How To Cook Like Your Grandmother
A Guide to Cooking with Real Food the Way Your Grandma Used to
I love onion dip made with sour cream and onion soup mix. Love it. Loooooooooove it. But the ingredients scare me. Have you ever read that package? So I decided to make my own. Of course I looked online for ideas first. Almost everything I saw included beef bouillon cubes. Oh yeah, that's so much better. What you see here is a first try. It's pretty good as a dip, but really fabulous for ... well, I'll tell you down at the bottom. … [Read more...]
The last time I made macaroni salad my wife and her father commented on how dry it was. I don't like it runny, like it usually is when you buy pre-made macaroni salad at the grocery store. I might have over-reacted a little and gone a bit drier than I needed to. (Not that I'm the kind of person to over-react. Oh no, not at all.) So this time I made it a bit more like they're used to. About twice the mayo as last time, though still not as runny as the pre-made stuff. I've got to admit, this … [Read more...]
After I made the tempura onion rings a bunch of people asked about doing a beer batter. I finally got around to it, and the result is what you see here. Tasty? Absolutely. Better than the tempura? Hard to say without a back-to-back comparison. But I will say this one is more work. If you've done beer-battered onion rings before, I'd be happy to hear any tips you've got to offer. … [Read more...]
I've been making mayonnaise for a while now. I've used it for buttermilk ranch dressing, macroni salad, horseradish sauce, onion ring sauce, thousand island dressing and deviled eggs. A couple of times I said that it didn't come out as thick as I would have wanted, but that was okay since it was an ingredient in a sauce. Well, after enough trial and error I think I can finally explain how to do it consistently. … [Read more...]
When you start cooking from scratch, one of the first stumbling blocks is that every single recipe seems to call for some kind of spice or seasoning that you don't have. So you start buying those little plastic jars with the red caps and get cooking. Then one day you notice how many recipes list two different amounts, one for fresh herbs and spices and one for dry. "Hmm ..." you think to yourself, "I wonder if the fresh stuff is really that different." So you start small. Maybe you go look at … [Read more...]
