Food and Cooking Tips
Read these 6 Food and Cooking Tips tips to make your life smarter, better, faster and wiser. Each tip is approved by our Editors and created by expert writers so great we call them Gurus. LifeTips is the place to go when you need to know about Single Women tips and hundreds of other topics.
Basic Vinaigrette Salad Dressing
The basic vinaigrette:
1/3 vinegar
2/3 oil
1 tsp Dijon mustard (this helps to blend the oil and vinegar so they stick together a bit, emulsion).
salt, pepper, a little sugar to taste.
You can try different types of oils and vinegars. Use a fancy oil or different flavours of vinegar, maybe lemon juice. Try a dab of maple syrup for the sugar.
Once you master the basic vinaigrette, you can experiment by adding different ingredients, from fresh herbs to grated Parmesan cheese to Worcestershire sauce and even a dollop of ketchup.
Tin Foil on Cookie Sheets
Cover your cookie sheet with tin foil before you put the food in the oven. This makes the clean up a lot easier, especially with something like pizza which can ooze cheese you have to scrub at a lot to get rid of later.
Skim your Latte
Try your coffee with whipped and/ or heated skim milk instead of cream or whole milk. Milk thickened this way is very low cal and yet will give you as much taste as you have become used to.
Cook, Bake and Be Merry
Don't stop cooking and baking just because you live alone.
There are great things like cookie exchanges and baking parties around family holidays. Give away your baking rather than eating it all, a lovely cake you made yourself is a great birthday present for a friend.
But, more importanly, you should treat yourself well. That includes eating well versus something frozen that comes in cardboard from the grocery store.
Substitute Ingredients for Variety
You can change up a recipe you use a lot by substituting basic ingredients. For instance, buttermilk instead of milk. Yogurt and cream cheese make a cheesecake creamier. Instead of cracker crumbs crush some cookies instead and you've got a different crust for your cheesecake as well.
Lighten up the fat by switching canola oil for butter, or go with half butter and half canola.
There are endless variations you can try, just use some common sense and taste it as you work.
Christmas Cookies All Year Round
Icebox cookies are a simple recipe. There are a lot of varieties for it online or in cookbooks, pick one that sounds good to you.
The best thing is having the cookie dough, rolled up in wax paper kept in the freezer for any time you want to bake up some cookies. You don't have to bake them all at once. They store very well as long as you make sure they aren't freezer burnt (wrap them up well).
My Christmas icebox cookies have red and green candined cherries to give them that added Christmas spirit!
| Guru Spotlight |
| Candi Wingate |
