Food Hacks Features
How To: 5 Tips That Make Cooking for a Crowd Easy
Even those of us most comfortable in the kitchen can be daunted by the idea of cooking for a whole houseful of people. Whether you have a large, well-equipped kitchen or a small one with just the essentials, it can prove to be quite a task to prepare food for a dozen or so people. It takes a certain type of recipe that allows for mass production, in respects to both technique and ingredients. And what I've provided below includes several recipes that you might normally make for just a family ...
How To: Make Tequila Sunrise Popsicles
Sometimes just drinking your alcohol can feel a little dull and boring. Eating your alcohol, however, is always a party.
How To: Quintuple Your Alcohol Options with These Easy Infusions
Unless you're well off, you've probably experienced the hard liquor purchasing conundrum. You know the one: you want to stock your home bar with more than just one spirit, but you don't want to drop $100 or more just so you can have some variety in your alcohol cabinet.
How to Nap Smarter: Just Add Caffeine (Really)
Naps provide some serious mental and physical benefits, but not if they last too long or occur too late in the day. Ideally, you want to awake from a nap feeling alert and refreshed enough to attack the rest of your tasks with renewed zeal, but not energized to the point where you can't get to sleep at night. Alas, most of us don't know these tricks and end up messing with our sleep cycle (guilty).
How To: Making Reese's Peanut Butter Cups at Home Is Super Simple
Rich, creamy chocolate cups stuffed with smooth, salty-sweet peanut butter in a bite-sized package—yep, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are an amazing fix for your sweet tooth at best, and a guilty pleasure at worst. It's easy enough to buy them on a whim at the local grocery store, but it's even easier than you might think to make them right at home.
How To: Save All Your Veggie Scraps & You'll Never Buy Stock Again
Stock is a crucial ingredient for so many recipes: soups, gravies, and risottos depend on stock; quinoa and rice are both more flavorful when cooked with it, too. So, chances are that broth is a staple on your weekly shopping list.
How To: Make Irish Corned Beef & Cabbage for St. Patrick's Day
Corned beef and cabbage is rarely eaten in Ireland (or at least America's version of the dish), but on St. Patrick's Day, many Irish Americans and wannabe Irish Americans will head to the bar to eat sloshy, poorly cooked versions of corned beef and cabbage while downing some jolly green ale.
How To: 3 Gluten-Free Sandwich Bread Alternatives That Don't Sacrifice Flavor
Let me start by saying something controversial: I despise the gluten-free fad. I think gluten is delicious (I go through at least two loaves of bread a week, with a healthy dose of pretzels and pasta in there as well), and I think many of the health myths surrounding gluten are either fabricated or hyperbolic.
How To: Send Your Kids Back to School with These DIY Fruit Roll-Ups
As a child, you probably spent some time trailing an adult at the grocery store. You lovingly eyed the aisle with brightly colored fruit snacks, reaching for the tempting boxes, placing them discreetly in the cart only to be told, "No! That's JUNK FOOD. You can't have it."
How To: 11 Fun & Useful Facts About Java
Coffee! It's so amazing that J.S. Bach wrote a comic opera about caffeine addiction. Meanwhile, more than half of Americans 18 years or older start their day with a cup of the hot stuff. Most of us take coffee for granted, but it's a bean that can surprise you. Read on to understand more about coffee and how to take advantage of all that it offers.
How To: Make Preserved Lemons
One of the great joys of cooking is taking the most basic of foods and preparing them in new and exciting ways. About two years ago, my wife opened my eyes to a delicious staple of Indian and Moroccan cuisine that is made in a very elementary way, the preserved lemon.
Weird Ingredient Wednesday: How to Train Your Dragonfruit
Even the most unadventurous eaters can usually be coaxed to take a bite of an exotic fruit (except, perhaps, the notoriously stinky durian). After all, fruit is sweet, juicy, and filled with natural sugars.
How To: 3 Easy Methods for Making Gourmet Chips at Home
As the days get shorter and the weather cools down, I prepare to "hibernate." I add piles of blankets to my bed, wrap myself in layers of flannel, and—most importantly—eat as if I'm storing energy for winter.
How To: Peel a Banana Like a Monkey
In this video, we learn how to open a banana like a monkey. First, take your banana and grasp it in your hand. Now, flip the banana upside down so you have the part without the stem. Push the bottom together at the tip until you see the banana in the skin.
