Sally’s Kitchen & Stuff

A few things that I’ve tried that actually worked…

• I wanted to make potato and leek soup one day, and I had no potatoes. So I raided the snack cabinet. Half a tin of Sour Cream and Onion pringles did the job. I just had to boil the oil out of it.
• One day I simply had no salad dressing for the spinach salad. So I cooked the spinach and threw peanut butter on it. It turned out REALLY GOOD. Now the bf won’t have spinach any other way.
• Seafood pasta. One problem. No seafood. The fish market’s closed, the bf’s coming home in an hour…sardines, canned oysters, and clam juice it is…he didn’t even notice the sardines.
• Line the bottoms of pans with bumpy firm veggies (think carrots and califlower) when doing a roast. Then I grounded the whole bottom stuff up, added broth, and made a flourless gravy.
• I have nothing to glaze this roast with? What shall I do? Raid the pantry. Oh look…orange marmalade!

…and the ones that didn’t work so well.

• Sugar and soysauce does NOT constitute teriyaki sauce. It’s just sweet soysauce. Chinatown restaurants actually do this, but they do it with bags of MSG and sugar. You know when you order chang-fan? The sweet soy is MSG sugared soy.
• Caramels: Heavy Cream and sugar. That’s all. Yes, add spices, but ground up cinnamon will NOT do. (the key is to get "essence" of cinnamon by either soaking and squeezing or getting a flavour shot.)
• Butter mixed with chocolate - good idea, since it melts better and spreads better. Bad idea: it NEVER sets.
• Roasted pears with cinnamon. Again, cinnamon powder seem to be a bad idea pretty much all around. It dominates.
• Hollandaise sauce made with peanut oil and butter flavoured spray instead of butter. No, it didn’t emulsify. There simply wansn’t enough solid there to hold on to the egg. I’ll try this again some other time, maybe with Becel margarine.

Got any to share? Email me - sallysings at gmail dot com.