The Kitchn Archive: Apr 2012

Do you store home-canned foods with the rings or screw bands on the jars? Here’s why you should remove them.When canning pickles, jam, and other foods in Mason jars, rings or bands are used to hold the lids in place during processing and cooling. Until recently, I left these rings on while storing the jars in the pantry.

Got a bottle of leftover wine – or perhaps a few, after a party? You could make jelly, or you could turn it into an exquisite sauce for fruit, ice cream, salad dressings, and more.To make wine syrup, you can use a single bottle or mix up the remainders of an assortment of wines. We have only tried it with red wine but white would work, too.

Since it’s Potluck Week here in The Kitchn, I’ve been thinking a lot about portable foods. And whenever I think about a crowd-pleasing dish that’s easy to make and easy to transport, I always come back to the Seven-Layer Salad.The Seven-Layer Salad has a bad rep in some circles. I can understand, given that in some recipes the amount of mayo and sugar and bacon is way over the top, leading to a gloppy, overly sweet mess on your plate. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

While visiting a roadside honor standHave you tasted salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor)? Its fern-like scalloped leaves have a delicate cucumber flavor, which makes it a lovely addition to salads, as the name implies, and an array of other dishes from tea sandwiches to light soups, fish, cheese spreads, and even iced tea and lemonade. Although burnet is not well known today, it was commonly grown in Medieval kitchen gardens and was used medicinally to heal wounds and protect against the plague.

I received several questions and comments during Dinner Week asking for discussion and help on pairing side dishes with main dishes. This left me scratching my head a bit, as I think it’s hard to discuss this generally, without a specific menu in hand.

We love the warm, peppery-sweet flavor of fresh ginger in all kinds of dishes. In the past we’ve talked about grating ginger with a ceramic grater or a Microplane, but what if you don’t have either tool on hand? Just grab a fork.To grate ginger with a fork, hold the fork down on a work surface and rub a peeled knob of ginger across the tines. That’s it!Even if you use a real grater at home, this trick can come in handy if you’re cooking in a kitchen without one.

Length and Finish are words often used by wine tasters. What do they mean? And what words might you use to describe them? Length is a tasting term to describe how long the taste of a wine persists or lingers on your palate after you have swallowed (or spit, if tasting professionally) the wine…Length is essentially, as it implies, a measure. A wine’s length may be described as long, moderate or short. In general, a long length is considered a sign of high quality.