Stephanie Barlow

Six more reasons to add a box of chicken broth to your grocery list.

Lemons are an ideal way to perk up early spring cuisine; from salads to fish and desserts, they are an easy flavor booster to keep on hand. However, I always end up planning a meal around my last lemon, only to find out it has become hard and yields as much juice as a potato. Then I discovered this simple tip for making sure you get every last drop out of your lemons. Lemons sealed in a plastic bag and stored in the refrigerator tend to keep fresh longer.

You’ve taken care to create a perfect cocktail, so why dull it down with a boring icecube? Read on for 5 cures to the common ice cube.• Striped Ice Cubes: More than just eye candy, these pretty cubes can even be made with alcohol. It adds another dimension to any cocktail!• Spherical Ice Cubes: These ice spheres are a bit more challenging to make (don’t even get us started on how to make the ice perfectly clear), but impressive nonetheless.

While our focus is usually centered around the fastest way to get dinner on the table, we think it’s luxurious to have a few hours to just cook. Lucky enough to have more than a few days off? Why not try several projects? We’ve rounded up 15 of our favorite projects for an afternoon or snowy weekend. Let’s get cooking! 1. Bake bread: Once a common task, few of us make bread daily (or even monthly!) these days.

Pickling involves little more than marinating vegetables over time. How much time depends on the method. And for new picklers, the best way to try it out is through refrigerator pickling. You don’t need a garden’s worth of vegetables or canning equipment – just pick a vegetable (or several), add spices and brine, and into the fridge it goes. Best eaten within a week or two, this method is your answer for quick and fresh pickled fare. 1.

I’ve been in a cooking frenzy lately, spending full weekend afternoons making pot pies and cheesecake. However, at the first sign of warm weather this week I couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. So I’m taking advantage of the rain forecasted this weekend to fill my freezer with easy to reheat dishes for when I’d rather read a book outside than stand at the stove.1.

Cooking with real vanilla beans is a beautiful thing; I love the flecks of vanilla flavor and scraping the concentrated vanilla seeds out of the fragrant beans. But after paying up for the real things, the last thing I want to do is throw away the scraped-out pod. Good news — there are plenty of uses for these spent beans, which still contain tons of great vanilla flavor. Vanilla sugar – Stash spent vanilla beans in a canister of sugar to give it a subtle vanilla flavor.

The whole point of freezing things is to have ingredients on hand right when need them. If you haven’t heard it before, caramelized onions freeze wonderfully well and are great flavor boosters for almost any food. Read on for freezing tips and quick fix uses!Caramelizing onions sounds like more of a process than it really is. Onions practically do it on their own if left alone in a pan.

When it comes to vegetables, I tend to stick to a routine. Roasted Brussels sprouts tonight, sautéed broccoli tomorrow. Do you ever gaze across the produce in the grocery store or the farmer’s market and wonder how you’d prepare something new? Look no further. Here’s a beginner’s guide to proper preparation times.If you’re new to the kitchen or trying to shake things up a little, it’s helpful to know which vegetables cook in a similar manner.

Love to buy loads of fresh veggies at the farmers’ market but can’t always use them up in time? Look to your freezer for help! However, it’s not as simple as throwing a few tomatoes in the freezer; there are techniques that vastly improve the thawed product. Read on for tips!In general, just plopping fresh veggies in the freezer results in rather sad, limp results once thawed. Why?