We work our kitchen sink drains hard. Even when diligently using a sink strainer or garbage disposal, inevitably food particles, grease, and other unlovely things make their way into the drain and we wake up one day to a foul smell coming out of the sink. Blech! Now what?
Thanks to our Kitchn readers and my fellow editors, I’ve got 10 ways you can kick that kitchen sink smell to the curb (and keep it from coming back).
Samosas were my gateway into Indian food back in my college days. What’s not to love, really? They’re crispy handheld puffs stuffed with spicy potatoes, peas, and onions — a plate of them is an appetizer to share with friends, two or three of them make an excellent lunch to eat on the way to class.
I’ve recently become obsessed with making an easy, baked version of these traditional, potato-filled samosas at home. My very non-traditional secret? Using store-bought dumpling wrappers to hold the steamy, spicy filling!
4.67 / 5 Stars | 3 Reviews
by GIFUOH
“A great, quick, and easy cocktail sauce for shrimp. Also works well on clams, lobster, and other shellfish. The vodka adds an extra kick, but is not overpowering sauce. The fresh tomatoes add a more natural taste to the cocktail sauce.”
Truthfully, it’s hard to be sad about the end of summer right now. I mean, when there are things like apple picking just ahead of us — and along with it, homemade applesauce (a fall essential) — I can’t be anything but thrilled.
If you’re new to making homemade applesauce, know that you only need a few ingredients, and turning them into a sauce is much easier than you might think. Especially when you bring in the Crock-Pot to do most of the work for you.
Now that Labor Day is over and school is back in session, lazy Saturday mornings will become a sacred thing. You need a good breakfast and your favorite old-school cartoon show to take advantage of that precious time.
Of course, the correct breakfasts to eat while watching “Hey Arnold!” and “Rugrats” are fundamentally different. You can’t mess this up, so we’re here to help. Go ahead: Choose your favorite Saturday morning cartoon and we’ll tell you what you should eat for breakfast.
There’s no way around it — it’s downright awkward when your dinner host asks what you think about the dinner he or she just served. The one they proudly spent the afternoon slaving over; the one you did not enjoy in the slightest. You don’t want to lie, but at the same time, your honesty would crush them.
How do you skillfully handle this situation?
I am never a better citizen of the sidewalks of New York than I am when I have a newborn, or at least the variety we’ve been assigned twice now: those that can only be calmed by long walks in the stroller. And so we stroll, even though it’s unforgivably hot out, even though we rarely get out of the apartment early enough to enjoy those brief parts of the day when there’s an actual shady side of the street to hover on, even though we really don’t need anything else from the Greenmarket or anywhere else, we make up excuses so we have somewhere to go. On the best of days, we see people that we know and the neighborhood feels like something out of Mr. Rogers (although his is notably absent of the guy who yells outside my apartment all day about his superstitions and the clouds of secondhand decriminalized smoke we wade through). We bumped into my son’s old preschool teacher a few weeks ago, someone who likes to cook almost as much as me, and she said she’d recently made a big batch of caponata and had been having it with everything — for breakfast with an egg, in sandwiches for lunch and even with pasta for dinner and I thought that sounded absolutely brilliant. I just needed to learn how to make caponata.
I read a lot and I learned several things about this eggplant dish. First, definitely don’t try to exhaust yourself by finding a one/true/authentic version. Just about all are authentic and true and few match, because everyone makes it the best way they know how and that’s usually the way their grandmothers made it and you have to be out of your mind if think I’m going to argue with a Sicilian grandmother. However, I knew a few things: I knew that while I am completely okay with frying eggplant the authentic way that it’s totally cool if you’d like to just roast or sauté it. I wanted to stick to a core list of ingredients — eggplant, onion, celery, tomato, capers, olives, raisins, basil and pine nuts — because while you can add a whole lot of things — i.e. garlic, zucchini, sweet or hot peppers, anchovies — I had a hunch there’s enough going on in the flavor department with the core list that it wouldn’t need much more to taste good.
… Read the rest of caponata on smittenkitchen.com
© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. |
permalink to caponata | 3 comments to date | see more: Appetizer, Celery, Eggplant, Italian, Photo, Put An Egg On It, Summer, Vegan, Vegetarian
