Additional Kitchen Tips

John Wilder who recently popped over to my blog from Kay’s incredibly diverse Pure Complex blog requested my free Kitchen Guide , which includes goodies like Abbreviations and Conversions and  Cooking and Baking Tips plus loads more wanted to share a few of his tips, so here are a few more to add to your arsenal.

• To make peeling soft-boiled eggs easier, use the back of a teaspoon following the curve of the spoon with the curve of the egg.  You can remove the shell much easier and in much less time without broken pieces of shell sticking to the egg.

• You can replace mayonnaise with equal amounts of non-fat sour cream. Mayonnaise is 100 calories per tablespoon whereas the non-fat sour cream is a mere 10 calories per tablespoon.  This works great in salads like potato salad.  It is also great for salad dressings where you can add garlic and onion powder to non-fat sour cream and dilute it down to dressing consistency with milk.

• You can make super easy and low fat fried potato home fries by nuking the potatoes in the microwave oven until they are about 3/4 the way done to being a baked potato. While they are still warm, slice them cross ways and then immediately dump then into hot olive oil.  The olive oil gives a great additional flavour and is much healthier.  The fries will be golden brown on the outside but will not absorb oil or salt like the potatoes that are rinsed thoroughly under water, which removes the starch and makes the potato a fat sponge.  Your fries will be crisp tender and not greasy at all.

• For cheesecake, place a sheet pan under the springform pan, which should be on the middle rack and the sheet pan filled with water on the bottom rack. This also helps eliminate hot spots typical to all but convection ovens.  Cool the cheesecake in the oven with it turned off which will also avoid cracks.

• Instead of a traditional graham cracker crust, substitute a ground almond crust, it’s much healthier rich in anti oxidants.  In fact according to the California Almond board the almond is the most nutritionally dense nut in existence.  You also get a great mouth feel with the crunchiness of the almond crust juxtaposed against the creaminess of the cheesecake.  Also the crust won’t take on smells from the fridge and it stays crunchy in the fridge and is much healthier than the empty carbohydrates of the graham cracker crust.

Thanks for your contribution John.