All Posts By Jennifer

The big spoon with the teeth and the hole in the middle. Every kitchen has one. Mine came in a set I got as a wedding present and I have used it several times a week for the better part of twenty years. I assumed the hole was for draining. Or for hanging it up. Or just to use less plastic. It is none of those things. It’s a Measuring Tool The hole in the middle of a pasta spoon is sized to hold roughly one adult serving of dry spaghetti. You push dry spaghetti up through the hole until …

I bought bread for about thirty years before I noticed the tags weren’t always the same color. I’d been treating them as packaging — whatever plastic clip the factory happened to have that morning. Then a friend who’d worked in grocery retail told me to check the color next time, and I have looked at every loaf I’ve bought since. The Color Is a Code At a lot of American bakeries, the color of the tag or twist tie tells you which day of the week the bread was delivered to the store. The common version runs alphabetically by the …

I want to be clear about something before we go any further: this does not make your chili taste like coffee. I know how it sounds. I thought the same thing when a cook I worked beside years ago stirred a spoonful of instant coffee granules into a pot the size of a sink and didn’t even look up. I made my own pot that weekend. Same recipe I’d made a hundred times. One spoonful of instant coffee. Three hours later my husband asked what I’d done differently, and he could not tell me what it was. What It Actually …

My grandmother kept a slice of white bread in the cookie tin. Not wrapped in anything, not in a corner — just sitting in there among the cookies like it belonged. I thought it was one of those things old people did for reasons nobody could explain anymore. Then one Christmas I baked four dozen sugar cookies on a Tuesday for a party on a Thursday, and by Wednesday afternoon they had gone from soft to something you could file your nails on. So I tried it. One slice of plain white sandwich bread, dropped into the container, lid on, …

There is a jug of white vinegar under my sink that cost less than a coffee and has cleaned more of this house than any product I’ve ever paid real money for. Windows, coffee maker, the inside of the microwave, the crusty showerhead. It earns its place. So I’ll be honest with you: for years I treated it as the answer to everything. Anything grimy got vinegar. And a few things in this house are permanently worse because of it. Here are the six places I’ve learned to leave it alone. 1. Granite, Marble and Any Natural Stone This is …

My slow cooker has earned its place on the counter. It has carried me through school nights, sick weeks, and more than one Christmas when the oven was already full. I trust it more than I trust myself before coffee. But here’s the thing nobody tells you when you unbox one: a slow cooker is not a magic pot. There are a handful of things that go in and come out wrong every single time — and I have ruined enough dinners to be able to list them from memory. Here are the five I’d tell any friend to keep …