TracyFood

Twitter Tuesday: #kitchenpetpeeves 31 January 2012 9:20 am

Posted by Tracy in : advice,cooking,food snobbery,food storage,kitchen gear,kitchen mishaps,Twitter Tuesday , add a comment

So I just found out about the Twitter hashtag #kitchenpetpeeves and as @michaelnatkin (Michael Natkin of Herbivoracious.com) says:

If you are considering restaurant work, read this hashtag #kitchenpetpeeves – a hell of a lot of education in every 140 chars

I tell you, he only speaks the truth. After only a bit of scrolling, I found pretty much everything I might have tweeted myself (and they’re not all about terrible restaurant customers, either!) Here are some of my favorites (bonus: writing this post has distracted me from reading the whole thread and stopped me from retweeting all but a few of these):

Joshua Galliano @cookingkid
almost empty containers not consolidated into smaller ones RT @ad_it_up #kitchenpetpeeves empty containers in the walkin

This one drives me nuts even at home, even when I’m the one guilty of not bothering to free up fridge space! (more…)

Foto Friday: Coffee experiment! 18 November 2011 1:25 pm

Posted by Tracy in : food snobbery,fun,geekery,kitchen gear,milk,photos,pictures,reading,recipes,sundance,taste test , add a comment

So yesterday I posted the following picture to Twitter and Tumblr via Instagram on my iPhone (remember that comic I shared on Tuesday with a character reading news from “this thing I can’t put down to save my life”? Yeah, that’s me. Anyway):

Exciting!

And today I’m going to elaborate considerably on that picture. Because that’s just how I roll. (more…)

Monkey Monday: “Is this thing on?” 26 September 2011 10:22 am

Posted by Tracy in : consumerism,convenience,cooking,cross-posting,eating,economics,fast food,food snobbery,health,kitchen gear,photos,pictures,tea,time versus money , add a comment

Pretend I started out here with a hilarious bit about trying to remember how I used to do these posts — or don’t, if meta-self-referential cutesiness is sooo turn of the 00′s and hellooo we are well into the second decade of the 21st century now, dur-hurr… Also maybe read (or reread) that August 2011 New York Times Magazine piece about how David Foster Wallace maybe kinda sorta invented the language of the Internet but he was one of only a very few writers skilled enough to actually employ this style without being super-annoying, and now everybody does it, gah! But I digress.

Here are a few things from this past month that got my attention and couldn’t just be camera-phoned and summarized in a caption on Flickr. There’s a picture and a rant, but then there’s some short and sweet and funny stuff, I promise. (more…)

Recipe: Lemon Bundt Cake 22 April 2010 2:54 pm

Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen,baking,cooking,dessert,friends,kitchen gear,recipes , 1 comment so far

I think this cake might be the very first one I ever made from a Cook’s Illustrated recipe (it’s either that or the fabulous huevos rancheros also in this issue, January & February 2006). In any case, I am not much of a baker or even a huge cake fan, but for whatever reason this recipe captured my imagination and I had to try it. Maybe it was the buttermilk? I don’t know, but I’m pretty darn sure that does not hurt the deliciousness of this one bit. Anyway. I dedicate this post to Ansley, who has been awesome at reminding me that she really, really wants to know how to make this delicious dessert.

Notes

This recipe is super-wordy because I am not a baker and lots of instructions are helpful to me, but I have cut it down to size on Twitter, like so:

Lemon bundt cake! 9oz butter, 2c sugar, 3 eggs+1 yolk, 3 lemons’ juice+zest, 3/4c buttermilk, 3c APF, 1 tsp powder, 1/2tsp soda, 60min 350F.

7:23 PM Sep 7th, 2009 via web

That’s a little misleading on the lemon juice, but otherwise right on. Also, it leaves out 1 tsp vanilla (oops).

The only other really important thing to know is that in addition to these ingredients you’ll need an extra tablespoon of buttermilk and 2 cups (8 ounces) of confectioner’s sugar, to make a light glaze of super-deliciousness. Armed with that information, experienced bakers can probably feel fine to ignore all my directions.

Last thoughts: the last time I made this recipe I used demerara sugar (Sugar In the Raw, to be exact) and the cake turned out a little crumblier than usual, but still delicious. I think this cake is even more delicious when it’s a day or two old; like many other baked goods, it gets denser and crumblier with time, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. (more…)

Foto Friday: yay! 16 October 2009 11:49 am

Posted by Tracy in : cooking,events,fangirl,geekery,Harold McGee,kitchen gear,photos,school , add a comment

Happy World Food Day, readers. Yesterday was so awesome that I’m still in a really good mood today, despite the weather outside still looking like yuck. It’s definitely turned into the season for comfort food, so today I would like to share pictures of a most successful experiment in the very best of belly-warming goodness, and celebrate proving to myself that I can still write and publish a full set of weekday posts.

But speaking of yesterday, yuck weather, and experimental cooking, (more…)