louiedog's Profile

You can avoid doing dishes AND being wasteful by eating pizza straight out of the box. Classy, no?

fi_burke

I wish I could find cast iron at thrift shops near me at any price. 50 cents would be a steal. Those pieces get snapped up quickly, and I hear they are generally around $20.

I have two great pieces of vintage cast iron. One came from a guy at a flea market who rescues old cast iron and cost me $14. The other I almost tripped over late one night. It was on the curb with someone's trash. It took some work, but underneath a bunch of rust and the damaged seasoning was a very nice Wagner 10" square skillet.

Using my immersion blender always seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. I love that thing too much to risk using it. I got rid of my blender years ago before a big move because I rarely used it. However, I've recently decided to make smoothies in the morning that I can take with me.

The solution for me was a Hamilton Beach 14 oz. blender. It retails for $20 (it was $15 at Amazon last I checked) and has a plastic BPA-free jar and a lid like you'd find on a travel mug. I throw ingredients in it in the morning, give it a few pulses, and take it with me.

It's much easier and more convenient to clean than a full sized jar and it crushes ice no problem. It is smaller, and I don't think the motor would stand up to crushing a bag of ice in batches, but it does the trick for small jobs.

My favorite is Trader Joe's creamy peanut butter. It's great. I would like to know more about the tasters in this. If you've been eating sweetened peanut butter for the last 30 years you're most likely going to lean that way. I switched over in my late teens and it took a couple of jars to get used to it not being so sweet, and now I prefer it that way.

I actually have a jar of Peter Pan in my fridge from a recipe that recommended not using natural peanut butter because of oil separation issues in the final product. It doesn't even come close to the TJ's stuff.

Oh, and if you find that mixing up natural PB is a messy affair give the jar a really good shake for maybe 10-15 seconds before you open it up for the first time. It won't do the mixing for you, but it'll combine the oil pretty well into the top inch or so of peanut paste. You won't be sloshing oil up and over the side when you stir.

Although the Jewels around me have an "I'm using my own bag" button, they don't always work. My location just upgraded their machines and seem to work 100% of the time now, but other locations with older machines don't. To get around this I first scan a heavy item that isn't weighed, like a can of tomatoes, milk, juice, etc, and put it in the bag, and then the bag on the scale in the bagging area. The relatively small difference is ignored by the machine and you don't get the prompt about an unexpected item in the bagging area.

At my store, unless there is an empty manned checkout lane (extremely rare), the self-checkout is always faster. I've tested it quite a few times and it never fails, even when there's a slow old lady who doesn't understand it or a bunch of college kids who are together but making separate booze purchases. One of the reasons for this is my store has one single line for all four self-checkouts. That means you can't get stuck because of one slow person. The next person in line gets the next available checkout. It's great.

I do, however, have some pet peeves. If you're buying a lot of booze, or using coupons, don't go through the self-checkout if there are a lot of people and the person overseeing the area looks busy. It just slows things down. If you've never used them before, don't try them out when things are busy. Please, don't take full cart with $150 worth of groceries through. It will take you forever. Even if you have a lot of experience, the machines aren't as fast as the ones manned by people who the store trusts, and you will take forever.

Is stir-frying so difficult to do that someone would need this? This looks like something that someone would spot in Williams-Sonoma, think "Oooh, I'm going to learn to stir-fry," use twice and never touch again.

I'd also hesitate about it being Teflon. I realize it's the new type of Teflon that's supposedly safe and all, but stir-frying is high heat cooking, and that was a terrible, terrible idea with the old stuff. My seasoned steel wok has better nonstick properties anyway.

My freezer's thermostat stopped working a few months ago and I first noticed the problem when I tried to make ice cream. The freezer was keeping ice frozen, but when I tried to make ice cream after freezing the bowl for 2+ days, it never got cold enough.

My guess is that either you're not freezing your bowl long enough or your freezer is too warm. There's no trick to using these things, the bowl just needs to be cold enough.

I've made ice cream with room temperature mixtures before because I was low on time, and they still worked out. I don't recommend it, but freezing the bowl completely is a must.

I made sun tea every 2 or 3 days as a kid. I lived in a rural area and was outside all day getting dirty, visiting the swamp, picking up animals, etc. I can't imagine I sterilized the jar or washed my hands that well at that age. No one in my family ever got sick from it that I can recall.

I've been baking boules on an inverted cast iron skillet and adding steam to the oven. They come out wonderful.

The Green Cat

Freeze it. Bread freezes extremely well. If I make enough bread to last a couple of days I make sure it's nice and cool and keep it on the counter in a large ziplock bag. If I make more than a couple of days worth I freeze the rest in freezer bags.

If you're going to be using it as slices you can slice it first and just take out the number of slices you need. It thaws very quickly that way. If freezing a whole loaf and you can just take it out an hour or two before you want to use it and warm it on the counter. Or if time is a factor, 10 minutes or so in the oven at a low temp does the trick.