Cooking gone wrong – Meringues

Don’t worry if things go wrong in your kitchen. It still happens to me even though I have been cooking for nearly thirty years.

I had a couple of egg whites left over from my delicious lime cheesecake. So, I decided to make meringues.

They looked lovely and delicious. But, believe me, they tasted horrible. I had a couple of mouthfulls just to make sure. They had definitely gone past the point of no return! Meringues are meant to look white. The temperature in the oven was just too high. Lesson learnt.

How to spread hard butter on bread

To add to a previous post, I have another tip to share with you on how to spread hard/cold butter on bread. If your freezer is too small to hold all your loaves, only freeze half of them. Then, when making a sandwich, take one slice from a frozen loaf, on which to spread the cold butter, and one from the unfrozen loaf. Of course, you could always use the microwave to soften your butter but that would be cheating! ;-)

How to make healthy beef burgers

Why is it that you cannot get men and children to eat vegetables with their burgers? I like to “hide” onions and sweet peppers in my home-made burgers so that the choice is not theirs.  ;-) It is also a healthy way to make more burgers with the same amount of meat without having to Continue reading

Cool food down quickly with ice packs

Ice pack under food for speedy coolingIn the winter, I often leave food outside to speed up the cooling process before placing it in the fridge or freezer, making sure that it is safe from any opportunistic thieves (whether my dog or the neighbour’s cat). In the warmer weather, this is not possible so you need to use another technique. Continue reading

Cooking gone wrong – Chicken stock

Frozen home-made chicken stock

Frozen chicken stock ready to be bagged and put back in the freezer

I was in a hurry when I last made chicken stock from my leftover chicken. I was tired and wanted to go to bed so did not fully reduce my chicken stock. Unlike the lovely jelly-like chicken stock I usually get, I ended it up with something a little bit too runny and therefore tricky to handle. As you can see in the picture above, the cup cases are slightly too full and only just managed to hold the chicken stock.

So, my advice is don’t rush it and try and reduce the stock as much as possible unless you are going to use it straight away in a soup or something.