Producing Friends’ weekly newsletter involves trawling through the internet to find news, recipes, advice, and a moderate dose of silliness framed around growing food, cooking it, and eating the results.(Sign up to receive the newsletter every week by clicking here.)
Every now and then, we find a great resource with common (and uncommon) knowledge that helps a cook with everything from meal planning and minimizing waste to what to do with the leftovers,
Newsletters are kind of ephemeral, though, so we’ve decided to cull through the archives and post all the websites and articles that, taken as a whole constitute a masterclass in kitchen mastery. The archive is more than 200 newsletters, plus, we keep finding more of these, so this page is going to be dynamic, we hope; it’ll grow ever longer and more essential as we discover more resources to make life in the kitchen better and easier. Here goes (The links are in the titles themselve, btw.):
21 Cooking Charts That’ll Make Any Foodie Say “Excuse Me, What?!”
Emily Shwake, a staff writer at Buzzfeed collected 21 cheat sheets in a single post that includes links back to all the source articles that spawned this encyclopedic visual guide. You can check out her post by clicking here.
The subjects that are covered include:
- For perfectly cooked vegetables every time
- For your summer barbecues (grilled vegetables guidelines)
- For finding the best meatless protein sources for you
- For choosing the healthiest greens (Top 15 nutrient-rich foods)
- Can you freeze it?
- The universal rules of cooking wild mushrooms
- For knowing which herbs to use
- Everything there is to know about knives
- How to fix a too-spicy dish
- How to (and how long you can) store vegetables
- Choosing cheeses
- Choosing cooking oils
- Translating recipe terms
- Wine 101
- For remembering conversions
- Choosing a beer for your meal
- Cheese and wine party matchups
- Pairing sauces with dishes
- Kinds of sugar
- Grain/Water ratios for cooking rice and grains
- Distinguishing between different cuts of beef
What recipes mean by S, M, or L onions and carrots
Less of an omnibus but no less essential, Frances Lam, the food “geek” at Salon.com asked a bunch of chef what the relative descriptions, “small, medium, and large,” actually mean with regards to produce like onions and carrots. This short article shares what she learned.
Food Yields and Equivalents
Ellen’s Kitchen is a somewhat antique website, but it’s crammed with kitchen wisdom. Her list of food yields and equivalents starts with onions, carrots, and garlic, and then goes on to cover, in extreme detail things like how much of a bulk ingredient will produce once prepped (e.g., nine sliced scallions will yield one cup, a pound of peas in the pod yields one cup once shelled).
If you want to avoid waste because you bought way too many zucchini, or frustration ’cause you didn’t buy enough, this page probably has the answer you need.
How to Peel an Egg and Other Tricks
Eating from the Ground Up is a food site and blog produced by Alana Chernila. She caught our eye with a short but sweet list of peeling techniques. If you’ve ever savaged a dozen too-fresh hard-cooked eggs or disintegrated a fresh peach, check out this post with a few really handy tips for minimizing waste and frustration.
