Blog Archives

Recipes You Can Make When You’re Sick [Illness]

Posted on September 4, 2009
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We seriously hope nobody is suffering through a fluke illness this long weekend. Whenever illness strikes, though, we can recommend these recipes that are light on ingredients and Sudafed-coated thought, and have a few home-remedy healing powers, too.

Serious Eats writer Tressa Eaton, suffering from an unseasonal fever, poured her waning energy into recipes that use (mostly) common cabinet ingredients, don’t require sauteing or mincing or anything much, and provide a warming, healing feeling. Her coconut chicken soup, for example, has a few wholly good things in it:

Garlic and ginger both have nutritive properties of their own, and they are fragrant enough that even with a stuffy nose you’ll be able to taste them. I love adding coconut milk to hot soups. Its richness ups the comfort factor and there are many new studies showing that this traditional ingredient is anti-bacterial, anti-viral, and anti-microbial.

Eaton also provides some seriously easy peas and a super-thick smoothie that sounds like a pretty decent throat coater. For a full afternoon of cold or flu killing, try Kelly Abbott’s “Grandma’s Penicillin” chicken soup.






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Bake Delicious and Economical Homemade Sourdough Bread [Food]

Posted on June 28, 2009
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If you tried out the technique we shared earlier this week for easy homemade bread and want to bolster your baking chops, you’ll definitely want to check out this detailed guide to homemade sourdough bread.

Laura and Barb, the two sisters behind the culinary blog My Sister’s Kitchen, post an excellent and detailed tutorial on homemade sourdough. It isn’t as simple as some of the other bread recipes and bread baking techniques we’ve shared in the past, like the aforementioned easy homemade bread, or five-minute quickbread, but based on the rave reviews their technique has received, we think you’ll find it worth the extra effort. While it’s a bit more intensive than some of the other methods we’ve covered, it’s still quite economical:

A very important detail to note is that this method makes extra large loaves that are approximately 4.5 pounds each. Each loaf costs only $0.68 to make. That is sixty-eight cents. I buy flour and yeast in bulk, so it’s possible that if you buy your ingredients at a regular grocery store, your loaf might cost twice that….a whopping $1.36! As you’ll see, that’s for a loaf that’s about 3 times the size of a loaf of grocery store bread.

They have a step by step tutorial on Instructables, linked below, and then a companion post on their blog with additional information about sourdough, creating your own sourdough starter, and various recipes. If you bake your own sourdough bread, due either to thrift or refined taste, we want to hear about it in the comments below.





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Whip Up Homemade Bread without a Bread Machine [Food]

Posted on June 25, 2009
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If you’d like to get hands-on and make your own bread, but need a little more guidance than a recipe, this simple bread recipe with step-by-step photos is a good place to start out.

If you’d shied away from baking your own bread because you thought it required all sorts of arcane grandmotherly magic or a pricey bread machine to create, you’ll love the simplicity of the tutorial we found on Instructables. You’ll need a handful of inexpensive ingredients from your local grocer like bread flour and yeast, a kitchen with an oven and a bread pan or two, and you’re in business.

The recipe is as simple as spending a few minutes mixing ingredients, waiting for the bread to rise, baking for a bit, and then devouring your yummy oven-fresh bread. It’s highly similar to the well-circulated no-knead bread recipe, but the helpful Instructables baker has documented each step of the process. If you’re a home-baking connoisseur with a favorite quick bread recipe, tell us how it wins the race in the comments.





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Make Fresh-Baked Bread in Five Minutes [Eat To Live]

Posted on June 11, 2009
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Can you spare five minutes each day? That’s all you’ll need to make fresh-baked bread with this recipe and method.

We’ve shown you that homemade bread can be cheap, delicious, and easy to make, especially if you’re using a no-knead recipe. Now, thanks to Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François, you can have fresh-baked bread with only five minutes of actual effort each time:

A one or two-week supply of dough is made in advance and refrigerated. Mixing it takes less than 15 minutes. Every day, cut off a hunk of dough and quickly shape it without kneading. Allow it to rest briefly on the counter and then toss it in the oven. We don’t count the rest time or baking time (usually about 30 minutes to an hour each) in our calculation, because you can do something else while that’s happening. If you bake after dinner, the bread will still be fresh the next day (higher moisture breads stay fresh longer), but the method is so convenient that you’ll probably find you can cut off some dough and bake a loaf every morning before your day starts. If you want to have one thing you do every day that is simply perfect, this is it!

Hertzberg and François even make remembering the recipe simple by explaining the "6-3-3-13" rule:

To store enough for eight loaves, remember 6-3-3-13. It’s 6 cups water, 3 tablespoons salt, 3 tablespoons yeast, and then add 13 cups of flour. It’ll amaze your friends when you do this in their homes without a recipe!

Using this rule, you can easily cut the recipe into half or double it in your head if needed, just maintain the same ratios. Follow the link below for the details on the recipe and several variations or tell us about your favorite bread recipe in the comments.





