"chopper" news and stories

When I'm in the kitchen, my cutting board is one of my best friends. I use a large, sharp knife and quickly (but carefully) chop my way through my onions, celery, potatoes or peppers. However, I have a good friend who prefers to ignore the cutting board for everything of the large job, instead using her fingers and a small paring knife to make fruit slices, potato wedges and carrot rings.

I tend to think of that 'in hand' slicing as a kitchen technique that comes from an earlier era. I can imagine my Auntie Tunkel standing in her tiny rowhouse kitchen, slicing root vegetables directly into a roasting pan, using a callused thumb to catch the blade on the other side of the turnip or rutabaga. My own mother is somewhere in between, having used the same old cutting board for so many years that she's worn it thin in the middle, nothing like my own hurried smash and chop.

Are you a cutting board devotee or an in hand slicer?

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]

Source