QUICK & DELISH | Looking for a new spin on potato salad that can’t possibly spoil the way egg-and-mayonnaise-based ones can? This potato salad is so flavour-rich that you’ll want to make it all year round and gobble it up while it’s fresh and still warm in the bowl. Read more
EASY & DELISH | The holidays are all about group meals like big breakfast spreads and brunches. Both of these multiplate affairs are always improved when sizzling strips of bacon are on the menu, though slaving over a sputtering frying pan to cook up a temperamental batch is a task fewer and fewer of us choose to tackle. But what if you could cook perfect bacon for a crowd while sitting in the living room balancing a Buck’s fizz in one hand and a cheesy blintz in the other? You can if you bake your bacon instead of frying it.
SAVE TIME | Pomegranates are everywhere in supermarkets right now, and maybe you’ve been eyeing them with reluctance because you hate the thought of picking and plucking at the hundreds of juice-wrapped kernels (anywhere from 200 to 1,400 per pomegranate) nestled inside the fruit’s fleshy membrane housed in a rosy-red case.
Fret not. Here’s a little tip on how to deseed a pomegranate in fewer than two minutes. We picked up it from a friend who picked it up from a chef at Rambagh Palace, “the jewel of Jaipur,” in western India—how exotic is that! Read more
EASY & ICONIC | Just when I’d thought there couldn’t possibly be another dessert recipe out there that was both dead easy—as in taking no time to make—and iconic—as in representing the absolute apex of a particular type of sweet—I run into Richard Sax’s indulgent chocolate cloud cake, a flourless treat so rich and satisfying that serious chocoholics will have little trouble choosing between it and sex. Read more
QUICK & EASY | In a few weeks, I’ll be hosting a post-wedding brunch. I want to serve something eggy, but I don’t want to hang around in my kitchen cooking eggs when I could be kibitzing with our guests. My friend Kerry suggested that to save time and whole lot of stress I might want to make muffin-tin frittatas, either baking them in advance (and rewarming them before serving) or mixing the ingredients ahead of time, plopping them into tins and popping these into the oven when we start to lay out our spread. Read more
SHOPPING AROUND | When you use your tablet or laptop as a cookbook, calling up recipes and scrolling back and forth between ingredients and instruction, it’s only a matter time before something gloppy on your fingers winds up stuck to its surface.
Computers working as cookbooks need to be protected, which is how I came to discover the Chef’s Sleeve, a clear, disposable (yet reusable) envelope for the iPad that does not interfere with touch screen operation. Great as it is, the Chef’s Sleeve isn’t all that easy to come by in Canada. When you do find it, as I did at Kitchen Stuff Plus, it is a titch pricey when you consider there’s a less expensive, if not as sexy, alternative available in most grocery stores. Read more
EASY + GOOD | Puff pastry is a flaky, crispy ingredient found in a surprising array of show- stopping appetizers, entrées and sweets. Of course you can make it from scratch if you want—à la Julia, perhaps?—but quality premade products found in the freezer section of grocery stores work fine, too.
Author Martha Holmberg used mostly frozen puff pastry for the 50 interesting and original recipes featured in her cookbook Puff—mains like the pizza alternative she shares with Frugalbits readers here. Read more
DINNER IN A MINUTE | When I really don’t want to spend time making dinner but can’t be bothered to go out or even order in, I love to boil up a big pot of water, throw in dry pasta and open a can of tomatoes. Oookay, you say, making nice but imagining I’m nuts to think plain spaghetti and canned tomatoes “straight up” could be anything but spectacularly boring. And maybe it would be if I opened your Hunt’s garden-variety dice, but the canned tomatoes I’m talking about taste nothing like that. Read more
SAVE TIME & ENERGY | If in-home entertaining is something you’d like to do more of but you don’t have the extra time or energy to put into an elaborate production, consider adopting the game plan Janie Collier uses to host twice-monthly Saturday night suppers.
Collier has developed one wonderful meal that she can serve to carnivores, vegetarians and vegans—and she repeats it—with slight variations and tweaks—in perpetuity. “If I had to come up with a new menu and source new ingredients every time I wanted to have people over, I just wouldn’t get around to it much.”
BEAUTIFUL & EASY | “Now this is a full-circle moment,” said my friend Anne, pointing to the Weck canning jars prominently displayed in the chi-chi San Francisco kitchen shop we cruised through last week. “I was so happy to get away from these things when I moved here from Germany and to discover canning jars with screw-top lids. They’re much easier and more convenient to use.” Read more