"the kitchn" news and stories

It's Friday afternoon. It's August. I, for one, would rather be at home doing something interesting with the quart of blueberries that have been patiently waiting on the bottom shelf of my fridge for the last week than sitting behind my computer. However, someone must hold down the internet, and so I carry on, doing a little work for my real job and searching the internet for tasty bits to keep you Slashfood readers salivating.

1. Of the many things I love about the city in which I grew up, one is that fact that people are permitted to keep chickens in their backyards inside the city. Tour de Coups is an annual neighborhood tour of the coops in which those chickens live. How I wish I could have gone!
2. My cousins Dan and Sabrina are just weeks away from the arrival of baby #2 and the whole family is waiting excitedly. This week, both The Kitchn and The Wednesday Chef have asked for tips on good foods to take to new moms. I'm bookmarking both posts for near future inspiration.
3. A week doesn't go by without someone doing something new and clever with bacon. This week heralded the arrival of the Bacon Alarm Clock and the Chocolate Covered Bacon Cake.
4. Loobylu tells the story of her mother's chocolate cake and how she never seemed to be able to make it correctly. A baking session with her mom revealed that her mom had given her a recipe that wasn't quite right. Cake sabotage!
5. A clever tip from Not Martha about how to preserve your beer bottle cap when opening, thus enabling you to put it back on the bottle and save the balance of your beer for another time.
6. College cafeterias go trayless to save on food waste, a nation of undergrads wonders how they'll carry five plastic cups of juice now.
   
7. The New York Times Paper Cuts blog features the The American Cookbook Project and I lose a half a day in productivity.
8. Kristin at Cookthink shares how she learned to pan roast a piece of fish so that it stays tender, flavorful and delicate.

Last weekend, my friend Angie handed me two plastic bags that were bursting with fresh herbs from her garden. This Saturday, after lunch at my cousin Amy's, she led me outside with scissors and a bag and asked that I "please take all the basil you can carry!" I am currently awash in an embarrassment of fresh herbs.

Last night, as I was rearranging the fridge to make room for the remains of the chicken I had roasted for dinner, I came across these multiple bags of herbs, seemingly undiminished despite active use and thought to myself that I better find a way to preserve them soon or I was going to have to add them to the composter (I now have a indoor composter in my living room, more on that later).

As I was reading through my feed reader this afternoon, I came across this tip on The Kitchn and realized that it was the answer to my herbal abundance. Emma recommends chopping herbs and then freezing them into cubes in an ice tray. Each well gets half filled chopped herbs and then is topped off with stock, wine or water. When they're frozen, she pops them out of the tray and stores them in a plastic zippered bag for future use. Much like how people are always recommending freezing stock into ice cube trays, only with more of verdant kick. I'm looking forward to saving some of the thyme Angie gave me for the fall.

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While the official start of summer is still a couple weeks off, the current bounty of strawberries makes me feel like summer is here. The current strawberry crop also means that it's canning, preserving and freezing season (how else will you be able to have gorgeous local berries in November?). These are the days when I find myself wishing that I had paid more attention to elementary school math, on the days when we learned how to calculate cups per pint, pints per quart and quarts per gallon. It's just the kind of knowledge that's useful when you're trying to figure out how many jars or freezer bags you need.

Lucky for me, those clever folks over at The Kitchn have put together a graphic that takes the guesswork out of calculating volumes. I've never seen anything like this before but I've always been one for an easy pneumonic devise, so I am sold. The design they came up with is as nice to look at as it is helpful. I think it would look quite fantastic on a poster or a white floursack kitchen towel.

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Everyone has one. A really ugly piece of cookware that they love too much to get rid of but it still embarrassing nonetheless. Mine is my griddle. It was originally an unassuming square of aluminum when I picked it up at a junk store six years ago. Since then it has gotten blackened and worn, with four perfectly seasoned circles where I always cook pancakes. I adore it, but when other people see me cook on it, I start to blush a bit and try to hid it from their gaze as much as possible (however, when they taste pancakes or french toast from my griddle, they chow down happily and are quite willing to ignore the pan from whence their brunch was cooked).

The Kitchn wants to see pictures of your ugliest, most embarrassing, most horrifically terrible pan. They have five really lovely Staub honeycomb frying pans to give away to the people with the worst pans and the best sob stories to go along with those miserable pans. Head over to The Kitchn for all the details so that you can enter to win a beautiful pan to replace your wretched cookware.

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It's hard not to waste food occasionally. You make a pot of chili and the leftovers get shoved to the back of the fridge, only to be discovered when they've grown a fuzzy green coat of putrid fur. Or you spend good money on some fancy mini-cucumbers, just to forget them in the bottom of your crisper drawer.

Wasted food happens, but you can take steps to minimize what gets thrown out. The Kitchn is currently hosting a Kitchn Cure, in which they are helping people get their kitchens clean and ready for Spring. They've posted a list of Tricks and Tips on how to avoid wasting food. One useful suggestion they offer is to keep a small whiteboard on your fridge to write down the fresh produce and leftovers you've got stashed away in there, so that you won't forget what you've got to nosh on.

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