Could be helpful

Halllooooo!  It’s Friday and it’s time for a tip!

I love making things with buttermilk.  There’s the Indian bread we love that calls for a 1/4 cup, and the beautiful German Chocolate Cake that needs a cup.  Problem is, buttermilk is sold in quarts…that’s a lot of bread and cake.  I hate throwing things out, so I decided to take the remaining buttermilk left from my friend V’s birthday cake and freeze it in an ice cube tray.  Beautiful thing – two cubes measures 1/4 cup.  Probably not exactly but close enough.  So if you take your standard ice cube tray, fill it up with buttermilk (or any other liquid, like, say, chicken stock, or nice dark veal stock, or even vegetable stock or orange juice, whatever), and then pop the cubes out and store them in a freezer bag, you can parse out what you need, when you need it.  Eight cubes = 1 cup.

It’s Friday again (I’m sensing a pattern), so time for another helpful tip.

*****UPDATE*****

So I post this helpful tip on March 18 and exactly two week later, Cook’s Illustrated emails an egg cracking tip!  Coincidence?  I think not!!

Regardless, their egg cracking method is better than mine, so I’m stealing it.  Instead of cracking your eggs on the side of your bowl, crack them on the counter.  Simply hit the egg in the same place you would on the side of a bowl on the counter instead (at the chubby middle of the egg).*

Hola!

It’s Friday, so it’s time for the third Friday Tip, which is actually going to be posted while it’s still Friday this week (thank you technology that lets me write posts in advance!).

This one is pretty simple – it’s about separating eggs and beating egg whites into…uh, beaten egg whites.  Here is all you have to remember:

Separating eggs – do it when they are cold

Beating egg whites – do it when they are warmed to room temperature

This post is inspired by Colleen Wainwright, aka The Communicatrix, who takes a minute or two each Friday to send a shout out to five cool things/people/peoplewiththings that she finds when she’s poking around the internets.  I’d really like this blog to be helpful (hence the “could be helpful” category), so I started thinking that publishing a “Friday Five” of my own would be a good idea – instead of five cool things, I’m going for five things that I think are helpful.  Ideally, they’ll be in the kitchen, but probably not limited to the kitchen and not limited to cooking (mostly because I’m not sure I can come up with five helpful things for cooking every week).