Apartment Therapy: Tips & Techniques

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Posts tagged “Tips & Techniques”

Basic Technique: How to Blanch Vegetables

Blanching vegetables--cooking them in a large amount of boiling water--might seem fussy or bring to mind childhood dinners of overcooked mushy carrots. But blanching is a good technique to keep in yo...

Weekend Cooking: On Tasting While Cooking

Do you taste your food while cooking? Or do you wait until the end and hope for the best? Tasting food during cooking might be second nature to some of us, but maybe not for all. Getting to know your...

Kitchen Hack: Blow-Dry Your Chicken Before Roasting

We came across this strange yet sensible tip over at the blog Domestigeek, and we're curious if anyone has tried it! Since you get the best and crispiest chicken skin when the chicken has been thoroug...

Baker's Tricks: Getting Steam into Your Oven

Steam is an essential component for getting a classic artisan loaf with good oven spring and a crackling crust, like the sourdough loaves we've been baking lately. Short of investing in an oven with ...

Cooking By Feel: French Ingredients and Flavors

French cuisine is perhaps the one kind of cooking where almost all of us feel uncomfortable off-roading it without a recipe. Julia Child, Jacques Pepin and other chefs of the last fifty years have pu...

Dressing Spring Salads: How To Make a Basic Vinaigrette

All this talk of baby shoots and growing sweet little radishes is making us think of salads. Simple, beautiful, garden-fresh salads that only need a quick toss with a vinaigrette to shine, shine, shi...

How To: Clean and Debeard Mussels

Recipes for preparing mussels, including our own recipe for Linguine with Mussels and Dandelion Greens, includes an instruction to "clean and debeard the mussels." For the uninitiated, this can be a c...

Using Cinco de Mayo Leftovers: Tortilla-Crusted Dishes

Did you have a Cinco de Mayo fiesta last night? Got leftover bags of tortilla chips? We were just reading the May issue of Southern Living, which has a recipe for pork tenderloin crusted in crushed to...

Food Science: Salting to Taste

Salt to taste. Such a simple and innocent instruction! We've read those words a million times over the years without thinking anything of it. But lately we started wondering what this really means. ...

Rescue Me! How to Save Dinner from Burning

Chris's post last week on cooking mistakes was a catalog of every kitchen snafu we've ever had the joy of experiencing. Ouch! There's nothing worse than realizing that you forgot to chop the spinach ...

Quick Tip: How To Keep Meringue Crispy

In our humble (as always) opinion, crunching down on a sweet airy meringue is one of life's great pleasures. Since just a few egg whites yields dozens of meringue bites, we can eat a belly-full and st...

Learning Something New: Our A-ha! Chicken Moment

In Week Seven of the Kitchn Cure, Sara Kate is challenging you to learn a new skill. It could be as simple as properly dicing an onion or as complicated as rolling out pasta. This reminded us of sev...

Happy Kitchen: Caring for Wooden Utensils

We've talked a lot recently about how much we love cooking and serving with wooden utensils. Silicone and stainless steel have their uses and particular beauty, too. But there's a tactile pleasure in ...

Little Cooking Mistakes Can Really Mess Stuff Up

Oooops, I did it again. I didn't put enough water in the pot and now the spaghetti is gummy. My bad! I didn't run the spinach through the salad spinner before I threw it into pan of garlic and olive...

Tip: How Not To Overstuff a Roll or Wrap

There are some wonderful foods out there that come rolled up in something else. Chimichangas, cabbage rolls, and the vegetable summer rolls we posted this week. But putting in the right amount of fi...

Reader Tip: Store Greens in Recycled Salad Containers

We liked this tip from reader and Cure-taker RebeccaCT. She says that when she brings fresh greens home from the market, or when they arrive in the CSA box, she cuts off the stems and repacks them in ...

Chocolate Bloom: Good or Bad?

After our discussion last week about why chocolate seizes, we thought we'd take a look at another one of chocolate's quirks: its tendency to "bloom." And unfortunately, we're not talking about the spr...

Essential Kitchen Tools: A Baking Stone

Unless you're lucky enough to have a brick hearth oven in your back yard, a baking stone--also called a pizza stone--is an essential tool for all of us would-be bakers! These stones mimic the conditi...

Stand Mixer vs. Arm Muscle: Do You Mix by Hand?

Food processors are a saving grace. Immersion blenders are oh-so-very handy. And we love our shiny and robust standing mixer so much that it's practically another member of the family. No doubt about...

Video: Fava Beans 101

We're excited to see fava beans showing up in the farmers' markets, but we admit to being a little intimidated about all that shelling-boiling-shelling action. Sometimes watching a quick demonstrat...

Weeknight Meal Tip: What Do You Do With Bad Wine?

It's happened to all of us at some point; that bottle of wine that we brought back from France or found in a really great wine shop - you know, the one we were saving for a really special occasion? I...

Infusing More Flavor with a Bouquet Garni

This is one of those things that you've probably used a million times as a home cook, but never realized that it has a fancy name all it's own. A bouquet garni (boo-KAY gar-KNEE) is really just a chef...

Cooking Without Recipes

Cooking without recipes was one of the biggest and loudest things we heard in your Cure requests. We've been talking about stocking your pantry well, which is the first step in cooking without your no...

Tip from Cook's Illustrated: Steamed Mashed Potatoes

Kathryn's post on Secrets of Awesome Mashed Potatoes was a popular read last week, so a bunch of you must have mashed potatoes on your mind. That reminded us of a recent article from Cook's Illustrat...

Make This at Home: Pulled Pork BBQ

We were in Memphis this past weekend (it's one of our hometowns) and, as is our custom in Memphis, ate more than one plate of barbecue. This one's from the Germantown Commissary. While we can't get ...