Stabilizing a cutting board

There's nothing more annoying (or potentially dangerous) than a cutting board that slides all over the counter when you're wielding a sharp knife. Some cutting boards come with nonskid feet, but what if you have a perfectly fine collection of other random cutting boards--as I do--with no nonskid bottoms?

Well, if you do a Google search on the topic, you'll get tips on using a wet towel underneath the board. Or if you've ever been to a professional food shoot, you'll have seen food stylists use stacks of wet paper towels under their boards.

Both of these ideas work just fine, but not as well as my personal favorite: nonslip shelf and drawer liner. You can find rolls of this webby material in any hardware store. It costs from $3-6 for a roll 12 inches wide by 5 feet long. You can cut out pieces that match any one of your cutting boards, and it works like a charm.

If you can't find it locally, you can do a search on Contact brand drawer liners.

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.

When life hands you lemon zest

Sometimes you're just in the mood for that incomparable flavor that lemon zest brings to food. But you're ready to cook and, OMG, that fresh lemon you thought you had has turned into a beautiful greenish-blue science project....and you really don't want to go out to the market just to pick up a fresh lemon.

Well, here's a cool idea for keeping that fresh lemon-y flavor in good supply: Air-dry your own lemon zest*. Here's how:

With a vegetable peeler, take off strips of lemon zest (1), making sure to only take the very thin colored portion of the lemon peel, the part with all that great lemon-y flavor.

Set them aside on a plate (leaving space between the strips of zest) for a couple of days. They will shrivel up (2) and turn a brown-yellow color.

Put them into an airtight container.

When you're ready to use them, you can either throw them straight into a soup, stew, or stock; or add them to the cooking water for rice or beans.

Or, if you want fresh lemon zest for salads or baking, all you have to do it reconstitute the lemon zest. Let it sit in cold water for 1 hour and it will regain its original yellow color and will be easy to sliver or mince or whatever. (You might be able to hasten this process by throwing some boiling water on the zest, though somehow I imagine that'll wash off some of the great lemon oils. But maybe not. Worth a try.)

Do this with fresh lemons that you bought just for the juice (pull off the zest strips before you squeeze them). Or do it with lemons you bought "just in case." Surprisingly, the lemons that have the zest taken off them (but with the white pith still intact) don't seem to go bad any sooner than a lemon with its full peel still on.

This is one of those things that made me think: How come I didn't always know I could do this?

*Of course you can buy dried lemon peel. But that's different. That's the zest plus the spongy white pith part, which tends to be bitter.

My Sister's Potato Salad

[Potato flowers photo by Keith Weller for the Agricultural Research Service]

My sister Megan (she of the home seltzer machine) does not cook. It's not that she doesn't have the palate, because she does, it's that she doesn't have the patience. This, in fact, is the reason that I have always loved her potato salad.

When Megan cuts the potatoes for her potato salad, she does not have the patience to cut them into even little cubes. She cuts them kind of helter-skelter--whatever gets the job done fastest. As a result, when the potatoes cook, some pieces get mushy before the other pieces cook through. The happy by-product of this is that the mushy potatoes blend in with the dressing and make the salad seem extra creamy.

I have made my potato salad this way ever since (Megan, are you grinning?). Of course being the somewhat more methodical cook, I actually use a small baking potato cut small to do the job.

My Sister's Potato Salad
The baking potato is purposely cut smaller so that it will fall apart while the red potatoes stay firm. This contributes a pleasing thickness to the dressing, giving you the sense that you're eating a sinfully rich potato salad. Other health tweaks: no mayonnaise, fewer hard-boiled eggs than a typical potato salad, and green pepper replaces the typical celery for the same crunch but more nutrients.

Salt
2 pounds red potatoes, UNpeeled, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1 small (5 ounces) baking potato, peeled and cut into 1/4-inch dice
1 large clove garlic, coarsely chopped
3 tablespoons lemon juice
3 large eggs, hard-boiled
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon pepper
5 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup finely minced Vidalia or other sweet onion
1 green bell pepper, diced (1 cup)
1/3 cup chopped parsley or cilantro (optional)

1. In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook the red potatoes, baking potato and garlic until the red potatoes are fork-tender (but not falling apart), 10 to 12 minutes. Drain the potatoes and transfer to a large bowl. Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of the lemon juice over the hot potatoes.
2. Meanwhile, peel and halve the eggs. Transfer two of the yolks to a small bowl and discard the remaining yolk. Coarsely chop the whites and add to the bowl of potatoes.
3. Mash the egg yolks well with a fork. Whisk in the remaining 1 tablespoon lemon juice until smooth. Whisk in the mustard, sugar, 1 teaspoon salt and the pepper. Gradually whisk in the oil.
4. Add the onion, bell pepper and egg dressing to the potatoes and toss well. Stir to force the little pieces of baking potato to break down and become a part of the dressing. Add the parsley, if using, and toss.

