How To Cook Like Your Grandmother
A Guide to Cooking with Real Food the Way Your Grandma Used to
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...]
This post was supposed to be called How To Make Sausage, but I'm not really happy with it yet. It's good, but it's not right. If I had spent a half-hour working on this I wouldn't have been so disappointed. But I didn't spend a half-hour. I spent ... more. So if you've made sausage before and want to see a newbie mess it up, read on. (PS: My wife is making me point out that she liked it. She just needed to add salt. Apparently I didn't follow my own advice.) … [Read more...]
Ginger is a staple in Asian cuisine, and adds a nice touch to sauces and salsas. … [Read more...]
Why on earth would you make your own butter? The stuff at the grocery store is already made from nothing but cream, isn't it? Okay, and salt if you buy salted butter. But that's pretty good isn't it? Because this butter is better. You read that right: better than ordinary butter. Hard to believe, but there you have it. Okay, it's not so much better that I won't use store-bought butter in my cooking and baking. But when I want something to spread on crusty French bread, or on top of warm … [Read more...]
