Homemade soda

My sister Megan has a cool seltzer-making machine called a Penguin (you can read more about it on the Sodastream website). I admire it deeply, but with limited counter space I'm currently content to go to her house and drink her homemade sparkling water.

However, I did stumble across this cute little gadget called U-Fizz. It's really more a mini science experiment for kids than a serious way to make sparkling beverages, but it's only $9 (from Scientifics), so what the heck?

To make a sparkling drink with U-Fizz, you put the juice or water to be carbonated in one bottle and screw the cap on. Then in a second bottle, you combine vinegar and baking soda and screw that cap on. The chemical reaction of the baking soda and vinegar produce carbon dioxide, which escapes through a tube into the awaiting juice/water.

Exotic food kits

A couple of months ago, I bought myself a wonderfully exotic cookbook that covered about 8 different Asian cuisines, including Burmese, Thai, and Indonesian. I was really excited to try one of the Thai recipes (a coconut custard with fragrant sugar syrup) and spent a good deal of time and energy traipsing around New York City to collect the ingredients. When I finally found everything (including pandanus leaf*), I had visited 4 stores and spent a huge amount of money. And the worst of it is that I had all these leftover ingredients that I really had no idea how to use on my own (i.e., without a recipe).

Anyway, when I saw these recipe kits called Destination Dinners, I was very impressed. In each kit, you get all the ingredients you need (minus any perishables) to make an exotic dinner. But you get only the amount you need and no more.

Each kit includes the premeasured ingredients, a grocery list for the fresh items you need, plus a little history and culinary trivia for the cuisine you've chosen. For example, one of the kits is for a Thai green curry with jasmine-scented sponge cakes, and the exotic ingredients included were jasmine rice, rice flour, green curry paste, fish sauce, jasmine water and palm sugar.

The handsomely packaged kits cost $30-35 and serve 4 to 8 people, depending on which recipe you've chosen. In addition to the Thai green curry, the 12 kits currently available include chicken garam masala (Bangladesh), jerk chicken (Jamaica), falafel (Israel), pork and egg rice bowl (Japan), beef bulgogi (Korea), baked spiced lamb (Lebanon), chicken and cashews (Thailand) and jambalaya (Louisiana).

If you really get into it, you might want to look at what they call the Destination Passport, which is basically a kit-of-the-month club. You can buy a 3-month, 6-month, or 12-month passport.

*Just in case you're curious, pandanus leaf is a long thin leaf that looks sort of like a piece of palm frond. It's used in Thai cooking to flavor coconut-based desserts and sugar syrups.

Putting party hats to good use

Have you ever been plagued by a fruit-fly infestation? If you said "No"....well, I don't believe you. It's happened to all of us. And to me just recently.

So I did what we all do these days, I went online. When I typed in "fruit fly trap," I found a bunch of sites that describe how to make one, and I promptly did so.

Here's what you do.
1. (This is the most important.) Get rid of whatever it is that the fruit flies were attracted to in the first place: an over-the-hill banana, something delicious in the garbage. Whatever it is.

2. Take a sheet of paper, form it into a cone and tape it together.

3. At the tip of the cone, snip off an opening that is just slightly larger than a fruit fly.

4. Put a piece of banana or some vinegar in the bottom of a tall glass. Put the paper cone into the glass and tape it around the glass's edges (to seal off any possible escape route).

The fruit flies, who are attracted to the smell in the glass, go down through the opening in the paper cone and then can't figure out how to get out. They may be prolific, but they're not very bright.

Now for how party hats come into play. 
Most party hats are in the shape of a cone. If you happen to have one, you have a ready-made fruit-fly trap. The bonus is that your fruit-fly trap is both sturdy and decorative.

Cake pops

I am not a cake fan. I actively dislike cupcakes. And I have resisted--so far--doing anything with the current fad for food-on-a-stick. However, I simply could not pass up these chicks. They are supposed to be for Easter, but just change up the colors and make them some other kind of bird and they're good to go any old time. See how to do it at Instructables.com.

Meat loaf cupcakes

There is a restaurant that opened recently in Chicago called The Meatloaf Bakery. The restaurant looks at first glance like a regular bakery, with a big glass display of all the "baked goods." But what's in the case is meat loaves baked to look like pastries, including layer cakes, tarts and my favorite, cupcakes.

Now, the reason I'm mentioning this restaurant (because this is really only interesting news to someone who lives in Chicago, which I don't), is that I think the idea of baking a meat loaf as a cupcake is a really cool idea.

If you'd like to give it a try, the concept seems really simple. Just take your favorite meat loaf mixture and bake it in muffin tins. Then just think of something that you can top the cupcake with that will take the place of frosting. To get you started, here are some cupcake ideas from The Meatloaf Bakery's menu:

• Ground chicken seasoned with minced celery and spicy wing sauce. Frosting: whipped blue cheese.
• Ground pork loin seasoned with minced chorizo sausage, hot peppers, almonds and garlic. Frosting: roasted garlic-mashed potatoes.
  
• Ground beef and Italian sausage seasoned with basil and sun-dried tomatoes. Frosting: angel hair pasta.
• Salmon loaf seasoned with lemon, parsley and dill. Frosting: wasabi mashed potatoes.
• Ground turkey seasoned with fresh herbs. Frosting: herbed bread stuffing.
• Ground sirloin seasoned with minced bacon, cheddar, mustard and ketchup. Frosting: 3-cheese mashed potatoes.

How I handle chili peppers (don't laugh)

The standard language used by cookbooks for dealing with hot chili peppers is to tell people to use gloves. This is a perfectly reasonable piece of advice, because the substance in chili peppers that makes them hot to the palate also makes them hot to your hands (and lord help you if you rub your eyes).