Makes 4 to 6 servings

Fun with Food: linguine picks

About 2 weeks ago I went to a dinner party at my sister's house. The guests/participants were all members of a group (I was just auditing) that gets together regularly to hang out and eat good food. The rules of the get-togethers are that no spouses or significant others are invited, the hosting duties rotate, and if you are a guest—i.e., not the host—then you are not allowed to help clean up (love that one).

The dinners are always collaborative, with everyone bringing a dish and/or wine. I asked them if they planned ahead who was bringing what and they said no, they just let chance dictate, but that somehow it always worked out. Which, in fact, it absolutely did that night: prune-stuffed pork loin, rich scalloped potatoes and jerk-spiced vegetables.

But before the meal we had appetizers, which brings me to the point of this post. One of the club members—Joyce Levowitz Maffezzoli (who said that since this is a food blog I could refer to her as Juice Liverwurst Mostaccioli)—brought bocconcini but she had forgotten to bring the toothpicks. My sister had no toothpicks, but she did have linguine, so Joyce improvised. Genius.

Keeping lemons

If you stored lemons on the counter instead of the refrigerator, would they grow mold? I suspect that an unrefrigerated lemon might just dry up. Any opinions?

In earlier generations, when refrigeration was pretty much nonexistent (not counting ice houses), cooks would surely have had to deal with lemons stored at room temperature. Assuming that the lemons would in fact desiccate (oooh, S.A.T. word), this little piece of advice from an 1877 cookbook called Buckeye Cookery makes sense:

TO KEEP LEMONS.--Cover with cold water, changing it every week. This makes them more juicy.

Measuring lemon zest

Creating recipes has a lot of challenges. If you're just cooking for yourself, you just eyeball things, throwing in amounts according to your instinct. But if you're creating a recipe you expect someone else to follow--and get the same results--then it's all about weighing and measuring and precision.

There are lots of pitfalls here, of course. For starters, you have no idea how other people are going to measure things. Lots of cooks, for example, measure flour in a glass measuring cup. Recipe developers would never do that: They would use a handled dry-measure and level off the flour with a knife. The difference in the amount of flour is actually significant. (And a baker would skip both of those methods and weigh the flour!)

Anyway, another problem area I discovered recently was in the matter of citrus zest. How you measure a teaspoon of grated zest is a question of whether you really pack it into the spoon or let it sit all fluffy-like. But it also has a lot to do with the tool you use to get the zest off the fruit in the first place.

There are several tools devoted to the task. It used to be that the only choice was a French-style zester (1) that pulled the zest off in dear little curls. Then along came the Microplane zester (2) that takes the zest off in very fine fragments. There is also something called a channel knife (3) that takes the zest and some of the peel off in big strips. In the pictures above, the amount of zest you see is technically all the same--from 1/2 lemon--but the quantities are really different.

There's no punch line here. I happen to use the Microplane zester for most recipes because I like the flavor of citrus and want to get the most mileage out of the lemon/orange/lime, but I use a French-style zester if the zest is more of a garnish, because the curls are cute.

Dulce de leche in 10 minutes

Dulce de leche (which translates as milk candy) is a dessert sauce and/or flavoring from Latin American cooking. If you heat milk until the water in it evaporates, the natural milk sugars will concentrate. Then if you continue to cook the milk, the sugars will caramelize.

There is a classic home recipe for dulce de leche involving a can of sweetened condensed milk, a saucepan of water and 3 or 4 hours of slow cooking. The milk gets cooked right in its can (though you have to put some holes in the top of the can for the steam to escape or you'll have an explosion).

My favorite engineer/cook at Cooking for Engineers experimented with making dulce de leche in the microwave. He got the condensed milk to a dulce de leche sauce in about 10 minutes. With 5 more minutes of cooking he got it to the candy stage. His instructions and step-by-steps are great.

How to crack an egg

When I learned to cook, I was taught by my mother, and her mother, to crack an egg on the side of the bowl (or pan). Sometimes, with a particularly unstable bowl, the corner of the counter came into play.

So there I was having breakfast with a bunch of food professionals and the topic turned to how to crack an egg (I guess because we were all having eggs for breakfast). I was surprised to discover that half the folks there cracked eggs flat on a counter--the theory being that this way you minimize the shardage (ooh, I like that phrase).

This made me wonder how other people crack eggs, which is why I ran a little poll to see. It turns out that it's about 50-50, flat-crackers to rim-crackers.

Feeling a little like the last one to learn a secret, I decided to start flat-cracking. The method definitely cracks the shells in larger pieces that are less likely to fall into the bowl, but (and maybe because I'm not adept at it yet) it also left small pools of egg white on the counter.

I consulted Howard Helmer, who has the distinction of having been in the Guinness Book of World Records three times as the world's fastest omelet maker*. (I think he might also be in the book for being the most enthusiastic person in the world.) Here's what Howard explained:

When I'm on the road doing my omelet-making demonstrations, I put on 3 shows a day for three days, and for each show I crack three dozen eggs. That's 324 eggs!

