Mom Money-Saving Tip 88

Be creative with leftovers.  Six uneaten French fries from last night’s dinner became the basis of today’s lunch.  First I warmed up the fries in the microwave.  Then I heated up a flour tortilla in a frying pan, flipped it over, placed the fries in a rough line down the middle and added some cheddar cheese.  I covered the pan with a lid and continued cooking for about 30 seconds, or until the cheese melted.  Voila!  Cheapest lunch ever.

                                          See all my Money-Saving Tips!

Mortar and Pestle: What Is It and How Do I Use It?

Glass Mortar and Pestle

A mortar and a pestle are actually two stand-alone items that are sold together and work together.  Basically they mash things up, things not really mashable with a fork.  In my case that usually means whole spices.

I bought a mortar and pestle some years ago because I thought it looked cool, but I only started using it when I began liking the taste of Szechuan peppercorns.  They were too expensive to put in a pepper mill, so I ground them up in my mortar and pestle.

Spinach: Fresh vs. Frozen

I couldn’t resist the 40-ounce bag of fresh spinach at Costco yesterday for $3.99.  I’ve been a fan of fresh spinach since my earliest cooking days.  I like putting it in salads, dropping a few handfuls into soup, a stir-fry, a stew or hot pasta.  I’ve recently taken to mixing some fresh spinach into ground turkey recipes, just to provide some novelty.  I also make an excellent Spinach Quiche.   

Frozen spinach just doesn’t provide the same taste experience, especially the chopped version.  Draining a pot of once-frozen, then-cooked chopped spinach is highly unappealing.  I would never serve it as a vegetable.  Whole-leaf frozen spinach is slightly better in principle, but I can’t remember the last time I offered it as a side dish.  As for canned spinach…I don’t want to think about it.

Mom Cooking Tip 121

Don’t rinse cooked pasta.  Fresh water washes away the starch coating that will help the sauce stick to the pasta.

                                                  See all my Cooking Tips!

Oops! I Ran Out of xxx in the Middle of Cooking

How many times have you discovered you were missing an ingredient in the middle of getting dinner ready?  Somehow I can look at a recipe, carefully check the ingredients and still manage to overlook the need for an egg or a cup of milk. 

If the ingredient is something odd—like anchovies or honeydew melon—I make a special point of confirming its existence in the house. But if it’s something so basic, so certain to be in the fridge or the cupboard, then I often don’t bother to check that I actually have it. 

I never buy lemons, for instance, because there’s a lemon tree 20 feet from my front door.  So lemons are always in supply—except when they’re not, as I discovered the other day when I went out to pick one.  The tree was full of mini-green lemons, which should be ripe next month.

Manzana Bananas: What Are They and How Do I Use Them?

I never heard of Manzana Bananas until I saw them in the produce department at a local grocery store.  They’re cute little bananas, 8-10 to a bunch, and they provide about three mouthfuls of fruit.

They seemed like the perfect answer to my lifelong problem of buying regular bananas and watching them over-ripen before having the chance to eat all of them.

A Fool for Chocolate

I sensed my life  going downhill yesterday when I found myself in the kitchen eating a spoonful of creamy peanut butter covered with chocolate chips.  It was my own fault.  I’d made a chocolate cake earlier in the week and foolishly given most of it away.  I didn’t want it to tempt me, but here I was making a fool of myself over chocolate.

I could have whipped up a batch of chocolate peanut butter cups, but that would have been work.  Or I could have made a batch of Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Cookies – same problem.