Quickie Quiz: How Do You Rate as a Guest

Yesterday I saw on Twitter that being helpful is the "new" selling. (I've placed new in quotation marks because it's more a return to selling from days gone by.)

I love old magazines; they give a glimpse into what people from a given decade might have been thinking about and experiencing. The tweet reminded me of advertisements I'd seen in my American Girl issues from the early 1960s. As Sprite's Birthday Party is nearing, a Heinz Soup advertisement caught my eye. (To see more pages from this issue, visit Flickr.)

Heinz Soup Advertisement, March 1963, American Girl Magazine

Heinz offers these tips for a smooth weekend visit:

1. If you're under 18 and invited on a weekend, have both your parents and the parents of your host approve of the visit.
2. Arrive with everything you need, for example, toothpaste, perfume.
3. Make a real attempt to be helpful.

How Do You Rate as a Guest?

Bon Apetit!

Eden

 

Credits: All images taken by Eden Hensley Silverstein for Recipes for the Good Life.

Tips: Keep Emergency Rations Fresh with Pantry Challenges

If you live in Earthquake Country (or Hurricane Country) you know about stocking up on the basics in case of an emergency. For earthquakes, the San Francisco Chronicle recommends including the following food stuffs in a preparedness kit:

• Ready-to-eat canned meats, fruits, and vegetables.
• Canned juices, milk, and soups.
• Sugar, salt, and pepper.
• High energy foods, such as peanut butter, jelly, crackers, granola bars, trail mix; foods that will not increase thirst.
• Comfort/stress foods, such as cookies, hard candy, sweetened cereals, lollipops, instant coffee, tea bags.

They also caution to avoid foods like rice, pasta, and dry beans that require a great deal of water to prepare.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that almost everything in your kit has an expiration date. So, once you've created your kit, how do you remember to replace the items every year so that they're not past their expiration when you need them? Easy, a Pantry Challenge.

My Pantry Challenges started in college as a way to stretch the food budget. When I moved to Austin (Tornado Country), the challenges helped to keep emergency stores fresh. Here are the basic rules:

1. Your meal must be created from food already in your house. This is important; you can't run to the store for a missing ingredient.
2. Your panty should have been stocked at least a month before. It's not a pantry challenge if you've just gone grocery shopping in the last week.
3. Fresh ingredients can be used, but the majority of ingredients should be canned or freeze-dried.
4. Be creative.

You can see why Chicken Chili Soup is a good choice for a Pantry Challenge. It uses a lot of canned food and doesn't require a great deal of water to prepare. Depending on how much chili pepper you add, it might fail the does not increase thirst criteria; but, that was why we had popovers - another Pantry Challenge entry.

Do you have an emergency preparedness kit? What are your tricks for keeping its contents fresh?

Tips: Achieving a Symphony of Tastes

Thai cooks seek to serve a meal that balances five flavors: sweet, spicy, sour, salty, and earthy. This harmony is why measurements for ingredients tend to be approximate and why taste rules. 

No one flavor should dominate your mouth. Think of it like a symphony. Unless an accompaniment calls for a solo, no one section takes center stage. All sections work together; none seek to drown out another. For example, with Tom Yum soup you shouldn't just feel heat or taste sugar. Sour (lemongrass, Kaffir Lime Leaves, lime juice) should balance salt (fish sauce), heat (chili), sweet (sugar and tomatoes) and earth (galangal and mushrooms). 

Depending on where you are you may need to make substitutions - pickled or dry Galangal for fresh Galangal, lime peel for Kaffir Lime Leaf. These substitutions change the strength of an individual component, requiring more or less than a recipe calls for to achieve the desired balance.

Some flavor affinities, identified in The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs (pp.128-129, 164, 189, 200, 324, 344), that you should keep in mind when perfecting a Thai dish:

• Chili peppers + Kaffir lime leaf
• Chili peppers + peanuts
• Chili peppers + garlic
• Chili peppers + cilantro + coconut milk
• Chili peppers + curry
• Chili peppers + curry + coconut milk
• Chili peppers + curry + peanuts
• Chili peppers + curry + fish sauce
• Chili peppers + fish sauce
• Chili peppers + fish sauce + lime + sugar
• Cilantro + chicken
• Cilantro + chili peppers
• Cilantro + coconut milk
• Cilantro + garlic
• Cilantro + ginger
• Cilantro + lime, juice
• Cilantro + mint
• Cilantro + tomatoes
• Fish sauce + lime
• Fish sauce + lime + tamarind
• Fish sauce + sugar
• Ginger + Kaffir lime leaf
• Kaffir lime leaf + pork
• Lemongrass + chicken
• Lemongrass + cilantro
• Lemongrass + cilantro + mint
• Lemongrass + coconut milk
• Lemongrass + fish
• Lemongrass + garlic
• Lemongrass + pork
• Lemongrass + shrimp

Tips: Finding 1950s Metal Canisters for a Modern Kitchen

In our kitchen, we have appliances that are black and stainless. We also have granite countertops with a black and white tile backsplash. Our accessories and countertop appliances tend to be stainless or brushed metal as well (pot rack and compost pail from Crate and Barrel and our Cuisinart TOB-60 Convection Toaster Oven Broiler). 

Our OXO containers take up a lot of counterspace (in the photo above they're stacked on top of each other behind the rice cooker). So while I love their functionality, I don't love the look. Solution? Hide OXO containers in stackable Lincoln BeautyWare from the 1950s (props for our retro kitchen shoot).

