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Love to Cook? Master These Must-Know Knife Techniques

March 19, 2015 by

If you love to cook, you know how important it is to use the proper cutting techniques in every recipe. Many people don't know the proper names of these techniques, however, which often leads to using the wrong one. Here are three important types of cutting that are essential for everything from entrees to desserts.

  1. Julienne. To julienne, you want to cut vegetables or other food items into stick-shaped pieces that are long and thin. Start by cutting the item into a square, then slice it into rectangular-shaped pieces lengthwise. Repeat the same step on each of the rectangles until you're left with pieces that resemble matchsticks.
  2. Chiffonade. This type of cut sounds fancy, but it actually just refers to cutting herbs or thin leaf vegetables. Roll the herbs up into a tight tube, then roughly chop across with a sharp knife. It doesn't matter how the cuts look, just that the pieces are small enough to sprinkle throughout a dish.
  3. Dice. Dicing is similar to chopping, but it creates entirely uniform pieces for dishes like stews or fruit salads. Begin with a rectangular shape and continue to cut it both directions until you're left with uniform pieces in the size that you desire.

Knife Skills: Different Types of Cuts [The Culinary Cook]
Top 10 Knife Skills [How Stuff Works]
Perfect Your Knife Skills With This Chef's Guide to Knives [Lifehacker]

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These Online Quizzes Put Your Memory to the Test

February 19, 2015 by

As you age, you may notice that your memory isn’t quite as sharp as it used to be. Luckily, there are a number of online quizzes that will test your memory and help you to keep it strong for years to come. You’ll even notice yourself improving the more often you do them. Here are just a few of those memory quizzes that are available online.

Short Term Memory Test
Do you often find yourself not remembering why you walked into a room or forgetting to pick up milk on the way home from work? Short-term memory is very important in day-to-day life, and this online quiz will show you just how sharp yours it. A sequence of letters will quickly appear on the screen, and your test is to see how many you can remember.

Dinosaur Eggs
If you prefer a memory game that’s a bit more fun and exciting, Dinosaur Eggs is the perfect choice. This addictive online game features colorful graphics of adorable dinosaurs hidden in eggs, and players must match the dinosaurs with their twins by memorizing their position in the group.

Memory V
Popular educational website Knowledge Adventure created this explosive card game to test players’ memory in a creative way. The game displays a series of cards for just a moment before flipping them over, and players must avoid each card that contained a photo of a bomb.

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Recipes That Make Use of Those Overripe Bananas

January 22, 2015 by

Bananas are quite finicky fruits, and if you don’t eat them right away they turn brown and too soft for many people’s tastes. Before you toss out those overripe bananas, however, try one of these delicious recipes that welcome that extra sweet flavor!

Chocolate Banana Creamsicles [alimentageuse.com]
While these cool, healthy treats are especially refreshing during the hot summer months, they taste just as delicious year-round. Simply blend a few overripe bananas with cocoa, vanilla, and coconut milk, then freeze it to create a handheld treat.

Bananas Foster Parfaits [myrecipes.com]
Give your browned bananas a second life with these gourmet quality parfaits. Greek yogurt creates the base, while cooking the sliced bananas with butter, apple juice, and toasted pecans imparts a sweet and robust flavor. If you’re serving this to adult dinner guests, substitute the apple juice for rum to create a more grown-up taste.

Banana Banana Bread [allrecipes.com]
This moist, dense bread contains so many bananas, it uses the word twice. It’s hearty enough to eat for breakfast, but it’s so sweet and delicious that it makes a great dessert, as well. Best of all, the riper the bananas, the better they work in this simple recipe.

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Technology Trivia: Three Important Chess Computers

December 18, 2014 by

Playing chess against a computer opponent is fairly commonplace stuff today. But the development of computers able to play chess competitively led to many important milestones in artificial intelligence, culminating (at least for now) with Watson, the famous Jeopardy!-playing computer, and Siri, the iPhone virtual assistant.

If you're interested in learning more about the history of artificial intelligence, here are three important chess computers:

Kotok-McCarthy
The Kotok-McCarthy computer was was developed between the years of 1959 and 1962 by a group of students at MIT. Advanced for the time, it was very slow by today's standards: it took anywhere from five to twenty minutes to calculate a single move! This computer also participated in the very first chess match between two machines, losing to a slightly more advanced computer from the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics.