I usually ignore this advice and go ahead and take my chances. I try to have as little contact as possible with the inner ribs of the pepper (which is really where the heat is by the way, not the seeds) and I wash my hands with hot, soapy water the minute I'm done. What this does is just tame the effects of the capsaicin (the heat-producing compound) to a tolerable level. My hands tingle a bit for awhile, but no biggy.

However I draw the line at Scotch bonnet peppers. These little chili peppers are among the hottest in the world--40 or 50 times hotter than a jalapeño! So when I have to cut up one of these suckers, you can be sure I'm not so bold.

But I don't keep a supply of chili-pepper gloves in my kitchen. Do you? So when the need arises, here's my solution. I take a plastic produce bag (which I keep for using a second time anyway), put it on my hand and push it down in between my fingers. A rubber band at the wrist keeps it in place, though that's not entirely necessary.

Then when I'm done cutting the pepper, I just pull the bag off, turning it inside out, and throw it away, not feeling guilty about throwing away a plastic bag because I used it twice.

Gentlemen, start your garlic

I am not a great gardener. I don't have the patience. But the one thing I plant every year, without fail, is garlic. Years ago, a friend of a friend encouraged me to grow garlic. He told me all I had to do was remember the garlic-planting mantra: "Plant on Columbus Day and harvest on the Fourth of July."

So that's what I do. This time of year, I go to my local farmer's market and buy a couple of heads of really good garlic. Then on Columbus Day (not the observed day, the real day) I plant them.

Here's how it's done: Separate the head of garlic into individual, unpeeled cloves. Dig a small hole in your garden about 2 inches deep and put in a garlic clove pointy-side up. Cover the hole. Repeat, spacing the holes about 4 inches apart. That's it.

In the meantime, check your local farmstand for garlic. I prefer the so-called hard-neck varieties, like Rocambole. If you don't have a convenient farmstand, then just use supermarket garlic. It works just fine. Or if you want to check out "gourmet" garlic, go to one of these sites:

Fox Hollow Farm
The Garlic Store

Homemade animal crackers

As a kid, when I got my hands on a box of animal crackers, I would spend time treasuring the beautiful details of the lions and tigers and bears (oh, my). I know I had favorites and would eat all the other shapes first so I could save the best for last.

But it has never occurred to me to make my own animal crackers, I guess because I wouldn't have imagined being able to get that lovely detail into a homemade cookie. Well, enter the Circus Cookie Cutters from Williams-Sonoma. The cutters work by cutting the dough out in the shape of the animal and then stamping the animal detail onto the dough with the spring-loaded stamp. They come in a set of five (tiger, lion, giraffe, seal and elephant) and cost $19.95.

The website also has an animal cracker recipe and a video that shows you how to use the cutters.

The Home Creamery

When I first got serious about food many a moon ago, one of the first things I spent money on was a yogurt maker. I merrily made yogurt for months, happy at the money I was saving. But soon I was restless and needed more of a challenge: aha, crème fraîche. That led to clotted cream, then butter, then cottage cheese.

Needless to say, I was pleased when I ran across a new book called The Home Creamery, whose subtitle reads "Make Your Own Fresh Dairy Products." Author Kathy Farrell-Kingsley has recipes for all of the things I used to make and more, from sour cream and kefir to goat cheese and mozzarella. I'm particularly intrigued by something called piima butter, which is butter made with a specific culturing agent that gives the butter a nice tang.

The first half of the book is all about making homemade dairy products, but the second half of the book is a collection of recipes that you could use even if you didn't make your own buttermilk or cream cheese. How does this sound: Cornmeal Waffles with Peaches and Mascarpone Topping? Or Crispy Buttermilk Chicken? How about Fudge-Swirl Cappuccino Cheesecake?

Hmmmmm, I wonder what I did with that yogurt maker?

My garlic harvest

Last October, I planted garlic in my garden. As with other bulbs, like daffodils or irises, you plant garlic bulbs in the fall, then come spring they sprout, and round about the end of July, the garlic is ready for harvest. (Click here for information on planting garlic.)

When I first started planting garlic about 10 years ago, I judged when to harvest the garlic by the fact that the lower leaves had started to turn brown. Then I stumbled on the best advice ever. It all has to do with garlic scapes.

Garlic scapes are the hollow stalks that a garlic plant sends up. It has a flower bud on its end and the scape is curled over in a kind of gooseneck shape [Photo 1]. The theory is that if you cut off the scapes, you will force the plant to put all its energy into growing a big bulb instead of growing a flower. The cut scapes [Photo 2] are actually quite tender and you can cook with them; they have a nice mild garlic flavor.

Now here's the trick I learned about knowing when to harvest garlic. When a garlic scape UNcurls and points straight up [Photo 3] in preparation for opening the flower, it's time to harvest the garlic. So when you cut off the scapes earlier in the summer, leave one scape to use as your barometer for the harvest.

Here's my harvested garlic [Photo 4]. The garlic in a freshly picked bulb is nicely pungent and almost crisp in texture. It's really rewarding to cook with your own homegrown garlic.

Growing square watermelons

If you lived in Japan, you could actually buy a square watermelon in the market (though it would cost you a pretty yen). However in this country, you'll have to grow your own. If you have a garden and are already interested in growing watermelons, then you can actually grow a square watermelon. On a website called Instructables: The World's Biggest Show & Tell, there are full instructions for how to do that.

The concept is really quite simple: grow the fruit inside a box so that it is forced to take on the shape of the container. The instructions for making the box, however, seem a little daunting to me, but then I'm not especially handy with power tools.

If any of you tries this--or has already tried such a project--I would love to know how it worked out. Please send me photos.