Tormented Kitchen

I got this tip from a friend who was trying Weight Watchers a number of years ago.  If you are using ground beef in a recipe that requires cooking and then combining with sauce ingredients, this is great because you will not miss the greasiness and the flavor will not be horribly reduced. Start with lean ground beef, I look for 90/10 or even 93/7 beef.  This refers to the percentage of lean meat and fat that is ground up together when raw. Now when you cook it in the frying pan, notice the puddle of hot, liquid fat. Normally I would drain the fat and return the pan to the stove. My friend recommended that you drain the fat and rinse the meat under hot water. Then also use a paper towel to wipe the fat residue out of the pan to remove as much fat as possible. Return the drained meat to the pan and season. This works really well for taco meat, sloppy joes, or chili.

 My kids love stickers. They plaster them everywhere and I really mean everywhere.They put stickers on the furniture, on the play kitchen, on the real fridge, on the doors, on the windows inside the car, and on themselves including their clothes. Well, sometimes I forget to check pants pockets for toys and money and shirts for stickers. Eric had a huge sticker on one of his shirts and it went through the drier.  I was folding clothes and noticed a big white sticky patch, front and center. Oops. Scrubbing and washing with a regular stain remover won't cut the gunk. Instead, get a spoonful of peanut butter, or soy butter if you don't do peanuts. Rub the PB into the gunk.  Use the spoon or a butter knife to scrape and rub the sticker residue off. Keep working the PB over and into the residue until the gunk just lets go. It should only take a minute. Use a little squirt of dish soap like Dawn to break down the PB on the shirt. Rub it in good and rinse it off, then l...

High altitude bakers, this is for you! We all do it. We all have to add extra flour to boxed cake and brownie mixes. Because the box says so and they are right that things don't cook up the same here as low altitude. The box says use all-purpose flour, good old nutritionally lacking AP flour. I use unbleached whole wheat flour instead.  I can't tell a difference because it's usually only 1/4 cup of extra flour. Your food will not taste like cardboard because you changed part of your flour.  My Ghiradelli box-mix brownies turn out great with this. Health-wise, I know it's only a teeny tiny microscopic improvement, but it's still a teeny tiny improvement. I also use some unbleached whole wheat flour in gravy and for dredging pan-fried meats. If that is too "natural" for you, try making tiny steps toward better nutrition by using unbleached all-purpose flour. I promise it's not a huge difference so I know you won't come back and tell me...

Well, hello again my dear readers.  Today's message was prompted by my own clumsiness. See I have furlough today. I have finished up my last-minute Christmas shopping and came back home to wrap and clean. I have laundry running, dishes in the machine, mildew spray-treated the shower, and put toilet cleaner in the toilets. In the melee, toilet-cleaning gel chemicals got all over my hands.  I got a faulty squirt lid on the toilet cleaner bottle so oops. Bad, bad, bad thing to have happen, you know? Rinsing and rinsing under cold water didn't get it all off and I could feel my thumb really starting to burn. Not good. So I run to the kitchen and grab the box of baking soda and pour it into my hands so I can stop the chemical reaction. I rubbed it in really well. Then I rinsed under freakishly cold tap water until my hands no longer felt slippery. Chemistry lesson of the day: baking soda also known as sodium bicarbonate + nasty things like toilet cle...

Quite a while ago, I bought a cake decorating kit. It came with interchangeable tips and a screw-down adaptor to fit it to a disposable plastic piping bag. Have you looked at how expensive those disposable bags are? Well, I needed multiple colors.  I got out the old reusable piping set I got from Mom and then I got out a bunch of freezer zip-top baggies to use with the newer interchangeable set. It's very easy to take scissors, trim off about 1/8 inch from the corner tip of a baggie, add the screw-down adaptor and tip.  Then you fill it with frosting and zip it shut. I especially like being able to close the top because I usually have issues keeping the reusable piping bag rolled shut, so when I'm not careful, icing goes out the top and over my hands. Yes, I will admit to being somewhat messy. It happens to the best of us. The zip-top baggie trick also works well if you have really thin icing and need it to write.  Just fill baggie with thin icing (o...

Hey remember this entry about peeling citrus fruit with a staple remover ? Well the handy little staple remover has found another use. I use it for shelling pistachios. Sometimes those little buggers are hard to crack with your bare hands. I tried crushing them with the handles of my scissors. I found that just prying them open with the staple remover is more effective. Insert the small metal protuberance into the crack of the pistachio. Run it down to lengthen the crack and twist to pop it apart. Viola. Nuts.

Who likes citrus fruit? Who likes peeling their citrus fruit? And who forgets to bring the little plastic peeler gizmo with them in their lunch bag? Picture this: I'm sitting at my desk, having just finished my soup and salad and looking for something sweet. Ah ha! The clementine! But, lo, I have trimmed my claws and can no longer peel citrus fruit with my bare hands. I search frantically for some device which will pierce and remove the skin! Eureka! The staple-removing device that ineffectively removes staples! Imagine my surpise to discover it does a much better job at peeling citrus fruit than removing staples from my work documents. SWEET! I mean, TANGY!