600 miles without any oil… While there’s no good, consistent way to tell if the heart healthy goods have been removed, chances are that if the words “milk” or “sweetened” appear anywhere on the packaging you might as well just inject a syringe full of beef fat right into your heart. On the bright side, if you do have a weakness for truly dark chocolate you can eat it knowing only the fat content is causing the hardening of your arteries and that the flavanols are doing there best to keep you alive.
Bacon Salt Review
January 15th, 2008
Earlier we told you about an exciting, confusing, utterly terrifying new product: Bacon Salt. The fine folks at Bacon Salt were kind enough to furnish Impoverished Gourmet with samples of the new porcine-flavored seasoning. Dig in — it’s gonna be a long read.
Vanilla Ice Cream with Bacon Salt — more on this later
Twelve Under-$20 Ways to Snack Well on New Year’s Eve
The Washington Post offers up Twelve Under-$20 Ways to Snack Well on New Year’s Eve. Sounds right up our alley.
Via Slashfood.