Crumbs

Tips, tidbits, and tales on food and the family table

5 Uses for Tea Towels

March 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Tea towels are a pretty handy for kitchen use. There are different kinds, and I’m not for sure how they officially differ from regular kitchen towels.

The kind I use are big and made with thin fabric. And boy, are they handy:

1. Microwave steaming. To quickly heat flour tortillas or pita bread, spritz or drizzle a stack lightly with water, and wrap completely in a tea towel. Microwave on high 30-45 seconds, and use immediately for serving. Also use to heat corn tortillas, and soften stale bread.

2. Soaking juice. From vegetables, that is. If you’re making a dry salsa, and don’t want juice oozing from the tomatoes, slice them and press them onto a tea towel that has been folded several times. Just be sure to put your towel immediately in laundry water, or spray with a laundry cleaner to help prevent staining.

3. Anything you would use a paper towel for. Thin tea towels are like super-durable paper towels. Use for drips, spills, or just shining the kitchen sink.

4. Bibs. Large-sized tea towels offer more fabric than kitchen towels, making it easier to tie (loosely) around children’s necks at dinnertime. If you’re children are super-messy like mine, consider carrying folded-up tea towels with you to restaurants and picnics. Store them in a zipper storage bag so you have something to put them back into when they are covered in food. The bibs – not the kids.

5. Straining. A little bit like the soaking up juice use, but for more: squeezing juice from a lemon without spilling any seeds, catching drops of fat when reserving juice from beef or chicken, or as a substitute for using cheesecloth. Good old Martha – she knows so much.

Note: I wash my dish towels and cloths in hot water, and sometimes with a laundry booster /stain remover like Oxi Clean or Borax, but I don’t work on kitchen spots much. I feel like the effort would be futile, and I have better things to do than apply elbow grease to tomato stains.  :)

 stock.xchng photo by siteroom

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Julie, Julia, and Me

August 17, 2009 By 1 Comment

No need to read Roeper, folks. I’ve got your unofficial, totally subjective movie review right here. The last one I did was over a year ago. That’s about how often I get to the theater: once every 365 days+ or so.

julie_and_julia

Speaking of 365 days, I took in Julie & Julia during an afternoon matinee. This is the movie about Julie Powell, the young woman who, over the course of a year, cooked through Julia Child’s cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, blogging about it along the way - all the while looking to Mrs. Child as a sort of demi-god in her mind.

With a free pass and Daddy home with the kids, it cost me nothing but a couple of well-spent hours.

I’m gonna include a side note here about seeing an afternoon movie:  almost everyone in attendance, other than myself and a few others, was pushing 60. I didn’t have to deal with a) talkers rattling during the movie or b) glow lights of Blackberries, or c) people attempting to inconspicuously yak on their cell phones. Stepping out of a dark auditorium after dramatic cinema into glaring sunlight may not be as sexy as sauntering out under the stars with your soul mate, but when the experience inside is so relaxing, it’s totally worth it. 

The screenplay was fabulous, the direction was terrific, and the actors were grand - including those who played minor characters. Amy Adams did a fantastic job portraying a regular gal in need of a project in her life. No souped up, tanned up, make-believe chick, just a normal girl who did a lot of work (much more in the cooking than the writing, I think) during her year-long culinary journey. She was smart enough and persistent enough to write about it in a blog (back when these things were just heatin’ up), and found an audience on the World Wide Web.

Meryl Streep’s Julia Child is superb. I’m old enough to have seen the large-as-life cooking guru on the televison (albeit as a young girl), long before the days of Rachael Ray, and back when Ms. Martha Stewart was posing for the covers of magazines. Streep’s acting is always magnificient, and this role was no exception.

Additional characters were played by: Jane Lynch (Julia’s sister), Linda Edmond (co-author), and Chris Messina (Julie’s husband).

There were plenty of skillet-sizzling, oven-baking, sauce-simmering delights during the film. More than one character experiences indigestion (I did, but that was because of the large Coke and refillable popcorn), but most of the food creation scenes were scrumptious. There was lots of humor, a few tears, and plenty of very well-done poignant scenes representative of real-life relationships.

I loved the fact that cooking was shown in a positive light, the use of butter extolled, and people in this film ate, well the way people eat when something tastes really, really good.

I highly recommend you see the film on a mostly empty stomach, then cook – and eat – a fabulous dinner afterwards.

 

Whether you write about it is entirely up to you.

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A Kitchen Cook’s Alternative Rules

August 13, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I’m no world-class cook, but I can find my way around a kitchen just fine. I enjoy preparing fresh food and I’m not afraid to alter recipes (i.e not measure anything) in order to make a dish suit my tastes. I’m not afraid to sample and taste as I go along.

Recently, I’ve been making a few summer treats for me and mine: fried green tomatoes, blackberry pie, and an ongoing supply of summer salsa.

I’ve also switched recipes from my old tried and true chocolate chip cookie recipe to a new one. This one is a little different, a little better, but still a classic and still too good to eat just one. As I was enjoying the finer points of eating a little raw dough, I chuckled at a few of the things I’ve heard/learned/developed on my own over the years with regards to making food. Having worked in the restaurant/food service business in a few different capacities, I know many of the rules of health and hygiene. Let me assure you, I followed them all when cooking for the public.

But now I cook in my own kitchen, and I have a few alternative rules of my own.

1. Wash hands thoroughly before and in between all food preparation. When tasting a recipe-which you should do often-go ahead and dip that finger into the raw cookie dough. After all, we’re all family and any germs will bake out in the oven.

2. Follow recipe measurements precisely. First of all, there’s no such thing as too much sugar in cookies. Second of all, feel free to add or take away ingredients not integral to the baking process. For example, don’t leave out baking soda. Do feel free to add more chocolate.

3. For a healthier option, substitute tofu for butter. Never, ever substitute for butter. If you’re looking for a healthier option, you shouldn’t be making cookies in the first place.

4. Measure spice ingredients exactly; the right combination is key for optimum taste. If optimum taste is what you seek, don’t even think about skimping on cumin or cilantro in any Mexican dish. It’s what makes the party.

5. When preparing a dish, double the recipe and make two. Keep one for yourself and give one to a neighbor. Better yet, triple the recipe and keep one batch for yourself hidden in the back of the freezer.

6. It’s a good idea to clean up as you go along. Yes, it is a good idea isn’t it?  But really, you did the cooking, so someone else should do the cleaning.

 

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