How To: The Clever Trick That Makes Stuffed Pancakes a Cinch
Any other person can make plain pancakes... but only the most awesome of cooks can make stuffed pancakes. Luckily, this isn't a tough technique—in fact, it's so easy that you'll find yourself getting bored of the run-of-the-mill pancakes and dreaming of all the things you can stuff pancakes with, instead.
How To: Make Sriracha Even Better with These DIY Salt, Powder, & Mayo Versions
Sriracha has quickly become one of the country's most universally loved condiments. The addictive and affordable chili sauce seemingly goes on anything, and with anything, and never seems to get old. To wit: when I studied abroad, all of our food was boring, pre-packaged Sysco shipments; for three months, I smothered every breakfast, lunch, and dinner with Sriracha. And after all of that, I still eat it almost religiously.
How To: Infect Your Friends with Zombie Punch
Halloween is this weekend, so if you're looking for a last-minute big batch cocktail that will keep your guests properly hydrated—and might turn them into mutants—look no further! (Note: This will not actually hydrate anyone, just so we're clear. Priorities, people!)
How To: This Awesome 3-Ingredient Fruit Dip Will Change the Way You Snack
Apples are great snacks, and they're often paired with peanut butter or sliced cheese for a well-rounded energy boost of carbs, fat, and protein. The apples are an important part of the equation, as they are low-calorie and full of vitamins, nutrients, fiber, and lots of other good stuff. It's the other half that's always the problem, as eating too much peanut butter or cheese is an easy way to polish off a boatload of calories and fat in one sitting.
How To: Finally, a Healthy Reason to Buy More Beer
Remember those horrible, soul-crushing studies from a few years back linking grilled meats with cancer? Unfortunately, they're still true, but scientists have recently found that an unexpected ingredient can curb some of the harmful effects of high-temperature cooking.
How To: The Easiest Way to Make Delicious Pumpkin Brownies at Home
I love brownies. Through the turmoil of my teenage years and the raucous over-eating of my college years to now, brownies have been a constant companion to my highs and (calorie-laden) lows. I've made brownies from scratch, I've used the box mix... hell, I was a baker at a bakery that specialized in brownies. So yeah... I'd say I'm pretty familiar with them.
Weird Ingredient Wednesday: It's Marmite Time!
Marmite: either you love the stuff or hate it. ("Love" meaning you are British and grew up eating it, and "hate" meaning you are everyone else.)
How To: The Triwizard Tournament of Homemade Butterbeer—Which Recipe Wins?
Harry Potter fans got a treat last week when Pottermore, a site created by Harry Potter author, J. K. Rowling, released a test that let users learn what form their Patronus protective charm would take.
How To: Feel Alive Again with Maca Root
I'm sure I'm not the only one on here that has googled "Why am I always tired?"... and I'm definitely not alone when I say that all of the advice I've found so far is useless:
Food Tool Friday: Cut Your Cooking Time with a Pressure Cooker
Kitchen tools are a personal thing. One hard lesson for me to learn is that just because something is popular doesn't mean that it's right for me. Take the slow cooker, for instance. Many rave about it, but I never cottoned to the thing. However, the more research I do, the more I think the pressure cooker might be a game changer for my cooking style.
How To: Make Party-Style Temari Sushi
If you've never heard of or eaten temari sushi, then you're in for a treat. These pretty sushi balls are good for parties and festive gatherings, and even though they are so colorful and striking, they are not hard to make. Just like every other type of sushi, they are customizable, and they have the cute factor necessary for kids or appetizers.
How To: 3 Weird & Tasty Ways to Cook Your Thanksgiving Turkey
Roasting turkey is a topic that inspires endless debate among cooks. How do you get the perfect mixture of juicy meat, crispy skin, and flavor? Everyone has a favorite technique, whether it's brining the bird or spatchcocking it. However, if you're ready to move onto Ph.D. levels of turkey cooking, you might just want to look beyond these methods and get genuinely wild.
How To: Turn Your Freezer's Ice Maker into a Candy Dispenser
Tons of freezers have built-in ice dispensers, but a lot of people never use them. But it turns out, all it takes to give it a new purpose is some duct tape, an X-Acto knife, and a piece of foam core.
