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Food bytes

Sandwich making proving to be a pain in the neck? Here’s a tip from a smart cook. “Melt (butter) in the microwave and spread it on with a pastry brush. If you line up all your slices of bread in a row, you can ‘paint’ them all in one long brush stroke.”

This blog’s a treasure house of super-smart, super easy tips like this. Avocados as hard as Voldemort’s heart won’t be a challenge any longer. All you need to conquer them are some bananas.

“The gas that bananas give off ripens anything very quickly. Put them together in a brown paper bag in the airing cupboard and the next day it will have ripened considerably.”

Then there are the days when your vegetables get as ashen as a supermodel who subsists on cigarettes and espresso alone. Here’s what you do to get the roses back in their cheeks. No more wilted cauliflower lunches.

“Squeeze a lemon into boiling salted water and drop the skin in, and the citric acid will keep your cauliflower pristine white. This means you can have cauliflower for Sunday lunch, serve half and leave half chilled in the fridge for a mid-week meal.” Or perhaps you find that your curry is swimming in fat. Use a piece of kitchen tissue or stale bread to soak up the oil. Or just chill it, so the fat rises to the top and solidifies, making it easy to remove. The blog’s working on putting together a total of 1001 cooking tips. We don’t have the space to print the whole lot of them, of course. But there’s just one more helpful hint on how to temper your frying pan, so that you don’t spend every evening scraping food off it. “When it comes to frying pans, you can’t beat stainless steel — brilliant heat distribution, and so easy to clean afterwards...The trick to make sure what you’re cooking doesn’t stick is to season the pan — sprinkle a thin layer of salt in and let it heat up. Then with a cloth wipe it around — as if you were polishing it. Watch out as the salt gets very hot, and will burn if you come into contact with it.”

Dust, wipe and you’re good to go.

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