This holiday season make sure your kitchen thermometers are accurate. It is easy to do and only takes a few minutes. Though the thermometers may, and I emphasize may, have been accurate at the time of purchase, exposure to high temperatures and other conditions may have compromised their accuracy. Don’t get caught with your mercury down…check out your thermometer today.
dtc
How to Break an Egg. Don’t let the title fool you. It has over 1,400 tips, how-tos, emergency fix-its, and handy techniques. Just reading it is inspirational. A definite kitchen staple.
dougthecook
Next time I make pizza I’m going to sift together the dry ingredients. This will help the ingredients get fully moistened and should result in a fluffier crust. Also, sifting will prevent chunks of a dry ingredient from happening - like biting into the crust and finding a pocket of flour. If you do not have a sifter you can use a wire whisk to “sift” the flour.
Sifted flour weighs 4 oz to a cup while settled flour weighs about 5 oz - that is a 20% difference in volume!. Settling occurs during shipping to the store. Sifting aerates the flour back to its wanted state. When measuring flour it should always be done by weight, not by volume.
Doug
2008 is here. Time to start on all the New Year’s resolutions we made.
Dinner on New Year’s Eve was great, though hectic. I was volunteered to cook a few entrees for 7 people. The chosen ones were Noodle Bowl Chicken and Chicken with Tomato-Caper sauce.
9 year old Addie provided dessert: her pink fluff heaven angel food cake. Also, the MOM had a delicious taco soup. And a gift for tomorrow’s breakfast was almond biscotti.
The entrees were still warm after trudging through a foot of fresh snow, which was still coming down.
All in all, everything was sooo good - especially the dessert.
Doug
Somehow, the original post was lost.
I made this noodle bowl with chicken 3 times a few weeks ago…it is that good. Once the ingredients are assembled, cooking goes quickly. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Doug
The other day I made fajita marinade for some delicious chicken. It was good but not great. After some thought, I realized I used a different lime juice. The best lime juice, of course, is from a real lime. Sometimes it is not practical to always have fresh limes around so lime juice in a bottle is the next alternative. The best one I have found is the juice that comes in a plastic lime looking container (I cannot remember the manufacturer). No wonder, once you find a good brand, is to stick with it.
dougthecook
This pizza sauce is easy to make and tastes good - a great combination!
1/2 onion, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
1/2 tsp salt
2 TBL olive oil
1 can (16 oz) tomato sauce - use a good brand. I used Hunt’s
2 tsp sugar
1 1/2 TBL fresh basil, finely chopped (or 1 1/2 tsp dried)
1 1/2 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp dried parsley
Cook onion and garlic in olive oil until onion is translucent (but not brown, so stir frequently. Takes about 5 minutes). Add tomato sauce then rest of ingredients. Stir well and simmer for 20 minutes, covered (or else it will spatter).
I have replace the garlic clove and salt with 1/2 tsp of garlic salt with good success; and it’s even faster to make!
Many times pizza sauces call for tomato paste - presumably to thicken them up. The brands I have tried have a tinny taste to them. And I found out they are not crucial for a good pizza sauce.
I do a good deal of baking - especially pizza. A pizza takes 20 to 25 minutes to cook, depending on the method I use which these days is usually an iron skillet. Another popular baking item is zucchini bread now that zucchini is growing prolific in my garden. This endeavor takes 55 minutes to bake.
Now that energy costs are rising I’m always looking for ways to save but not give up my lifestyle. One way I found was to turn off the oven during the last few minutes of baking and let it coast. No degradation of taste or quality has been noticed. So every 10th pizza doesn’t cost me a dime to cook.
When I pan cook food, such as an egg in the morning, I apply the same cut-and-coast technique. After I flip the egg off goes the stove (it’s electric so it has residual heat) while I butter my toast and pour my juice.
This may be a minor incident but small things add up. Now only if work were at the bottom of a hill…
I must say I love pot roast - especially the carrots. Normally I cook it two ways: the oven at 450 or on the stove top in a big pot. Since it is summertime (tomorrow, officially) the thought of all that heat in the kitchen is reprehensible. So out comes the crockpot.
Even though there is 1 1/2 of us (my wife eats half as much as me) I make a lot of it because it still tastes delicious after a few days and it relieves me from cooking. It doesn’t get any easier than this:
Into the crockpot set on high (4 hrs) or low (8 hrs)
6 carrots, peeled and sliced
4 potatoes, peeled and cubed
1 pound chuck roast, 1 inch cubes, trimmed of fat
1/3 cup water
Cooking on high tends to get a few veggies stuck to the side of the crockpot - at least on mine which is 20 years old.
I have been very busy making soups. The plan is to make an area on dougthecook.com exclusively for soup. At first, when I started to cook, my soups were terrible. Whole pots would get pitched because of some problem - too much salt, wrong ingredient, blah blah. Since soup was a weak point I decided to make it a strong point. I must say my soups have improved tremendously since yore.
Here are a few ones to get started:
Minestrone Soup
Chicken Stock
Pasta Fagioli
dtc