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Browse, Create, and Share Recipes at Nibbledish [Cooking]

Posted on June 1, 2009
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Nibbledish is an open-source cookbook for the wired world. If you’ve found other recipe sites to overwhelmingly stuffed with nearly identical recipes and nondescript entries, you’ll love the variety, and photos, at Nibbledish.

Be forewarned, if you’re cursing yourself for missing breakfast this morning, visiting Nibbledish isn’t going to help. Not only are the thousands of people who contribute recipes to Nibbledish consummate chefs, but based on the quality of the photographs, they’re also passionate about documenting the results of their kitchen forays. Nibbledish practically pushes you into the kitchen with all the beautiful shots of artfully prepared food.

You can comment on and rank recipes, and follow Nibbledish users whose recipes you have enjoyed. Every recipe is tagged with keywords, so if you find yourself looking at a dessert that’s close, but not quite right, for the party you’re hosting, check out the keywords to find similar recipes. You can search or browse by recent popularity, all-time best, and individual tags. Users who have been recognized by the community as having excellent recipes are flagged as Professional, and you can have only recipes created by Pro users show up in your search. Nibbledish is free to browse and use, and every recipe is free to use and reproduce under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.





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SuperCook Turns Your Kitchen Contents into Yummy Recipes [Recipes]

Posted on May 20, 2009
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It’s cheaper and healthier to eat in, but all too easy to look in the fridge and think you have nothing to make. SuperCook tells you what you can make with what you have.
We’ve covered this…

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Learn the Basic Chemistry of Marinades [Grilling]

Posted on May 6, 2009
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It’s officially grilling season in most of the U.S., so now’s the time to start treating your meats and veggies right. The L.A. Times helps you get creative by breaking down the basics of marinades.

Photo by @rgs.

The one-paragraph, elevator-pitch version of making your marinades is that they should resemble a vinaigrette salad dressing—combine an acid (vinegar, citrus, wine) with an oil (olive, vegetable, or other), then add herbs, sweeteners, and other flavors to taste. But creativity and flavor demands you get beyond the basics of dunking a chicken into Hidden Valley Italian.

While a marinade may not make tough meat tender, or even penetrate very deep into thick cuts of meat, it can help protect meat from drying out under intense flame, and add flavor to most bites. Take the L.A. Times’ suggestions on different types of meat, though, and heed well:

Remember to balance flavors: You can’t just throw anything into a marinade, or insert insane amounts of a special ingredient. Restraint is key: “More” almost never equals “better” in the kitchen.

To get you started and inspired, here’s a short, sweet video that shows off webtrepreneur Guy Kawasaki’s blender-processed Teriyaki marinade. Using soy sauce instead of oil lends a bit more punch to the marinade’s flavor, as you might imagine, and it’s going to taste a lot fresher than that 3-year-old bottle of Kikkoman you’ve got rolling around the fridge door.

Gather ’round the grill and tell us your favorite soaks and marinades in the comments.

Marinades made easy [Los Angeles Times]





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Recipe Puppy Chooses Meals Based on the Ingredients You Have [Recipes]

Posted on April 21, 2009
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Recipe search engine Recipe Puppy finds meals by a list of ingredients or keywords, searching through more than 500,000 recipes across dozens of web sites.

Once you've searched using the list of ingredients you want to use, Recipe Puppy will suggest other similar ingredients that you might want to add to your search, a very nice feature to help pick an interesting meal. Since the search engine is powered by Google APIs, you can use some regular search operators to help—for instance, you can add a "-" in front of an ingredient you don't want to see. The popular web site AllRecipes provides a similar find-by-what-you-have feature, but Recipe Puppy’s ability to search many sites at once makes it worth a look for anybody trying to figure out what to make for dinner.

Recipe Puppy is a free website, works anywhere. For more, check out how to find recipes to satisfy your cravings, or make the most of what’s in your pantry with RecipeMatcher. Thanks, Kris!





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Simple Crock Pot Recipes Save Time and Money [Cooking]

Posted on February 1, 2009
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Crock pot cooking is dead simple and has the capability of turning basic ingredients into delicious meals with little time actually spent in the kitchen. These simple five-ingredient recipes will help you get started.

Photo by baykes.

Trent at The Simple Dollar blog shares some crock pot recipes that share a common theme: they all have five ingredients, are made with basic and inexpensive cooking staples, and require very little prep time. Beyond adding the basic five ingredients, the only instructions for the recipes are:

Combine all of this into a crock pot. Add salt and pepper to taste. Turn it on low and walk away for eight hours. Add a quarter of a cup of water for every additional two hours you intend to cook it.

His pot roast recipe for instance—assuming you're a speedy vegetable chopper—could be prepped from the fridge to the counter to the crock pot in under five minutes. If you have some simple and tasty crock pot recipes of your own, share them in the comments below.






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