Entries tagged with “kitchen”
Reader’s Digest brings us “30 Secrets Your Waiter Will Never Tell You”.
10. Oh, you needed more water so badly, you had to snap or tap or whistle? I’ll be right back … in ten minutes.
And from the I-wish-I-didn’t-know-that department:
28. If you’re worried about cleanliness, check out the bathroom. If the bathroom is gross, you can be sure the kitchen is much worse.
A cell phone, too close to a stove, may turn it on:
When Andrei Melnikov’s Sony Erickson PDA is within about two feet of the stove, an incoming call will make the Maytag Magic Chef stove beep, and the digital display will light up, indicating that the broiler is on high. Open it up and you’ll see the gas flames streaming out of the broiler’s burners as it begins cooking anything inside it in 500-plus degree heat.
I’m pretty sure this is one of the early attempts of Skynet taking over.
Melnikov says he has spoken with the Maytag company which has promised to send out a repair team and identify the problem.
Hey, they finally found a use for Ol’ Lonely.
Tassimo brewer by Braun
Like millions of people around the world, I start my day off with at least one cup of coffee. For years, I used a typical ground coffee brewer, but was never truly happy with it. After seeing a friend’s Tassimo, and hearing his and his wife’s glowing review of it, I decided to get one myself and give it a try. That was a few years ago, and I think I’m finally ready to give it a proper review.
You wake up at 8am on a Sunday morning and you reach for the last coffee pod in your apartment. As you approach the coffee machine, you drop the pod on the table, and it rolls off the table into the most inaccessible section of your kitchen. To access this part of your kitchen, and retrieve the increasingly important coffee pod, you have to move the table; a feat that should only be attempted after you are fully awake. Oh the irony.
I don’t have a muffin pan because I don’t make muffins that often, and with a Manhattan apartment kitchen, storage is at a premium so every device in there needs to be used often or have multiple purposes (or just be easy to store). In the past few weeks I came across several muffin recipes that I would love to try out and during this time I was made aware of silicone muffin/cupcake baking cups that you just place on a baking sheet (which I have). They were $8, so I decided to pick them up and give a few muffin recipes a try.
There are few things I like more than bacon. Chocolate is one, and banana flavored things is another. For some reason, I’m not a huge fan of bananas, but I love banana flavored things. If you combine those two flavors in a muffin, you can bet I’ll be all over it. Last night, I gave them a try.
As you can see from the pics above they didn’t come out looking all that great, but boy did they taste incredible. The woman I marry will need to make these and, in fact, should bring samples to the interview.
This was the last class and the chef threw us for a little bit of a loop…when it came time to cook, she told us that we wouldn’t be allowed to look at our recipes…she would post a list of ingredients and we would have to mix them based on experience and taste. I’ll go into why that is almost the worst thing Chef could have done to me in another post, but for now, I’ll just say that I went into this class with an open, but cautious, mind.
The lecture portion included how to make a marinade and why certain ingredients are necessary in one depending on what type of food is being prepared (i.e. chicken, lamb, pork, beef, etc.), how to make mayo and when you should versus using store bought, how to properly carve London Broil, and how a restaurant broiler is different than the average home kitchen broiler.
Last night was the first class of the five, and to make sure that I wasn’t late, I left work slightly early to make sure I had enough time to get downtown and find the school, and by “slightly early” I mean that I left at the time that I officially work till as directed by the employee handbook and my job description.
I don’t know what it is, but I’ve been having amazing luck lately when it comes to the subway. It seems that I either arrive right as a train is pulling in, or about to pull in. During rush hours, I never need to wait more than two minutes for one. And yesterday afternoon was no exception. As I was going down the stairs to the N/R/W tracks, there was an empty train pulling in. Within 15 minutes, I was at 23rd and 5th, getting rained upon.
For many, many years, I’ve been threatening to take a cooking class to improve my confidence in the kitchen…and if the class prevents me from poisoning myself, well, that would be a bonus.
Well, I’ve stopped threatening and I’m taking action. I’ve enrolled in a recreational fine cooking class at the Institute of Culinary Education. For the next five weeks, I’ll be attending the class one night a week from 6pm-11pm and learning about knife skills, sauteing, roasting, braising, grilling, and cooking shellfish.
As I prepare to embark on the first phase of Josh 2.0, I wonder what exactly I’ll take away from this class. After enrolling I started to wonder what it would take for me to think of this class as being successful and worthwhile. Maybe I’ll find some hidden talent that I didn’t know I had, or maybe I’ll fall in love with a food I wouldn’t normally find appetizing (like asparagus—yuck!), or a way of cooking that I didn’t understand. Maybe I’ll walk away with the confidence to not be intimidated by complicated recipes, or maybe I’ll have the ability to find something in a grocery store and be able to understand how to cook it and shop for sides without having to go home look up a recipe and go back to the store to pick everything up.
It wasn’t until today that I think I found a good line in the sand that will define whether the class was useful or not. If, after the class, you ask me what the most important utensil is in my kitchen, and I don’t answer, “the fire extinguisher”, then it will have been a success.
Well, not really, but you get the idea. Let’s start at the beginning:
7:00am - E-mails from work wake me up.
7:30am - Log into work and see there is a problem with a NIC card on a server.
8:00am - Problem at work solved. I’m wide awake.
8:05am - Decide to actually get out of bed and start the day (way too early for that normally).
8:15am - While enjoying first cup of coffee, decide to order a waffle from the diner since I had a craving for it.
8:35am - Waffle arrives. I place tin with waffle in it on kitchen table. Pour second cup of coffee. Put second cup of coffee on top of fridge (normal spot where I pour the milk into it).
8:36am - Open tin with waffle in it. Take waffle out and place on plate. Open fridge to get syrup (real maple syrup from Vermont—the best!). Grab syrup, open it, pour some into coffee. Close syrup. Place back in fridge. Grab milk. Open milk. Start to pour milk onto waffle, but catch myself just before it comes out. Wonder why I’m doing that.
8:37am - Open fridge, and remember that I was holding the syrup bottle a moment ago. Look back at waffle and find there is no syrup on it. Wonder where syrup went. Look at coffee cup. Say, “No way,” to myself. Look in coffee cup. See weird slick on top of coffee. Sigh loudly.
See, the butterfly effect in it’s full glory. A server NIC dies, and because of that, I put syrup in my coffee. At least it sort of makes sense.
Now if I could only figure out why I keep putting shaving cream on my toothbrush in the morning…
Peaches and cream made with sour cream. Actually, wasn’t that bad.
I was trying to make some dip using Lipton’s French Onion Soup Mix. I had seen others do it, and it didn’t seem that complicated. I opened an envelope, poured it into a bowl, spooned about two spoonfuls of mayo into the bowl, mixed it up, and then wondered why it didn’t taste as good as when others make it.
I recently made some pasta for dinner. In my refrigerator, on the bottom shelf, I have two jars of sauce; one jar of Prego Spaghetti Sauce with meat, and one jar of Old El Paso Spicy Taco Sauce. Guess which sauce I put on my pasta that night?
(hint: I wouldn’t mention this if I had used the spaghetti sauce)
If you find anything on here useful or interesting, or you just feel sorry for me, you can buy me a beer via PayPal.