"dishwasher" news and stories

Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

• Your dishwasher spoils you.
• Healthy tacos do exist!
• Is eating cute woodland creatures your thing?
• It's OK to curl up with some warm winter comfort food -- we won't tell anyone if you break a resolution.
• Jamie Oliver takes his healthy-eating campaign to the airwaves. Will Americans gobble it up?
• Eat, eat, eat this, hot, hot, hot!
• Brown makes brown rice easy.

I rue the day I first put my manual can opener in the dishwasher -- it was the beginning of a long process of rusting. Now, I keep a solid list of tools that should stay far away from the dishwasher.

Somehow I never seem to load the dishwasher correctly. I've given up trying to learn. No matter how I load it, my husband comes after me and re-loads it. Luckily for me, he doesn't seem to much mind this arrangement. Then again, I bake him cupcakes every week.

If your spouse is like me and doesn't load the dishwasher in the "correct" way, Kathy Maister of Startcooking.com offers some tips on how get them to mend their ways without causing a fight.

Kathy suggests, "By the third time they do it 'not quite the way you think it should be done', gently offer suggestions - with reasons. No-one likes being criticized, but if you use it as a form of education 'By the way, did you know WHY they say you should.......?' you may get away with both your goals: getting it done right and keeping your relationship strong!"

Kathy also explains exactly what the right way is to load a dishwasher. This may settle the debate you've been having about what's better, top or bottom (get your mind out of that bottom rack).

Does your spouse do the dishes wrong? What do you do about it?

Source

Source

The worst thing about cooking is, without question, the cleanup. Once you have cooked and eaten your fill, the last thing that you want to do is do the dishes. The process seems daunting when you don't have a dishwasher, and somewhat less so if you do have one, but it's called a "chore" because it is one.

Chip, at Cook Think Blog, put together a brief guide to loading a dishwasher properly, with tips that can really help you make the most out of each wash. Before you laugh, keep in mind that having a system makes doing the dishes go much, much faster than it ordinarily would. You'll spend five minutes loading because you know where everything goes, versus 20 minutes trying to figure out how to cram everything in. Here are a few to start with:

• The used ends of forks and spoons should be pointing up, maximizing exposure to the water, while knife blades should point down.
• Plates should not be loaded by size, again to maximize exposure to water.
• Bowls should go on the top rack, not the bottom.

Source

If there's a moral from this story, it's "always check the label."

Three restaurant customers in South Carolina were injured - one was in intensive care - when the sugar on the rim of their martini glasses was found to be not sugar at all but industrial fryer cleaner. Yikes. It seems that one of the new bartenders didn't know where the sugar was, so he asked a dishwasher that didn't speak much English. Not sure why the bartender didn't check the label before using the cleaner.

Another question: the martinis where dipped in sugar? Do they mean margaritas?

Update: Oh, that's right, margaritas have salt around the rim, not sugar. Sorry 'bout that. Thanks to the commenters who pointed that out.

[via The Obscure Store and Reading Room]