Deep Thought
Deep Thought was developed in a partnership between Carnegie Mellon University and IBM; it was named after a fictional computer in the book series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The computer won the North American Computer Chess Championship in 1988 and the World Computer Chess Championship in 1989. Deep Thought is perhaps most well known for losing two widely-publicized games to chess champion Gerry Kasparov.

Deep Blue
Deep Blue was developed as a successor to Deep Thought. In 1997, it beat Gerry Kasparov twice yet losing the match 4-2. The match was controversial, as Kasparov later accused technicians of making moves on Deep Blue's behalf. The match — and the controversy — later became the subject for a documentary called Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine.

CC-BY-SA-2.0/Flickr/soupboy

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Pro Tips for a Perfect Pie Crust

December 4, 2014 by

With the holiday season in full swing, you might want to impress your family and friends with a delicious, homemade pie at your festive gathering. Although making a pie from scratch seems intimidating, these tips from the pros will ensure that your crust turns out completely flawless.

  1. Chill everything. It’s fairly common knowledge that a good pie crust relies on very cold butter, but you can even go one step further by chilling everything (like flour, butter and shortening) before beginning.
  2. Keep things lumpy. While most recipes require you to blend or mix the dough until it’s perfectly smooth, a good pie crust relies on those small chunks of butter or other fats. This is what creates small air pockets for that lovely flaky texture once it’s done baking.
  3. Don’t over-handle the dough. The warmth from your hands can cause the gluten in the dough to seize up, so be sure to only touch the dough when transferring it into the pan.
  4. Use parchment paper. Not only does sandwiching your pie dough between parchment paper keep your kitchen cleaner, it also prevents the crust from tearing when it gets too thin.
  5. Create an aluminum shield. Because the pie’s filling and its crust tend to cook at different speeds, wrap a shield of aluminum foil around the crust’s edges during the last five minutes of baking.

10 Tips for Making Perfect Pie Crust [About Food]
The 10 Commandments of a Perfect Pie Crust [Real Simple]
6 Tips For Perfect Pies And Tarts [Food Network]

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How to Reuse Everyday Household Items and Reduce Waste

November 20, 2014 by

In our throwaway culture, the habit of mindlessly tossing things into the trash can be a tough one to break. However, many everyday items can be easily repurposed, helping you to reduce household waste—while also helping you to save some money in the process! Here's how to breathe new life into old, everyday household items.

1) Sharpen scissors with aluminum foil. Finally, a use for those leftover scraps of tin foil! Simply fold a piece of tin foil in half several times, then snip through it with scissors to sharpen and hone the blades.

2) Portion and store food in old egg cartons. Clean a Styrofoam egg carton to repurpose as frozen food storage. The carton's compartments make portioning easy, especially for make-ahead recipes such as cookie dough and meatballs. Alternatively, you can use the egg cartons to store small odds and ends, like thumb tacks, miscellaneous screws and nuts, paper clips—even smaller holiday ornaments!

3) Use paper towel tubes to organize hair bands. Wrap elastics around the tube to keep your hair accessories neat and all in one place. Paper towel tubes can also double as boot trees, which prevent taller boots from flopping over and creasing. Or you can rely on the tubes to corral plastic bags: Simply stuff the bags into the tube.

Reusing Things: 100 Ideas of How to Reuse Commonly Thrown Away Items [Mother Earth News]
Best of 10 Uses for Common Household Products [This Old House]
10 Ways to Rethink Household Items [Real Simple]
10 Ways to Reuse Common Household Items [Wise Bread]

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These Dairy-Free Substitutes Have All the Flavor of Cow’s Milk

October 16, 2014 by

Many people choose to cut milk out of their diets, whether it’s because of a food allergy or a vegan diet. Luckily, dairy-free milk substitutes make it easy to continue eating and cooking the foods that you love. Here are a few of the best milk substitutes.

  1. Almond milk. Almond milk is a wonderful milk substitute because it has a thick, creamy consistency just like real milk. Its taste is nutty and slightly toasted, but it’s not enough to overwhelm your cooking or baking. Almond milk is also completely free of dairy and has only around 60 calories per cup.
  2. Soy milk. Soy milk is the original milk substitute, and likely the one that you’re most familiar with. It’s made with thickeners that give it the milk-like consistency that’s necessary for baking, and its taste is creamy and a bit sweet.
  3. Coconut milk. Newly popular coconut milk has a slightly thinner texture than cow’s milk, but its light flavor is very tasty. This isn’t the best option for baking because it could produce breads or cakes with a gummy texture, but it is delicious on cereals or to drink straight.

