Kitchen Hacks...

I love the hack posts that are floating all over the internet--kitchen hacks, life hacks, office hacks...here are a few of my favorite kitchen hack posts.

A better way to cut cake, keeping it fresher longer!

If you use these creamers ( I don't, but I have some friends who ALWAYS do--I'm going to beg them for the bottles), recycle them for snacks and such--air tight...I think they would make great dressing bottles for my homemade balsamic.

You know the shower caps you never EVER use from the hotel room amenities? Save them and use fresh caps to cover bowls of food on the picnic table...

Ditch the avocado slicer you've never used. Slice the avocado in half, remove the pit. Hold the avocado skin-side-down in the palm of one hand. With a butter knife in the other hand, slice the avocado one way, then slice the other way, cutting through just to the peel. Use a spoon to scoop the cubed avocado out. Want an uncut half avocado? Holding that half avocado skin-side-down, just use a spoon to scoop the entire half avocado out. Have your way with it.

Have you seen the video on cutting cherry tomatoes (or grapes, for that matter?). Cut a whole bunch at once with one slice of the knife...watch the video, but in a nutshell, you corral the tomatoes on a plate. Place another plate on top of said tomatoes, but one that leaves a gap between the two plates...now just slice between the two plates. Done and dusted.

Did you know you can toast nuts in the microwave? Did you know all nuts are better toasted? Just spread them out on a plate, microwave 1 minute at a time, stirring and checking on them after each minute...Keep a close eye as they'll go from toasted to burnt rather quickly. How did I go all these years not knowing about toasting nuts in a microwave?

Poach eggs easily in plastic wrap:

What I've Seen this Week on the Web.

I look for funny. Avoid the scary, sad, offensive and political...because that is how I like it.

Brian Williams Raps Baby Got Back. Jimmy Fallon? Genius.

Michael Ruhlman really WORKS a Farmers Market--you should work it, too.

This from my son (language ahead!-i). I always like to envision different GPS voices/attitudes. This one cracked me up.:




Opera at the grocery store? Okay:



My friend Jen Singer's take on the great/bad of Summer Break.. From her post, among the things she loves/hates:

I love/hate you for: giving my kids summer jobs/preferring their paying jobs to my unpaid yard work.

On Food and Friends

I love food and wine people. For the most part they are truly a great bunch to be around. Of course there are exceptions to every rule--how someone could be wined and dined on a press trip and still be a curmudgeon about it all, while enjoying the beauty of, for example, Nevis, is beyond me, but I've sat next to people like that.

But I will say it again. For the most part, food and wine people are my people. It may stem from dinners growing up in a mostly Italian family, noisy, argumentative, loving...did I mention noisy? And plenty of good food. We spent hours post-meal around the table every holiday, and I cherish those hours. To this day, a good meal ends the same way, dishes long cleared, coffee cups emptied, perhaps one more round of post-dinner drink poured. (Okay, these days, I'm more apt to suggest we move to the comfort of sofas, but only after at least an hour around the table!)

So it is with so much delight that I've found myself surrounded by some real foodie friends yet again in my new hometown. It all started when a few of us just wanted to get together to practice/learn French. Then a book club was suggested. Then the brilliance of an end-of-year book club meeting that focused on a food book and a cook book. (Thank you, Jill!) (For the record we read Blood, Bones and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton and cooked from My Paris Kitchen by David Lebovitz.)

To me there is something so special about cooking for friends. Yesterday, my husband posed the question, "Would you rather entertain than be entertained?" and my answer was an immediate yes. For me, cooking/entertaining has always been about hospitality and surrounding myself with people I love, meeting new people I come to love.

He then asked me to rate entertaining vs. being entertained (it's the way his mind works. We rank it all...) To me, the two are so close because I simply love both. I'm social that way. I think there is a far greater disparity, however, if someone prefers being entertained to DOING the entertaining. If you would rather be entertained, I'm guessing you probably want nothing or little to do with actually hosting an evening.

Either way, to me, an evening over dinner with friends is a special evening. Food is great, but loving friends is greater.

I'm lucky.

Monday's Art on Wednesday: Bermuda Onions

I sketched this on regular sketchbook paper. I will definitely tackle this again on watercolor paper. 

Guest poster Pat got Monday's spot, so I'm posting my onions today. Last week Jackie asked about how or why I got started painting...I love watercolors enough to want to be good at this particular thing. They really just capture beauty so well. I took lessons eons ago with a fabulous painter in Louisville, KY, Aline Barker. Fast forward to today, years later and a few painting classes in between, and I realize how fortunate I was to have had her as a teacher. I only regret not starting sooner and ever putting the brushes down (I didn't paint once in Florida. I wasn't happy there.)...It was one thing I wanted to get back to.

Almost a year ago, I turned to a painter friend and said, "I'm going to try to paint every day." So I started. I've painted almost daily ever since. I blog it over at My Year Of Watercolor, where I let you know you'll see the good AND the bad. It hasn't been so very bad so often that I've been embarrassed, although there are a few entries where I cropped the entire painting down to one tiny area that I liked...and sometimes, that's enough, to look at an entire painting and find one thing that I'm okay with.

Painting is so different from everything else. It's challenging. It's brought me into another world of people I never would have met otherwise. So I keep on going.

Tea Time!