How To: The iPhone 7 Isn't the Only New Thing That Comes in Jet Black
Move over rainbow food trends, there's a new, darker kid in town: jet black ice cream. And no, it doesn't have squid ink in it.
Food Tool Friday: Thermomix, a Mind-Blowing 12-in-1 Kitchen Appliance
When I first heard about the Thermomix, an all-in-one kitchen appliance from Australia, it sounded like an old SNL commercial parody: It slices! It dices! It heats! It kneads! Is there ANYTHING this machine CAN'T do?
How To: Make Your Own Pesto Plus
Among the many gifts that Italy has bestowed upon the world, culinary and otherwise, pesto stands alone. The exact birthplace of pesto, that herby sauce made of pine nuts and olive oil, is an area of Italy called Liguria, whose microclimate is particularly kind to basil, one of pesto's key ingredients.
How To: Turn Your Wok into a Food Smoker
Woks are good for more than just tossing Friday night's chow mien with beef and broccoli. In fact, you can use a wok to impart a deep and delicious flavor into foods through smoking. But how exactly do you smoke foods using a wok? Watch this video from CHOW to find out.
News: Everyone Wants a Slinky, Especially This Chocolate One You Can Eat
The winter holidays are right around the corner and that can only mean one thing—dessert. Leave it to the French pastry chefs to come up with something totally unique, like this glittery, chocolate Slinky by Amaury Guichon of Jean Philippe Patisserie inside the ARIA Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.
How To: The 2-Ingredient Chocolate Mousse of Your Dreams
As a self-proclaimed chocoholic, any day with chocolate mousse in it is a good day in my book. And thanks to prominent chemist Hervé This, one of the founding fathers of molecular gastronomy, chocolate mousse is not only easy to make every single day—but only requires two ingredients.
Food Tool Friday: The Real-Life Star Trek Food Replicator
It sounds like a dream come true: just press a button on your phone, and 30 seconds later, a machine produces a custom-made, ready-to-eat meal. Finally, science comes through for the truly lazy!
How To: My Secret to Always Finding Good Beers, Wines, & Spirits
If you struggle with deciding which wine you should buy for an intimate dinner, or the type of beer with the highest alcohol content that doesn't taste like tree bark, then check out some of these great alcohol-friendly apps to make better booze decisions.
How To: Melt Chocolate in Under 1 Minute Without a Stove
When I first moved to Los Angeles, I rented a bed in a tiny studio. I was too broke to afford my own place, so all I had was a mattress in someone else's apartment. Unfortunately, this person had no interest in cooking, and therefore no kitchen equipment whatsoever. To make matters worse, there wasn't even room for my kitchen equipment. Needless to say, I ate a lot of tubs of Trader Joe's hummus, and frequented a lot of taco trucks.
News: How Beer Saved the World & Other Bizarre Food Facts
It's easy to take the food we eat for granted, but the truth is, there are a lot of bizarre, wonderful, and just plain weird things about what we eat and drink, the effects it has on our bodies, and vice-versa. Read on to learn how bugs provide food dye, the Japanese grow square watermelons, and more.
How To: 6 Delicious Ways to Cook with Coffee
No offense to water, but if I could survive on coffee alone, I would. I swear I'm not addicted... I just really, really, really love the taste of a cuppa joe, whether it's hot, cold, frothed, milked, flavored, plain, whatever! And while my favorite thing to do with coffee will always be to drink it, recently I've become crazy about using coffee in cooking.
How To: This Easy Tip Will Make Your Homemade Cupcakes Look More Professional
A simply frosted or glazed cupcake is like a blank canvas for creative decorations. Intricate cupcakes are works of art, but piping frosting or rolling fondant can be tricky. Luckily, even the most craft-challenged person can use pre-made decorations to create party-worthy cupcakes. Use chocolates or candies to make designs or other decorations and you can have endless fun (and very little stress) creating eye-catching treats.
How To: Who Knew? Turn Radishes into Chips for a Sweet & Spicy Snack
Consider the radish. This root vegetable is so sadly misunderstood sometimes, and that makes us sad because we adore its spicy flavor and crunchy texture. We're always on the lookout for unique food items that can be turned into a dish of wow and wonder with just a few simple steps, and radishes truly fit the bill.