Archive for cooking tips
A Thanksgiving To Do List
It is the weekend before Thanksgiving - are you prepared for the big day?
You should already know what you are making and have all of the recipes that you need for the big feast. You also should have already decided what size turkey you will be needing to feed the family. So, what is the [...]
Tips for Melting Chocolate
Anyone who has attempted it knows that melting chocolate can be one of the trickiest tasks to undertake in the kitchen. Chocolate scorches easily when heated, turning grainy and impossible to use. The key to melting chocolate is to keep the heat as low as possible, just high enough to melt it.
Per the experts, the [...]
Melting Chocolate in a Double-Boiler
If you want to melt chocolate on the stove in a double-boiler pan, there are a few important tips to keeps in mind.
Make sure that the bottom of the top pan doesn’t touch the water. This will make the pan too hot and the chocolate may scorch.
Heat the water only until hot. If the water [...]
Melting Chocolate in the Microwave
To melt baker’s chocolate in the microwave, first chop it into pieces. A large bar or chunk of chocolate can heat unevenly. It can take so long to melt the inside that the outside will scorch. Small pieces will heat more evenly.
Place the pieces into a microwave-safe container. (Keep away from plastic. It doesn’t distribute [...]
Easiest Hack Mashed Potatoes - Period.
Mashed potatoes, a staple component of the American holiday meal. If not for this fine concoction, what would we put next to our peas, serve our noodles over, and later turn into potato cakes? It seems like everywhere I go for the holidays lately, people are adding all kinds of things to their mashed potatoes. [...]
Potato Cakes
After any holiday meal, you are bound to be left with mashed potatoes, unless you didn’t make enough to begin with, in which case, you are bound to be dragged out of the house and beaten accordingly. While mashed potatoes are usually a popular leftover on their own, one of the simplest ways to turn [...]
Easiest Part of the Holiday Meal to Hack
Some people like to make a loaf or two of homemade bread to go with their holiday meals. Why? While homemade white or wheat bread can indeed be a tasty treat, it is also time-consuming and takes up space in the oven. Now, if making the bread at home was the only possible way to [...]
Hack Appetizer - Oil Dipped Bread
We all know what appetizers are for. They rev you up for the big-eat and keep you from wasting away while you await your entree. During any big cooking holiday, appetizers serve one extremely important role as well. They keep people out of the kitchen!
One simple way to both keep down the tummy rumblings and make [...]
Holiday Cheesecake Baking Hack - No Nonstick Pans!
If you will be baking any cheesecakes for your dessert table you will want to make sure that you cook it right.
Here is something that you might not know - nonstick pans are bad news for cheesecake because they will make the cake cook too fast and possibly even burn. And no one likes a [...]
Quick Tip: Hand-Mixing
When it comes to cooking and baking, especially specialty recipes, the recipe-writers make a lot of assumptions about the recipe-readers. Oftentimes, they expect you to have everything in your kitchen from an egg separator to an apple corer. A lot of kitchens have neither of these things. Some of us don’t even have the basics, [...]