Twice in the past three weeks, we've had tea at home, with a lovely tiered tea plate (thank you, Kerrie!), plenty of tea, sandwiches, scones, clotted cream, champagne--the works. Both times we had cucumber sandwiches, but ya know what? Just not a fan of cucumbers unless their in a pickled salad...I love smoked salmon, but I think I was the only one...egg salad was a hit, of course. But the second time around, I created two sandwiches that were top of the list. Tomato Cheddar and Ham with Curried Honey Mustard. Both were simply put on thin white sandwich great and both were the first two sandwiches to go.

Here's the thing: nothing says you can't turn a tea sandwich into a regular sandwich, right? So here are two sandwiches to live on this summer:

Tomato Cheddar:

2 or 4 slices bread
About 4 ounces cheddar, grated
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1 tomato, sliced

Pop bread into toaster. While bread toasts, mix cheddar with mayo and chili powder. Spread over 2 slices of bread, 4 if you want to stretch it even more and cut calories. Top with slice tomato. Serve open-faced and enjoy. (Or close the slices for sandwiches you can pack.)

Ham with Curried Honey Mayonnaise
4 slices bread
4 teaspoons mustard (I used my fave, brown deli mustard)
2 teaspoons honey
1 teaspoon curry powder
4 ounces thinly sliced ham

Pop bread into toaster. While bread toasts, mix mustard with honey and curry powder. Spread evenly on toast, top each piece of toast with 1 ounce sliced ham. Enjoy open faced, or close up for sandwiches to pack.

Guest post: Meet Pat and Pretty Food

Pat was a neighbor of mine for far too short a time. We moved out, she moved out...but not away. Now I get to visit her in the gem of a house she and her husband found, mere minutes away from where we first met. I love getting together with her and I love that she has jumped into he blogathon.
She blogs at Pat Blumer: I really should be in church right now, where she makes me smile and makes me think. Go visit her there.

For today, I am lucky to have her as my guest poster. I give you Pat:

Pretty Food

Only once in my life have I witnessed a bona fide meltdown over a poorly presented plate.

My husband and I were with new friends, Suzie and Dave, at adowntown Atlanta restaurant. It was the first visit for all of us; we had heard rave reviews about the new-Asian cuisine. Food writers throughout the city promised a dining experience like none other -food not only delicious, but gorgeous – colors and textures thrown together to produce tantalizing works of culinary artistry - diners finding themselves in quandaries as to whether or not they should violate this art with a fork!

As we were escorted to our table we admired the pretty food on the tables of other diners; Suzie even stopped dead in her tracks at a table or two. When seated I noticed Suzie kept her head on a swivel, twisting and turning to examine our fellow diners’ entrees. (hmmm…) While the rest of us began perusing the menu, Suzie began wondering aloud if she should ask the next table which dishes they had selected because of how delicious they looked. (oh Lord …) We all felt confident in assuring her that anything she ordered would be wonderful and that she should just relax.

We were wrong, big time.

The entrees soon arrived with much fanfare and were placed before our expectant eyes. All seemed well, for about a second and a half.Suzie took one horrified look at her plate and exclaimed, loudly, “It’sliquid! It’s … liquid!” The rest of us forgot the artistry placed in front of us and peered at just what on earth she could be talking about. And sure enough, her food was swimming in a plate that was just as plain, bland, beige in color as any entrée I have yet to see in any restaurant, anywhere.

Little did my husband and I know that Suzie had a history of choosing poorly. Her husband, Dave, was Johnny on the spot and saidcalmly, and with great intent, “Here Suzie, have mine”, as he shovedhis plate under her nose in exchange. But she was way past diversionand continued to lament … loudly. It was at this point that Dave looked at my husband and said in a hushed voice, “This always happens to her; whatever she orders is always brown and runny.” It was at this point that my husband switched over from wine andordered a double scotch.

She kept on, “It’s liquid! It’s liquid!” Adjacent diners stared. Waiters flitted and offered anything short of their firstborn to rectify her choice. Nothing doing. By now, I was past mortification and somewhat entertained! We had gathered quite a crowd and I was interested to see how this would play out. But suddenly the chefappeared – that man just came out of nowhere. “What you say you no like my food?!” Whoa … things had escalated past entertainment – at one point I thought we would be asked to leave. Heck, by that point, I was ready to leave!

All the while, poor Suzie wasn’t blaming anyone – she just could notbelieve her stupid, bad luck at always selecting beige food! By this time she was in tears, apologizing, sniffling and hiccupping, “No, no it’s okay … I’ll eat it.” She stuck to her guns, refused a different dish, calmed down and began to taste with trepidation. We all began to breathe again, except, of course, for my husband who had been self-medicating during the entire debacle. He was breathing just fine.  

Poor Dave. Poor us. After all the drama, I am to this day clueless as to what food we ate or even if it was any good.

But I learned a good lesson. It can be summed up in one word – garnish. No one could argue that the enjoyment of a meal beginsbefore the first morsel is placed upon the tongue. Faced with a beige or unappetizing dish, it’s doubtful we will enjoy it. Since forever, food just tastes better if it’s dressed up. My grandmother always dusted her deviled eggs with paprika and expertly placed a green olive half in the center of each one. I still do the same to this day.

Monday art: sketching onions

I am really into sketching right now, honing my drawing skills. I put these into my regular sketch book, but the paper is not very suited to watercolor. Nonetheless, I like the results, but I will def try this, eh ich is from a photo I took, on watercolor paper.