Photography Credit: Roberts888 via Flickr
Check out the Canette canisters on the countertop to the right of the fridge.

When assembling a cohesive (i.e. "matchy matchy") kitchen look using vintage pieces for your modern kitchen, there are a few things to consider:

• Brand - Canette, GarnerWare, Lincoln BeautyWare, Masterware, Duro (a Canadian brand), and Mirro. Canette, GarnerWare, Lincoln BeautyWare, and Masterware are blind embossed on the bottom of each piece. If photos of a piece don't show the embossing, be sure to ask the seller.  
• Finish - chrome, brushed aluminum, copper, or paint finish
• Material used for handles - some are painted metal, some are plastic woodgrain
• Type of label - some are blind embossed
• Lettering of label - some are all capital letters, some are all lowercase letters
• Orientation of label - some are vertical and some are horizontal
• Dimensions - some of the canisters aren't stackable as they typically round (Mirro). Others are polygons that can be stacked (Lincoln BeautyWare and GarnerWare). However, some are pie-shaped designed to fit in a corner on your counter. Stackable rectangular canisters can differ in size, GarnerWare can be 4.75"x5.75" to 5"x6" while Canette and Lincoln BeautyWare are typically 5"x6" and Masterware is 4.875"x5.125".

Canette ($38 for the set)
Image courtesy of Compost This 

GarnerWare
Image courtesy of Renee's Attic Collectibles

Lincoln BeautyWare ($20 to $29 for the set)
Image courtesy of Sir Edmond's Vintage

If searching on Etsy, try a couple of combinations, GarnerWare as well as Garner Ware, Lincoln BeautyWare as well as Lincoln Beauty Ware, and Masterware as well as Master Ware.

Tips: Oven vs Instant Read Thermometers

The age old question as you stare intently over a pan or into an oven, is it done yet? You can slice your meat open - not the best option. Or you can skewer it with a thermometer being careful to avoid any bones or coming in contact with the bottom of the pan. Now if you're going the thermometer route before you put your thermometer into the oven and close the door, you need to know if it's an oven thermometer. If it's not, you'll find out soon enough; it'll melt.

We have a meat thermometer. At one point, I knew if it was an oven thermometer or an instant read thermometer; I'm no longer sure. I think it's an oven meat thermometer as it seems to take forever to get to some temperature other than 0. Or alternatively, we just don't really know how to use it.

Because we had the option to review a product from Cookware.com, a CSN Store, we looked at the thermometers they had available. The models we considered were:

• Taylor's Connoisseur Instant Read Thermometer for $15.99 (not oven safe but has silicone grips for safe and easy handling - our current thermometer does get hot to the touch)
• Taylor's Connoisseur Meat Thermometer for $19.99 (oven safe with safe temperature for meat clearly marked)
• Polder's Dual Probe Thermometer (THM-360) for $29.99 (oven safe with type of meat and "doneness" of meat settings - fancy!)
• Taylor's Commercial Wireless Thermometer for $34.99 (oven safe with programmable settings and customizable alerts when meat is almost ready and is ready)

One thing that would be helpful to anyone browsing Cookware.com is if they offered tips on which thermometer is the right one for the task at hand. Every cook, from the novice to the most experienced should have a meat thermometer but depending on what you're going to be cooking and how, you don't need all the bells and whistles and you need one - instant read - versus the other - oven - meat thermometer or both meat thermometers.

We braise meats as well as roast and broil them, so we actually need two meat thermometers. One we could use in the oven - placed in the meat at the beginning of the cooking that you can read without opening the oven door and removing the entrée. And another that we can quickly read whether or not meat on the stove top is ready.

In any case, we're getting a new meat thermometer. Now we just have to determine which one we're getting first.

Tips: Selecting a Mortar and Pestle

There's no Guestbook Recipe post today. We still acquiring the necessary tools and ingredients for the first recipe we selected. We're almost ready to make it though! We have selected and ordered a mortar and pestle - now it just needs to arrive.

As with most kitchen gadgets, it turns out you shouldn't choose a mortar and pestle based solely on its design. In the process of trying to figure out what we wanted to review from Cookware.com, a CSN Store, I learned how you should select a mortar and pestle.

Basically after knowing what you plan to use it for (curry pastes, guacamole, salsa, etc.), you need to consider the following:

• Material of both the mortar and the pestle. If you're making a guacamole or salsa, you won't want wood which will absorb liquid.
• Porousness of the mortar. If you don't want the flavor of what you're grinding to season your next batch choose marbles, vitrified ceramics, or granites.
• Surface of the mortar. They can be smooth like the Solid Thai Granite Stone, coarse like the Mexican Molcajete, or ridged like the Japanese Suribachi.
• Weight of the pestle. A heavier pestle makes the pounding of ingredients go much faster.
• Size of the mortar. If your mortar is too small, you'll have to work in batches. Small mortars typically yield a cup, large two cups, and so on.

For us of the mortar and pestle sets available from Cookware.com, the options that made sense for us to consider were: Frieling's "Goliath" Mortar and Pestle (Granite) for $49.95, Fox Run Craftsmen's Oversized Mortar and Pestle (Marble) for $59.99, or Le Creuset's Large Mortar and Pestle (PG4050-1230) (Ceramic) for $37.95.

If you're interested in learning more about mortar and pestles, check out these resources:

• Video: What is a Mortar and Pestle
• Tutorial: How to cure a Molcajete