"SimplyRecipes" news and stories

Warm days call for cool picnic ideas, and this white bean salad certainly answers that call. Made by Elise at Simply Recipes from a recipe of her mother's, it looks both refreshing and hearty, a simple solution to the perennial question of not only what to eat, but what to eat while sitting on a blanket, fending off ants and sunburn.

And while you may be able to hold both at bay, we're guessing that when a salad looks as pretty as this one, you'll have no such luck fending off the hungry advances of fellow picnickers eager for just one more mouthful of beans, kissed with fresh lemon juice, spiked with raw purple onions and garnished with fresh, lush herbs.

[Via Simply Recipes]

Caramelizing Onions from Simply Recipes on Vimeo.

There are few meals I make that don't in some way involve onions. I add red or sweet ones to salads for crunch. When I saute greens, I almost always start by softening slivered yellow onion in some olive oil, in order to give the chard or kale a flavor partner. They go in all my soups, stews, braises and roasts. And, when I want a real treat, I'll caramelize them down to a puddle of dark, sweet onion jam that goes amazingly well on sandwiches, pizzas or even just on top of a cracker.

Elise at Simply Recipes posted a tutorial yesterday on how to make caramelized onions that is helpful for the beginnger and a good reminder for those of us who have let caramelized onions slip off our mental food map. What's more, she created a time lapse video of the caramelization process that I've now watched four times, just for the pleasure of seeing those crispy raw onions melt down into a rich and mellow spread.

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Each Friday afternoon, I gather up an assortment of links from around the food webs for your pre-weekend enjoyment. Here's some of what's caught my eye recently.

1. Move over canning, root cellars are the newest (oldest), hottest method of food preserving on the block. The New York Times featured them last week and Culinate offers more on subject from expert Harriet Fasenfest.
2. Looking for a way to make your winter a little brighter? Plan meals with friends and family.
3. Like the taste and convenience of slow cooked foods but don't have an electric slow cooker? CityMama helps you use just a cast iron casserole dish and your oven to achieve the same effect.
4. The Wednesday Chef featured a chocolate chip cookie recipe that includes buckwheat groats for added fiber and texture. These are going on my 'must make' list for this weekend.
5. I bought a big bunch of kale last weekend at the farmers market. I haven't gotten around to cooking it yet, but I've got my eye on this recipe from Elise at Simply Recipes.
6. For those of you out there who keep kosher, it's going to be a whole lot harder to get kosher beef for you dining table. NPR reports that one of the largest Kosher meat plants in the country has shut down their beef facility.
7. I like pumpkin bread and I LOVE cranberry bread. Putting the two of them together? Genius!
8. Looking for a weekend baking project that will knock the socks straight off your loved ones? What about the Feather Boa Doughnuts that Erin made recently! Based on a recipe from 101 Cookbooks, they are a little lighter than fried doughnuts but I imagine no less delicious.

I have always been a sucker for butterscotch. When I was a kid, I would always choose one of those hard, orange butterscotch candies over a piece of chocolate. One those rare occasions when my family went out for ice cream sundaes, I would choose vanilla ice cream with hot butterscotch syrup drizzled over top (my mother, being a chocolate person herself, never understood my choice). While I don't always make the same selection these days (I did come around to chocolate sometime in my teens), I still love the flavor of real butterscotch.

Yesterday on Simply Recipes, Elise published a guest post written by Shuna Fish Lydon of the blog Eggbeater on how to make homemade butterscotch. The post comes with step-by-step pictures, which are extremely helpful for those of us who are never sure if the sugar/butter/cream mixture has cooked to the proper consistency. She makes it sounds really easy, which is at once both encouraging and a little dangerous, as the last thing I need in life is the ability to make butterscotch on demand.

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Those of us who follow food blogs are well acquainted with Elise of Simply Recipes. Her recipes are always dependable and she seems to have cooked just about everything in creation, which means that her website is something of a definitive resource.

However, if you haven't been following her for a long time, you might have missed a particularly useful blender tip she offered nearly three years ago. Lucky for all us internet readers, those eagle-eyed editors at Lifehacker found this particular tip and have brought it to prominence for our edification.

She suggests using a canning jar in place of your blender carafe when mixing up small batches of things. Apparently, most blenders are designed so that their bottom blade contraption will screw onto a standard sized canning jar. This way you can blend or chop inside a jar, remove the blender blade and store easily by popping on a regular old jar lid. It's like the predecessor to the Magic Bullet.

[via Lifehacker]

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