There’s a hole in the handle of almost every frying pan in my kitchen. I spent years assuming it was for hanging the pan on a hook — which it is, but only by accident. A chef I worked next to showed me the real use in about four seconds, and I’ve done it every day since. It’s a Spoon Rest Slide the handle of your wooden spoon or spatula down through the hole, and it sits there at an angle with the business end hanging over the pan. Every drip goes back into the food instead of onto your …
There’s a row of numbers stamped on the end of every carton of eggs in the shop. Most of us have never looked at it, and the ones who have assume it’s a batch code for the factory. One of those numbers tells you the exact day the eggs were packed. Not “best by” — packed. And it is very often a different answer from the date printed on the front. The Three-Digit Number Is a Date Look for a three-digit number between 001 and 365. That’s the Julian date — the day of the year the eggs went into …
Foil is the thing I reach for without thinking. Cover the dish, line the tray, wrap the leftovers, done. Then I wrapped half a pan of lasagna in it, put it in the fridge, and opened it two days later to small gray holes in the foil and a metallic taste through the top layer. That sent me looking into it, and it turns out there are a handful of things foil genuinely doesn’t belong near. 1. Anything Acidic — Tomato, Citrus, Vinegar This is the one that got me. Acid reacts with aluminum. Leave tomato sauce, lemon, lime or …
The fridge door is the most convenient shelf in the kitchen. It’s at eye level, it’s the first thing you touch, and everything on it is a single reach away. It is also the warmest part of the fridge, by a long way — and I’d put money on most of us keeping at least three of these things in it right now. Why the Door Is Different Every time you open the fridge, the door swings out into a room that’s around 70°F. The shelves inside barely notice. The door takes the full hit. Open a fridge ten or …
The first time I did this I was out of beef broth and had a chuck roast already sitting in the pan. What I had was most of a jar of dill pickles and the juice they were swimming in. I poured in about half a cup, topped the rest up with water, and put the lid on expecting the worst. That roast is the reason my mother-in-law asked me for a recipe for the first time in eleven years. What Pickle Juice Actually Does to Meat Two things, and they’re both real. The acid loosens the meat. Pickle brine …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 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, …
