eggy83's Profile

If you get the foil-and-paper cupcake/muffin liners, you can just set the liners on a cookie sheet and bake them without a muffin tin at all. You can easily fit 24 liners on a sheet pan and that way you can bake them all at once.

Before I met my fiance, I thought that it would be a total deal-breaker if my partner weren't as into food as I was. I adore food shopping, cooking, eating, and talking about food; he is picky and would be happy to eat the exact same meal every day for the rest of his life. When things started to get serious between us, I had a moment of reckoning...could I be with someone who didn't care much about food? The next thought...would I really not marry this unbelievable person because he doesn't like pesto? If that's his biggest flaw, I think I'm doing pretty well.

He really does appreciate my cooking (he never knew that things like bagels, yogurt, and granola could be made at home and taste so good), and he eats a much wider range of things than he did before we met, but I know he's never going to get why I'm so excited about heirloom tomatoes. Oftentimes, I'll make dinner and leave to the side the thing I know he won't like, and we're both happy. I have many many people in my life with whom I can share my love of food.

Somewhat related and that my nerdy self thinks is pretty cool...one thing you can't use Lactaid for is making yogurt. The yogurt enzymes/cultures actually eat the lactose during the fermentation process, so lactose-free milk won't culture properly if made into yogurt (this is also why some lactose-intolerant people can eat yogurt without a problem).

Also, Lactaid tastes sweeter than other milk, so you may need to adjust the sugar in the baking recipe.

This was great, especially w basil and cherry tomatoes from the garden! Left out the pepper flakes and it was still really good...tasted like it took way more time than it actually did. We did add some broth to shrimp and the lemony sauce was amazing w fresh bread to mop it up.

I find that Bittman (Michael Pollan, you are also guilty here) tends to write the same book over and over again. I believe that Bittman talked about his Vegan Before 6 philosophy in How To Cook Everything Vegetarian, Food Matters, and the Food Matters Cookbook. Don't get me wrong, I think that he has done wonderful things to help make good cooking accessible to many people--and I really applaud his efforts to make food that is healthful (full of nutrients) rather than just lower-calorie. But sometimes he seems to go for volume of recipes (my criticism of the How To Cook Everything series) or number of books written, rather than quality.

When I was living in France where both rhubarb and strawberries were abundant in the spring, I would buy a ton of each at the sunday market and make a big pot of strawberry-rhubarb compote with a little sugar and a piece of scraped-out vanilla bean....no matter how much of each I bought, I never got the compote to last past Wednesday! It's heavenly with plain yogurt.

These are the best measuring spoons ever: not only are they magnetic (i second the comment about how when the spoons are on a ring they all seem to get dirty), but each one is two-sided so that it can be used twice without washing, and the oblong side fits into spice jars.

http://www1.macys.com/shop/registry/wedding/product/martha-stewart-collection-magnetic-measuring-spoons?ID=449628

Spilled Milk and the Sporkful! The Sporkful guys are hilarious (their motto is "it's not for foodies, it's for eaters") and they get into all the eating-related minutiae that I never even realized I think about, like the two-part episode devoted to cereal-eating technique.

i have the exact same couch (but it's 6.5 years old) with the exact same problem! So far I've unsuccessfully been smushing it back every week or so (I've rotated/turned the cushions too many times for it to matter), but these suggestions sound far better, particularly the king-sized pillow. Can't look any worse, right?

I somewhat disagree on not buying thrifted things until you're in your new space. In a place like Boston, where it seems that half the apartments in the city turn over every September 1, there are amazing deals to be had on furniture in August, even if you're moving yourself. If you've always wanted to replace something, now's the time to do it, and you can make a few bucks in the process by selling yours (last year I bought a desk from someone on craigslist and sold my old one on craiglist the same day for $20 less than I paid for the new one). I'd also weigh the cost/hassle of moving something to the new place against the cost/hassle of buying it new post-move. But I agree that if it's a big piece that may not work in the new space, it's better to wait.