Peeled Chestnuts: Make or buy?
I needed peeled chestnuts for a batch of pickled chestnuts I wanted to make. So I needed them whole, as opposed to a tin of chestnut purée; you don’t pickle chestnut gloop. I know you can buy peeled chestnuts canned in brine, but I wanted to do my own pickling. And with the advent of…
Pressure Cooker Pasta Sauce
Update August 2017 Three years later, I’m going to consider this an archive page. My views have changed and I’m constantly learning. I myself wouldn’t do pasta sauce this way anymore. I am leaving it up as I know many people are curious about the idea of using a pressure cooker for pasta sauce. The…
Lancaster Bomber Ale
Lancaster Bomber Ale has been made since at least 2003, and probably before. The ale got more attention in 2014, however, owing to the British joint tour of the last two airworthy actual Lancaster Bomber planes, one from the UK and one from Canada. The brewery, Thwaites from Blackburn, Lancashire, sponsored a web site to…
Duck Fat
You may wish to consider introducing Duck Fat as one of the cooking fats in your kitchen — for both health and taste reasons. Here’s why I think duck fat is a healthy fat Duck fat’s “nutritional profile” falls between butter and olive oil. Now, technically, a clinician looking at these cold hard…
Goose Fat
Goose fat is amazing for roasting or sautéing things in. It doesn’t evaporate away or get soaked into foods the way that oils do, so you need far, far less of it.1 Consequently, it actually ends up being less fattening than cooking with oils. Nutritionally, in terms of saturated vs monounsaturated etc fat, goose…
The skinny on coconut milk
Some coconut milks are really fattening, and the only way you can tell is by checking the labels on the tin. The lighter ones aren’t always marked light, and the really fattening ones are just marked normal. Grace Brand coconut milk is 330 calories (9 Weight Watchers PointsPlus®) per 250 ml (8 oz /…
Low-sodium ketchup
We were brought up as Heinz Ketchup kids. I love the ketchup and use it daily — here’s my write-up on the history, etc of ketchup. In the spring of 2013, I switched to Heinz’s low-sodium version of their ketchup, which I think was still kinda new at the time. Pictured above is the…
Heinz Tangy Tomato Pickle
I discovered Heinz Tangy Tomato Pickle in the fall of 2013, and I love it. Let me briefly cover the word “pickle” in the name, because it gave me pause at first, too. Us North Americans use a very narrow definition of the word “pickle.” It’s usually pickled cucumbers, usually dilled, and usually involves…
Heinz Ketchup vs Heinz Tangy Tomato Pickle
These two very similar products from the same maker, Heinz, are a great example of why a little bit of one-time analysis can pay off forever. In my review of Heinz’s Tangy Tomato Pickle, I confessed that I’m a fan now — it’s basically a grown up ketchup. (But I’m such a ketchup fan…
Low-fat fat: it really exists
I had joked a few times about there being “low-fat fat”, so you can imagine how gob-smacked I was when I saw this product — Atora Light Shredded Vegetable Suet — appear on the store shelf. Who knew? I haven’t had an occasion to use it yet, but when I do I will report…
Guinness Chips
Chips (aka crisps in the UK and Ireland) are really unhealthy. You know what that means. That means, when you do them, you gotta do them right, see? Which means the chips have to be worth it. And Lord liftin’, these be worth it. These Guinness Potato Chips are hand-crafted; each bag even indicates…
