vrai-lean-uh's Profile

Oh, and the posters above who mentioned how sturdy china is are right. As long as you don't get a metallic pattern that will wash off, it's incredibly durable.

I have had a bottle of red wine break in a suitcase (I was coming back from Chile, and my bag got searched and re-packed at the airport). It was really, really bad.

It was bad enough that I would consider buying a wine diaper.

Hm, sorry everyone, I don't know what happened to the rest of my comment.

I also make cream biscuits, which you can freeze before cooking. I would bet that you could do the same with muffins:
- Make sure you have tin liners of some sort, then fill the tin with the raw dough.
- Freeze, then pop out the raw, frozen muffins.
- Then when you're ready to cook, pop them back into a tin frozen and just add a few minutes of cooking time.

If the shelves are solid wood (I'm not familiar with the IKEA Lack shelves, so I'm not sure) and if you only have one or two, you could also sand them down along the side to make them curved. It'll take a little time, but not too too long if you've got some coarse-grain sandpaper and you wouldn't need power tools.

Hold the shelf up to the wall and gently mark with chalk or pencil (ideally on the bottom, but if you're painting them if doesn't matter) where the wall starts to curve away from the shelves. Then sand that middle section down a bit to create a curve in the shelf. It'll take some eyeballing, but you probably don't need it to be exact.

I consider my strainer first tier, absolutely. I wash it by hand because I use it so often that I don't want to wait for it to go through the dishwasher.

I have an old egg beater that was my dad's (maybe my grandma's?) and that I LOVE.

I use it for whipped cream a lot, because that doesn't require a ton of whipping and it doesn't seem worth it to haul out the electric mixer for such a small job. It's really nice for when I'm making dessert with my little brother, too, because it's lighter and easier to use than the electric mixer so he can help.

But I've also used it to beat egg whites for pancakes, and other small beating jobs (heh).

About a year ago, my husband spent 6 months away in training for his job. I did a bunch of the things people describe above but my favorites were:

- scrambled eggs with greens and cheese,
- roasted vegetables, with some lemon chicken one night, and then the leftover vegetables over polenta another night,
- soups (freeze the leftovers so you're not eating the same thing day after day after day),
- sometimes I'd have just a big bowl of broccoli with cheese, which my husband doesn't love,
- a salad with tuna, olives, capers, and a lemon-garlic vinaigrette,
- and I also really enjoyed going out to dinner by myself.

Good luck!

I have a peeler very much like that swiss ceramic peeler, and it's amazing. I find I'm able to peel unwieldy things like butternut squashes pretty easily because of the extra leverage.

I bring it with me when I cook at other people's houses.

This is super exciting, because I love those crisps and I cannot justify $7 for a box of crackers that I will eat in one sitting.

I made hot chocolate with ginger. If I've got fresh ginger, I grate some directly into the pot (or mug, although I think that works slightly less well), and/or I add in some ground ginger. I like the slight spiciness. I have also heard that ginger aids digestion, and generally feel that my digestion could always use some additional aiding, so there's that, too.

I also really like to add cardamom to hot chocolate.