Although short ribs used to be seen as a less desirable cut of beef, they’ve risen in popularity, causing prices to also increase for this cut that used to be fairly inexpensive. So if you’re now spending more for short ribs, it makes sense to get to know the two popular ways that they’re cut, flanken and English style. Once you know the differences in appearance and how they should be cooked, you can buy the right cut for your recipe!
Headed to the kitchen to bake cookies — but all out of baking powder? You’re in a pinch, but we have a solution: make homemade baking powder! It doesn’t take more than 30 seconds (just about the length of this video!).
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One of my favorite soups is hot and sour soup, and I was flabbergasted to discover that it’s really quite easy — and cheap! — to make. Who woulda thunk it? Called suan la t’ang in Chinese, it gets its tang from the addition of white vinegar.
If you know me just barely, you know that I’m summer’s biggest fan, and after 20 winters in the Northeast, I still moan and groan over winter’s double-whammy: no fresh vegetables in season and freezing temperatures. So today, in frigid Brooklyn, I give you a piece about a hot tomato soup a friend brought back from a recent trip to Egypt. For me, tomato soup is summer food at its best, but a can of quality tomatoes can evoke fond memories of July and August, when the sun shines and the muscles are more relaxed.
It was a couple of years ago that I first heard about bagged broccoli slaw. I was paging through a new cookbook and came across a recipe that I wanted to make; it called for bagged broccoli slaw and I actually didn’t know what it even was. I had to Google it to learn it’s a package of grated broccoli stems, carrots, and sometimes cabbage. I found it up among the other pre-fab produce items I gloss over because I don’t usually buy them: stir-fry vegetable mixes, already cooked beets, peeled garlic cloves.
Recently, my brother asked an extremely adorable vegetarian to be his wife. She said yes. And I’d like to think that in some small way, my cooking had something to do with it. You see, my brother’s favorite meal growing up was French dip au jus. If there are chicken wings on a menu, they’ll end up on his plate. And I’m pretty sure if he had a choice between ribs and rice pilaf, he’d go with the former.
Luckily, though, his love for meat did not outweigh his love for this girl. And he was totally game to let me, his sister, come up with creative food swaps that kept everyone satisfied, including these faux pulled pork sandwiches. The secret ingredient? Carrots!
Who: Jade and Toby Keller, son Cy, and dog Dot
Where: Chiang Mai, Thailand
Read Parts 1 and 2: Jade’s Thai Kitchen in Chiang Mai and Why Jade Shipped Her Special Wedding Dishes Across the Globe
Jade works as the Educational Program Manager at the SOLD Project, an NGO in Northern Thailand working to prevent the trafficking of children into sexual servitude. Recently Jade introduced baking into the project’s curriculum, which means that she totes her small kitchen oven to the SOLD project’s facilities every afternoon to bake with the students.
The kids love baking, as she told me, particularly one 11-year-old boy named Jai.
As we wrote a few months ago, IKEA is retiring their AKURUM cabinet system and replacing it with SEKTION, a more modular system that promises to be even easier to work with and customize.
At the time we wrote that post, we hadn’t yet seen the new system in action, but that was then, and this is now, and now we have all the details, pricing info on sample kitchens, and plenty of photos ahead of the official February 2 launch.
Did you catch our profile on writer, food editor, and recipe developer Eva Katz this week? If you’re just tuning in now, you can read the whole series right here:
Did you make a New Year’s resolution in the kitchen? Perhaps you want to cook dinner more often, or pack your lunch every day. Making resolutions can be perilous — do you have the willpower to keep them? But healthy resolutions like these don’t have to be massive efforts; keeping them is the result of small daily habits.
Here are four New Year’s resolutions that some of us made this year — to cook dinner more, to pack a lunch, to eat more greens, and to use our cookbooks — and a few simple habits and suggestions for each resolution to keep them strong well into the new year.
