Scratch Food with a Side of Geek Mom and Pop Culture.
“Excuse me, what’s that?”- said the lady behind me in the checkout queue in the supermarket. “Excuse me?” I replied, somewhat surprised. My cart didn’t contain anything that would have looked weird to anyone. Or so I thought. “That,”- said the lady, pointing at the beetroot I bought for salad. “Oh that. That’s a beetroot.”…
This post won’t be for everybody, and that’s cool. After all, the real foodies among us have the option of butter instead of margarine. But if you’re vegan, or you’re contending with dairy allergies, butter is a no-go. My tale of vegan margarine begins with a commercial brand, the only vegan brand available, that my…
Have you ever wondered about how cream turns into butter, or why whipped cream and butter are different? I was thinking about post ideas, when someone said “have you done butter yet?” No, I haven’t done butter. Butter is gradeschool Homesteading 101, and everybody’s got a post on how to make butter. “Yes,” says my friend….
What do you do when you’ve a potluck request for your super-smooth like store-bought, (Jerusalem-style) hummus, and you somehow hallucinate you have another day to soak the dried chickpeas, forgetting that to make it you would have to be grinding chickpeas in your food processor at 7am? I had a can of chickpeas left over…
There’s actually two ways to make your own ricotta right at home! One method of making it requires the whey that may be leftover from making another kind of cheese, like your own fresh mozzarella, but the other method is much more straightforward and takes only two ingredients: milk and lemon juice. How does acid…
I was chastised by a friend a couple days ago when she made my recipe for stuffing bread. I didn’t say in the recipe to grease the pans, and she had bread that stuck. In true “me” fashion, I’ve been performing a trick that I forgot wasn’t common knowledge, and therefore worthy of a blog…
If you’ve ever played with natural food dyes, you might have already used red cabbage to make things the colour blue. Crazy, right? Red cabbage has an abundance of pigments (which give it the pretty red colour) which are called anthocyanins. They dissolve well in water, and react to the pH balance–the acidity or basicity–of…
It started as an innocent enough question from an Eastern Sea-boarder on my Facebook page: Why does bad weather affect things when I make candy? I assumed she meant the humidity was changing things. After all, the boiling process of a sugar syrup reduces the amount of water. I knew that after it cools a…
My friend Jennifer at Homegrown.org recently asked me to write up a 101 on making homemade pectin instead of using store-bought powdered stuff with dubious GMO ingredients. I happily complied, since I’ve got the hots for scientific research of the food variety. 🙂 You can find the entire 101 article at http://www.homegrown.org/forum/topics/making-pectin-101
I posted a little while back about good ol washing soda as the prelude to my experiments with homemade dishwasher powder and what hopefully will become homemade laundry powder. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time writing about something if I don’t know it on a fundamental level. I think there’s an…