From Apartment Therapy → Here’s Proof That Kitchen Contractors Do IKEA Hacks Better Than The Rest of Us
The Proof That Kitchen Contractors Do IKEA Hacks Better than the Rest of Us — Apartment Therapy
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Author Archives: artislyfe
A Fast & Fancy Creamy Pasta That Will Make You Swoon — Quick Tortellini Dinners
Keep a bag of frozen tortellini tucked away in your freezer and you can rest easy knowing that a quick meal is always at the ready. This series on fast tortellini dinners will show you how to transform frozen tortellini into dinner using pantry staples and a few surprising techniques. Pasta sauce is just the beginning!
Frozen tortellini deserves to be dressed up and made to feel a bit fancy sometimes. Here’s how: Toss it in creamy, dreamy mascarpone cheese, along with plenty of bright lemon juice, colorful peas, and, most importantly, crispy prosciutto crumbles. It’s the fastest way to turn frozen tortellini to a fancy-pants dish of macaroni and cheese.
The One Sign It’s Time to Replace Your Range — The Smart Appliance Shopper
Your range is a wonderful and complicated thing that helps you put dinner on the table. And even though it may see like a complicated heat box machine, it’s actually pretty simple to repair.
The ceramic top has a crack? No big deal! A new one can be popped into place (just don’t cook on it until then, as it could further shatter or lead to some electric shocks!). The oven seems to be giving off a lot of heat? You might just need a new gasket. Is the control panel being wonky? That’s probably an easy fix, too. You can even get a new thermostat or heating element if the oven isn’t heating up as fast or evenly as it used to.
If you’re feeling particularly handy, you can even do a lot of these little fixes yourself (hello, YouTube!), or you can get a certified repair expert out to your house.
The point is: Ranges are almost always worth a fix — there’s just this one time when they’re not.
A Newbie’s Guide to Corned Beef and Cabbage — Tips from The Kitchn
If this is the year you finally make corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick’s Day, we’re here to help! From buying the ingredients to choosing a cooking method, here is everything you need to know about making this Irish-American classic.
The Fast Trick to Turn Any Salad into Dinner — Quick Tortellini Dinners
Let’s face it — a simple salad just isn’t enough for dinner. (People tend to complain.) So when you’re looking to turn those last bits of spinach, half a cucumber, and a few chopped radishes into a dinner-ready meal, here’s a trick: Reach for that bag of frozen tortellini.
This brilliant shortcut transforms the last bits of the crisper drawer into a dinner you can make for one or scale up to feed four or more. Here’s how!
This Kitchen Pegboard Idea Is Too Good to Hide — The Great Kitchen Pegboard
If you have deep kitchen drawers (instead of cabinets), it’s easy for them to quickly become a jumbled mess of toppling plates, plastic containers, mixing bowls and other random whatnots. Can you relate? Yeah, we thought so. There’s hope, though!
Get your kitchen under control with this off-the-wall idea: Use a pegboard inside the drawer!
One-Pot Pasta Soup, Thanks to a Freezer Shortcut — Quick Tortellini Dinners
Keep a bag of frozen tortellini tucked away in your freezer and you can rest easy knowing that a quick meal is always at the ready. This series on fast tortellini dinners will show you how to transform frozen tortellini into dinner using pantry staples and a few surprising techniques. Pasta sauce is just the beginning!
Dinner tonight should most definitely be this almost-instant pasta soup. There’s no need to pry open a can of the store-bought stuff when you’re craving a bowl of something brothy; you can still have a (mostly) homemade soup in a matter of minutes. Everything comes together as quick as can be, thanks to the help of a few freezer shortcuts like precooked meatballs, peas, and tortellini. Simmer everything in a big pot of chicken broth and you’ve got a comforting bowl at the ready.
The Best New Thing to Buy at IKEA — Shopping
We have a hard time finding things we don’t want to buy at IKEA. (How is it all so pretty and functional?) But because we sadly can’t have it all, we constantly have to edit down our wish list to just our favorite things.
With the launch of IKEA’s new line, JASSA, a limited-edition collection inspired by the color and craft of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, we are practicing our restraint. Here is the one must-have from the new collection.
Why My Week Always Includes a Pizza Night — Meal Planning for Beginners
Pizza Friday is a well-loved weekly event in our family. To be honest, I can’t remember why or how we started it, but I do know that having this day on the calendar each week has not only brought joy to my children, but also a little more sanity to my meal planning. Friday night pizza serves two important and seemingly unrelated purposes: clearing out the fridge and holding space for family time.
black lentil dal
Because I have strange habits, I spent a lot of time one night last week watching videos on YouTube of grandmothers and other home cooks making dal makhani, a rich black lentil dish from the Punjabi region. Unpolished home cooking videos are one of my favorite ways to learn how to make a dish that is foreign to me, and while what I’ve made here isn’t an authentic black lentil (urad) dal, it’s worth knowing why it is isn’t. For example, it would have a small portion of kidney beans (rajma) it in too, you’d definitely have soaked your lentils and beans together the night before and in almost every case, cooked them in a pressure cooker on another burner while making the spiced base sauce, and then together for a little or long while. The more authentic versions I looked at have a lot more butter and cream in them, and only sometimes began with an onion. In every case, the cook had a “ginger-garlic paste” that seemed to have come prepared, something I was previously unfamiliar with but find brilliant as they are so often better together, and of course all spices were added with eyeballed measurements.
It’s also much more loose. A traditional dal is like a gravy or a loose soup, but here I go for something thicker, almost like a chili. You can loosen it a bit with more water and serve it like a soup, or ladled over rice; you can also add a spoonful of rice to the middle, as we did with this soup to give it a bit more heft. We ate it in small bowls with some toasted naan and these potatoes and cauliflower on the side, a forever favorite.
