The Kitchn Archive: Oct 2012

At home, soup-eating is usually a casual affair, with no special rules or etiquette. But have you ever wondered about the proper way to eat soup, especially at a formal dinner or fancy restaurant? From where to rest your spoon between bites to how to politely get the last drops of soup from the bowl, we have the answers. At a table setting with a lot of utensils, the soup spoon will be placed on the far right, and is usually recognizable by its wide, round bowl.

Do you have leftover apple peels from making sauce, pie, and other seasonal apple dishesThis is technically a tisane rather than a tea, although you could add apple peels to a cup of black or green tea. What we do is forgo the tea leaves and simply simmer a handful of organic apple peels in a saucepan of water for 5-10 minutes.Your kitchen will smell amazing, and the drink has the delicate flavor of apples and any other whole spices you add, such as a cinnamon stick, cardamom, or cloves.

Have you ever had pizza for breakfast? There are a couple of ways to do it. The first is the cold way, the leftover way — pizza straight from the fridge, cold and chewy, with cheese slipping off sideways. This is not a breakfast to be underestimated. It’s fast and satisfying and who knows how many early morning college exams have been aced thanks to its brain-powering boost? But there’s another way to eat pizza for breakfast.

You may choose to drink tea with a little bit of milk to make it taste better, but are you diminishing tea’s health benefits in the process? It turns out that, yes, that may be the case. Researchers at the Fifth International Scientific Symposium on Tea and Human Health say that milk proteins bind with the flavonols in tea, making it more difficult for the body to absorb them and reap the health benefits.