Photo credit: Flickr/Yogma

If you are anything like us, you love the effectiveness of high quality, sharp knives.  So make you’re not doing any of the following things to ruin them:

1. Not sharpening them frequently.  Most restaurants get their knives sharpened every 30 to 90 days – granted, you probably don’t use them quite as much, but they still need to be sharpened frequently.  The duller you let the knife get before sharpening it, the more metal will have to be shaved off to get a sharp edge.  Read the rest of this entry »

We have come at last to that beautiful time of year when your garden (or, ahem, your mom’s garden…) is just dripping with lush, ripe tomatoes.  The first few weeks, you eat them in everything, and then they start to produce faster than you can follow.  And frankly, you’re getting tired of tomato/cucumber salads.  Before you start freezing or canning them, consider this delicious alternative: tomato water.

Tomato water is essentially tomato juice without the fiber and color of the tomato.  The process is simple – Whirl up a couple of ripe tomatoes in your food processor or blender, then pour the juice into a colander or sieve lined in cheesecloth with a bowl underneath.  Leave it to slowly drain in your fridge overnight, and presto!  Tomato water!  The water will be surprisingly clear with just a tinge of pink, with all the pure summer taste of homegrown tomatoes. Read the rest of this entry »

After two lovely years in South Bend, Indiana, where Byron was attending business school at Notre Dame, we have moved on.  A permanent destination is still up in the air.

The house we rented in South Bend was pretty great – except for the ridiculously hard water.  We had to soak the kitchen faucet in CLR the week we moved in because the flow was so pathetic.  It was impossible to fill the bathtub completely with hot water because the hot water heater was so filled with hard water deposits (and this was a tragic development for a pregnant woman who loves baths). Read the rest of this entry »

I can remember back to being a kid when Lunchables came out. They were an exciting new thing, and (I’m sure after an incessant amount of nagging) my mom acquiesced to letting me try them for school lunch. Even in grade school though, I remember thinking they were pretty mediocre. Bologna, cheap crackers and even cheaper cheese… no thanks! (Yeah, I was a foodie all the way back then too, even if I didn’t know it yet!)

Flash forward and now I’m an adult (at least on the outside!). My tastes have matured, and low and behold, so have ready-to-eat boxed meals. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a recipe I just threw together one night with an Asian/peanut/satay’ish sauce in mind. It was one of those times when it worked out amazingly well on the very first try, and even though I’ve never previously written down the recipe (I’ve always just thrown it together), it’s been delicious every time. Why have I waited so long to share it here? Good question! Read the rest of this entry »

Well it’s Lent, and even if you’re not Catholic and don’t feel obligated to eat it on Fridays, we could all probably stand to eat more fish. …And since nearly every grocery store will be running sales on fish during Lent, it’s the perfect opportunity to make that happen.

Our local grocery store was running a sale on catfish, so that’s what we used here, but any white fish would work just fine (heck, I’d certainly eat a fried salmon po’boy, too). There are a couple of components in this, but you can take all sorts of short cuts if you want. We made our po’boys with some homemade slaw (you can use store bought if you want) and a homemade remoulade (you could substitute mayonnaise if you prefer), and we made some hush puppies (you could buy frozen fires or tater tots to swap out for these, but they’re worth the effort, so don’t!). Read the rest of this entry »

A little while back, we reviewed some fabulous eco-friendly cleaning products by GrabGreen.

Since then, we’ve also had the pleasure of trying their Lavender with Vanilla laundry detergent pods, which work really well.  While I was skeptical about the scent at first, it turns out very mild and pleasant once the clothes are dry.  The pod format, which is like the pre-measured pods of dishwashing detergent, is no-mess and very convenient to use.

Well now GrabGreen would like to share their cleaning goods with you!  They’re giving away a collection of the Dishwashing Detergent, Dish Soap, and Degreaser Cleaner so you too can have a (guilt-free) cleaner kitchen. Read the rest of this entry »

This month, we’ll be focusing on seafood.  But, let’s face it, we live in non-coastal Indiana, so we won’t be featuring a whole lot of beautiful fresh fish fillets.  Our aim is more to focus on interesting, tasty seafood options that can be made from items at your local grocery store.  We might also attempt a taste test of fast food Lenten fish options if we’re feeling brave!

These simple salmon croquettes (or salmon patties) are a great way to get more high quality seafood into your life without getting too spendy.  You could certainly use salmon fillets, but we opted for a can of pink salmon instead. Read the rest of this entry »

This is another one of those things I wish I had tried earlier in life – falafel is completely delicious, but I didn’t have it for the first time until I was an adult. It turns out that it’s not all that complicated… when you do it the right way. Me being me, I of course wanted to do it differently right out of the gates, by baking it instead of frying it. It was one of the more epic cooking failures I’ve had in quite a while; the uncooked balls of falafel heated more slowly in the oven than it would in a pan, and so they completely melted into a puddle of falafely-green mess on the baking sheet. Oh well, good intentions, and all that. The second attempt I made went by the books (pan fried rather than deep fried, but either is acceptable), and the results were great. Read the rest of this entry »

As the picture to the left may indicate, Texas Caviar isn’t actually caviar at all.  It’s actually a marinated, make-ahead salad of black eyed peas, most delicious when scooped onto a tortilla chip.  It was popularized in the 1950′s in Texas (East Texas is a major black eyed pea producer) as a New Year’s good luck dish.  Having attended college in Dallas, it’s always been part of my mom’s party dish repertoire.  So when we were looking for dishes for our Super Bowl party (in a month that The Foodie Forkful is focusing on beans), this seemed like a natural. Read the rest of this entry »