Common Ingredient Substitutions [AllRecipes]
Meet the Milk Substitutes [Cooking Light]
Substituting Milk and Dairy Ingredients [Kids With Food Allergies]

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Want to Be an Astronaut? Check Out These Five Facts!

October 2, 2014 by

Does the kid in you still dream about being an astronaut? If you're still dreaming of walking on the moon, check out these facts from NASA about space suits and walking in space!

1) The temperature in space varies drastically, so it's important that astronauts wear specially designed space suits. The temperature can get as hot as 250 degrees Fahrenheit and just as cold.

2) Without the astronauts in them, a space suit weights 280 pounds on earth, while in space, the suits are weightless. Space suits are custom-made for each astronaut, but there is no difference between male and female suits, except for size.

3) It takes 45 minutes to put on a space suit. Then, an astronaut must wait up to an hour, breathing in pure oxygen, to let the body adjust before going on a space walk.

4) To get used to the weightless feeling of outer space, astronauts practice in their suits in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, a pool filled with 6.2 million gallons of water.

5) Space walks are called EVA, which stands for extravehicular activity. The first EVA by an American took place in June of 1965. The longest EVA to occur was almost nine hours long!

Visit NASA's website for more information.

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Picking Apples? Take a Look at These Handy Comparison Guides to Apples!

September 18, 2014 by

If you’re heading out to an apple orchard this weekend, you’ll likely find a wide variety of different types of apples to choose from. Some apples are better for baking, while others have a crisp taste that’s perfect for eating as an on-the-go snack. These handy comparison guides will help you to choose the perfect apples, no matter what you want to use them for.

Comparing Apples to Apples [theyummylife.com]
This chart offers a number of different uses for the most common types of apples. It lists apples like McIntosh, Pink Lady and Red Delicious and also includes comments on how tart or sweet they each taste. The chart then provides a ranking for each apple for how well they can be used for things like baking, making apple juice or just eating raw.

Apple Varieties for Cooking, Baking and Cider [Washington State University]
Washington State University’s website offers a similar chart for apple uses, but it includes non-culinary uses as well. Whether you want to find the perfect type of apple for your fall pies or the best one to use to ferment for hard cider, this list is a great resource.

A Visual Guide to Apples [Epicurious]
If you’re more of a visual learner, this chart from Epicurious is perfect for you. It provides detailed photographs of each type of apple so that you can easily identify them at the orchard.

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Keep Your Kitchen Need and Tidy With These Organization Tips

August 21, 2014 by

In terms of most-used spaces in your home, the kitchen is usually one of the first rooms that comes to mind. Used for everything from cooking breakfast to catching up on emails, this is a multipurpose room that often gets very disorganized throughout the course of the day. Here are a few simple tips that will help you to keep your kitchen organized.

  1. Stack things high. If you’re short on cabinet space, maximize the room on each shelf by purchasing dishes that are meant to be stacked. You’ll be surprised how much more you can fit inside once you utilize that unused height.
  2. Use a Lazy Susan. Lazy Susans make it possible to store spices and other kitchen essentials in tight spots while still allowing for easy access.
  3. Spruce up storage containers. If you want to store your most-used ingredients on the counters but dislike the original packaging, opt for a matching set of containers instead. Small glass jars are ideal for storing things like sugar, flour, and baking soda in plain sight.
  4. Hang a pot rack. Pot racks are great ways to free up under-stove storage, and they’ll give your kitchen a professional, chef’s kitchen look.
  5. Organize pot lids. Use a wooden peg rack in a cabinet to file messy pot lids vertically instead of horizontally.
  6. Invest in a knife rack. Mount a knife rack to the wall to keep knives in a safe spot and maintain their sharp edges.

24 Smart Organizing Ideas for Your Kitchen [Real Simple]
Kitchen Organizing Tips [Martha Stewart]
8 Smart Organizing Tips for the Kitchen [Tidy Mom]
Kitchen Organization & Storage Tips [Better Homes & Gardens]

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