For me, because I have to work so fast, cracking eggs flat on the counter slows me down (and what a mess it makes, too). So I'm an edge-of-the-pan/bowl man. I crack my eggs on the edge of a bowl two-at-a-time in both hands and I do it by bringing the eggs down to the lip of the bowl hard. The real trick is to not do the "wussy" rap, rap rap method, because then you're guaranteed to end up with unwanted eggshell shards.

Watch Howard making an omelet:



*427 omelets in 30 minutes

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.

An old-fashioned remedy

In the course of my research for a history-oriented feature (for Hallmark Magazine) called "Signature Dish," I spent a lot of time looking through really old cookbooks (you can get almost anything these days from the used booksellers at Amazon and Barnes & Noble) as well as websites that specialize in food history. (If you're interested, a particularly good one is called Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project.)

Once you spend any time checking out food history, you'll discover that many of the books from earlier generations were more than just cookbooks. They also dealt with the topic of household management. There was advice on everything from how to make stucco to removing ink stains from a mahogany desk to getting rid of crickets.

One of my favorite tips comes from a book called The House Servant's Directory. This landmark book was written in 1827 by Robert Roberts, a professional manservant and a prominent figure in the African-American community in 19th-century Boston. Along with advice for those wishing to enter into "gentlemen's service," Roberts also included such practical advice as this:

"To remove flies from rooms. Take half a teaspoonful of black pepper, in powder, one teaspoonful of brown sugar, and one tablespoonful of cream; mix them well together, and place them in the room, on a plate, where the flies are troublesome, and they will soon disappear."

It sounds oddly tasty, doesn't it? I'm very curious to know if it actually works. If any of you has a problem with houseflies, give this remedy a try and let me know how it goes.

The ultimate refrigerator cookie

If you've ever made a checkerboard refrigerator cookie, you will appreciate the ingenuity of this idea from Eva Funderburgh, a Seattle-based artist. She used a Play-Doh Fun Factory to extrude strips of colored dough that she then assembled into a log, which when cut crosswise produced a cookie with an image on it. OK, this is next to impossible to describe. You'll have to check out the series of photographs that she posted on Flickr for her Pixel Cookies.

What were they thinking?

I stumbled across this home remedy in a 19th-century cookbook called Aunt Babette's:

"How to Make a Bacon Bandage for Sore Throat.
Cut the bacon in strips one quarter of an inch in thickness and two or three inches in width and long enough to pass entirely around the throat. Remove the bacon rind and any lean meat there may be in it to prevent blistering the throat or neck. Sew the bacon to a strip of flannel so as to hold it in position and prevent its slipping and then apply the bacon to the throat and neck. Pin it around the neck, so that it will not be uncomfortably tight. The throat and neck should be completely swathed with the bacon. If after an application of eight hours the patient is not better apply a new bandage in the same manner."

I'm baffled by the use of bacon as a sore throat remedy, but I'm not baffled by the use of bacon in a chocolate bar (go figure). On the Vosges chocolates website, there is a category called Exotic Candy Bars. There you'll find Mo's Bacon Bar (as well as other exotic bars made with things like hemp seed and tea). This use of bacon makes sense to me, because the combination of sweet and salty works beautifully. (Have you noticed the recent trend of salt in sweet things like ice cream and caramel?)

The creator of the Bacon Bar explains that as a child she first encountered the delicious combination of sweet + salty/crunchy when at breakfast her pancake syrup got onto her piece of bacon. As she puts it "...on that plate something magical happened, the beginnings of a combination so ethereal and delicious that it would haunt my thoughts until I found the medium to express it--chocolate."

Eventually the idea took the form of this chocolate bar, which is made with milk chocolate, crunchy bits of applewood smoked bacon and just a sprinkling of smoked salt. It costs $7, but it's worth it just to say you've had a bacon chocolate bar.

Turning down the volume on the musical fruit

I happened to stumble across a study done in spring 2006 in which a group of scientists in Venezuela were looking to find the secret to gas-free beans. The problem with beans in the human digestive system is that bacteria in the large intestine actually ferment the beans in order to make them more digestible down the line (so to speak). As anyone who has ever made bread or beer knows, one of the by-products of fermentation is gas (C02). So the scientists were looking to find the specific bacteria that could be used to pre-ferment beans as they cook, thus reducing the gas problem.

Now what interested me about this story was not the actual findings (the research was geared to the food industry) but a remark made in passing--no pun intended--by the Reuters reporter, to wit: "Smart cooks know they can ferment beans, and make them less gas-inducing, by cooking them in the liquor from a previous batch."

So, OK, I guess I'm not a smart cook. I've never heard this theory. Has anyone out there ever done this? And did it work?

Peeling kiwifruit

I just learned the coolest new trick: how to peel a kiwifruit with a spoon. I watched this chef do it in about 5 seconds. It was amazing.

Here's what you do. Cut off the two ends of the kiwi (just about 1/4 inch of it). Then take a tablespoon--just a regular spoon from your silverware drawer--and push it up between the flesh of the kiwi and the skin, with the convex side of the spoon against the skin. Work the spoon gently around the whole fruit to loosen the skin. You can then just pop the kiwi out of its skin. Try it.