How To Make Bacon Bits

Everything's better with bacon. Everything. But there's a better bacon than bacon ... Wait! Come back, I'm not crazy! Okay, now what I was trying to say before you started laughing and walking away, is that there's a better bacon than bacon ... for making bacon bits. … [Read more...]

How To Make Mayonnaise

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...]

How To Make Garlic Salt

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...]

My First Experiment Making Sausage

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...]

How To Peel and Chop Ginger

Ginger is a staple in Asian cuisine, and adds a nice touch to sauces and salsas. … [Read more...]