The Cuisinart Electric Pressure Cooker Is a Trusted Friend in the Kitchen — Product Review

Item: Cuisinart CPC-600 Electric Pressure Cooker
Price: $99.95
Overall Impression: With a bright red pressure indicator and easy-to-understand menu options, this pressure cooker is a no-fuss way to make great food fast.

Cuisinart is a big name in small electric appliances, including electric pressure cookers. This is their standard electric pressure cooker. It promises to cut cooking times by up to 70%, but is this machine intuitive enough for a newbie to pressure cooking? How will the food actually taste?

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crispy frizzled artichokes

crispy frizzled artichokes

Promise me something: The next time you see baby artichokes, whether in a 9- or 12-pack clamshell of indeterminate origin at your local supermarket or loose at your local farmer’s market (jealous, as ours won’t be here for some time), I want you to buy every single one of them. All of them. This is no time to share with the next customer or to be a good locavore citizen. Trust your local artichoke-obsessed food blogger on this one; without fail, they disappear for the season the moment you discover their awesomeness, which I hope we’re all about to do.

peeled and halved baby artichokes
halved

As I admitted recently, despite the fact that they’re my favorite vegetable, we don’t talk much about artichokes around here because I know they’re fussy to deal with, and for most people, this is a dealbreaker. It’s also because my favorite way to eat big artichokes is rather boring — boiled or steamed whole until deathly soft, the leaves pulled and dipped into a hodge-podged sauce of mayo, lemon juice, salt and black pepper. With a glass of white wine and a simple green salad on the side, I honestly don’t know why I eat anything else for dinner, ever.

par-boiled

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3 Reasons Why Prices Vary from Grocery Store to Grocery Store — The Grocery Insider

“Tell Kenny to go get the van.”

A competitor was having a sale on Coca-Cola. The price was something crazy, like $1.99 for a 12-pack, limit 10 per customer. (Please don’t hold me to that price. It’s been a decade.) The point is, the box store was selling soft drinks to their customers at a price that was way lower than we could buy it direct. We loaded up our catering van and stocked our shelves with as many cases of Coke as we could get during that sale. Desperate? Yes. Moral? Well…

Prices deviate between stores for a myriad of reasons, and a higher price on the same item doesn’t mean that store is trying to get rich off of you. (I’ve never seen a grocery store owner in Burberry.) Here are a few reasons you may find price differences as you shop around. It’s not all apples to apples. (Or milk to milk.)

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