Leah Hope's Profile

All my pretty aprons have been purchased from Boojiboo: http://www.etsy.com/shop/Boojiboo

I have a black and white polka dot with red trim and a yellow and blue starburst. When you're wearing them it basically looks like a sundress. So cute!

Spigots like the one she used are much cheaper than the stainless faucets/shanks above if you get one that's not made of stainless steel, people in the comments on the original article have had success with just replacement spigots (austensibly for other containers) off of amazon for a lot less money. The trick seems to be getting one that has the washers/bolts to hold the faucet in place and using those inside the watermelon, instead of just relying on the threads to hold it in place, because it will wiggle and enlarge the gap and start to leak.

Rhubarb syrup--makes beautiful, puckery, delicious spring cocktail! Just cook down some rhubarb with sugar (as much as you like) and water, then strain out the solids for pretty pink syrup.

Maybe they're taking it on average--take an hour to make a batch of caramelized onions that will do for three recipes, ta da! 20 minutes.

It IS worth the extra time. We've taken to making up a batch if there are onions left on grocery shopping day, then just having it for the week. Caramelized onions and some cream cheese on your morning bagel? Yes please.

There's no health reason chicken can't be stored on the bone, but it does expose it to more air if it's been partially carved and then you put it back in the fridge in the packaging it came in. So it can stay nice (not dry out or go bad) longer if you pick the bones and then store them in sealed bags with the air pressed out.

I love this strategy--I used to do this all the time when I lived alone. I also liked that they were smaller than most roasting chickens, plus on friday it was like $5 and I could have something to build a meal around for days and days. It also meant I could reapportion my limited cooking time on busy days such that I didn't have to spend a lot of time on my protein and could focus on making veggies I would actually finish.

The metal hooks you get at hardware stores work fine--you just have to remember to pick up a pack of the little plastic strips that hold them in place. Most hook sets come with them and you can also buy more if you run out.

I love my pegboard!! Mine is made of hard plastic (they were meant for garages) so we didn't paint them. Otherwise this is all great advice.

@Lynell, The blender pictured is a good balance between cost and functionality--you can get ones that are way more expensive, but this one is definitely the best in the reasonably priced range. If your frozen fruit is in small pieces (like sliced or chopped strawberries as opposed to whole) it does pretty well although big chunks can be hard on it. It doesn't do well with solid ice either, although that might be a problem you could solve by getting smaller cubes or already-crushed ice if you wanted to use it to make drinks for a party or something. But overall it does a great job and is durable and easy to clean.

I thought mine would be a unitasker too--blended soups weren't even really on my radar because I'd always avoided them because of the mess and hassle of pouring into the blender. I'll admit it, I got mine for one reason only--making perfect homemade mayo! We use it all the time though, for soup and smoothies and whipped cream and emulsifying. Lately we've been having a lot of banana peanut butter smoothies made in the measuring cup that came with the blender.

You can also do onions over a much higher heat (or with less monitoring/stirring during the final stages) if you just add more water to the pan as it starts to dry out so they don't burn.

My parents weren't getting their knives professionally sharpened because they thought it was prohibitively expensive; but when my own hardware store started advertising their knife-sharpening services ($1 a knife at DC-area Ace Hardwares for all of December, WOO!) I looked into it and found that blade-sharpening is a pretty common service at many hardware stores for $3-5 a blade; it's just not widely advertised because it's time-consuming to do and people are less understanding about losing access to their knives overnight or for a couple days than losing access to tools they're not currently using for the same period. So if you think there's no place around you to get them sharpened or think the culinary stores are too expensive, give some hardware stores a ring. You might be surprised!

There is a definite status symbol effect of shopping at certain farmers markets in DC and northern virginia. You can find the same produce from the same people at dramatically different prices around the city. Some people are wrongly diverting this discussion to one of agribusiness versus local small scale producers, and I don't think that's what the post author was getting at. It's that the social/trend factor of certain kinds of produce is making local organic foods unaffordable, at least in the short term, for the people who will have to be able to participate if local and organic is going to become the primary model in the food supply chain. Agriculture is notorious for not playing nice with the economic patterns of other sectors because its goods take so long to produce that farmers have to guess at what the market forces will be like in a few months and don't really have much opportunity to adjust once planting season has passed. Particularly when the local/organic supply is so small, large-order purchasers like restaurants can have a huge impact very fast, way faster than the supply can respond to. And if the pricing for local/organics is highly unstable because of the intermittent interest of these large purchasers, people aren't going to plan on making "buying local" at farmers markets part of their lives because they can't count on being able to get what they need inside their budget and they end up wasting a huge amount of their valuable time. And ultimately, that's bad news for the normalization of the local/organic supply chain. That doesn't mean that restaurants shouldn't be using local foods or that it's wrong for farmers to price in accordance with demand (even though it's frustrating when that leads to big gaps in price at different sites of purchase) but it does mean that it makes it difficult for a pretty important segment of the market--people who aren't rich--to continue to put their money where their ethics are. There is an income point at which "setting priorities" is irrelevant to the reality that you just don't have the money for it. It's an incredibly privileged standpoint to argue that everyone should be willing to pay prices five times what other producers are able to charge--or more than the same producer is charging in another setting, especially when in that setting less of the actual cost is going to the farmer and not to a middle man. Everybody can't afford that, and feeling the pinch of dramatic price increases doesn't mean you don't care.