Learn whether making a cocoa paste or sifting your cocoa powder is more effective for making clump-free hot cocoa, plus 4 extra tips for smooth hot cocoa.
Techniques & Tutorials
Cooking for yourself, despite your busy schedule, requires having the right techniques and systems to save you time and energy.
We're here to share ideas and inspiration for setting up your kitchen, organizing your meal plan, and batch cooking all without panicking.
Learn how to make cooking easy, fun, and relaxing with an ingredients-first approach so you'll be looking forward to eating in instead of ordering out.
How to Eat Less Meat Without Going Vegetarian
Learn how to eat less meat WITHOUT becoming vegetarian or vegan and overcome the challenges of food boredom, bingeing on carbs, and going to bed hungry.
How to Make Easy Tea & Coffee Wedding Favors (+ Free Printables)
Step-by-step tutorial to make charming tea & coffee wedding favors. These quick and easy favors help you show your guests appreciation and still stay sane.
5 Tips for Batch Cooking — How to Stay Sane While Avoiding Food Poisoning
How can you batch cook to save time yet eat nutritious AND delicious food? Get the 5 tips to batch cooking while staying sane and avoiding food poisoning.
How Meal Planning Saves You Mental Energy
In 2000, Kathy Sierra and her husband tried to write a best-selling programming book on Java after they lost their jobs due to the dot-com crash. The odds were stacked against them. There were more than 16,000 books on Java to compete with, many of them famous and fantastic. But Kathy had an ace in…
How the Reverse Shopping List Works
Two weeks ago, I attended a financial independence meetup about where we discussed our food budget. A couple mentioned their strategy at a low-cost grocery store like Grocery Outlet. They go inside and look at what’s on sale. They prepare food based on the deals and bargains they picked up. I used to shop like…
How to Meal Plan the Sane Way
When you have a recipe formulae library and food inventory, you’re ready to plan out your 3 meals a day plus snacks. I know it seems counter-intuitive. Why work harder by meal planning and food prepping? Why not just wing it in the grocery store? Yes, it is more work to plan. But trust me, it’s less stress…
How the Recipe Formulae Works
This story contains an affiliate link to a book on Amazon. But just the one 🙂 and it’s about the best advice Katie Couric ever got. What’s the biggest difference between baking and cooking? In my mind, it boils down to one difference: Baking follows a rigid recipe: skip the baking powder and you’re in trouble!…
How the Food Inventory Works And Why You Should Do It
The biggest mistake almost everybody makes in meal planning is this: Why People Don’t Take A Food Inventory Maybe it takes more work. In fact, it takes a lot of work the first time. Not sugar coating the reality. Maybe it’s easier to buy more and throw stuff out without thinking about how to use what you’ve…
Why Meal Planners On the Internet Suck
It’s late at night. You’re drained from work, and it’s dinner time. Now you have to work even harder to put a meal on the table. You’re not alone. This is our reality, every weekday. Our solution is our meal planning system, and it doesn’t involve batch cooking. Thank goodness. So, how do you plan…
What Are The Benefits Of A Meal Planning System?
Yes, it’s a pain in the butt. But (pun intended), there are 3 big benefits of meal planning worth remembering: Declutter Our fridge has never been so organized and therefore easy to find things. As you may know, we’ve had some housemate conflicts with our fridge. Now, we worry less about selfishly taking over too much…
Why Use A Meal Planning System?
“We’re taking control of our cooking time!” “Let’s spend less time cooking and more time eating.” “We have a plan and we’re sticking to it.” Have you uttered these sentences before? Have you been optimistic about increasing your cooking efficiency only to discover an hour later that you’re knee deep in an ambitious cooking project…
Our #1 Food Problem in 2017
Our biggest food problem in 2017 was spending too much time cooking. Hear Me Out You might be thinking, “that’s what you signed up for when you started a food website!! You nincompoop.” Well, yes that’s true. But I am not counting any of the publishing tasks related to this website. My assessment is based…
How to Efficiently Open a Pomegranate Without Crushing The Seeds
Check out 3 tips for super busy people who love eating pomegranates and want easier techniques to open and extract pomegranate seeds (arils) to enjoy.
Growing Our Creepy Mushrooms
This story contains an affiliate link to a book on Amazon. But just the one 🙂 and it’s about mushrooms. Every morning, before cooking breakfast, I reliably discover Alex misting his mushroom colony. He gently unravels the translucent trash bag we use to cover the lumpy substrate because our little babies have clearly outgrown their…
3 Tips: How to Slice Lamb Super Thin For Hot Pot
The best way to greet the cold winter rains is with hot pot. Lamb is by far my favorite meat to enjoy with hot pot. But I only enjoy it super thin, the way it is served at “steamboat” (hot pot) restaurants, shabu-shabu, and Korean BBQ. Since Alex and I are not willing to add another kitchen appliance to…
New Year’s Day Excitement: Cleaning, Stacking, Purging
What’s the most exciting thing to be doing on New Year’s Day? Cleaning up our kitchen and garage to prepare for 2018. You see, it has been a headache to find the right pots and pans while cooking. We’ve also got so much clutter that our best stuff is hidden under junk. What did I rediscover today…
Lattice Pie Success: 3 Tips
Yesterday, I made a cherry pie for my friend’s dinner party. This is the first time that I made a lattice cover for a pie. It worked beautifully, and it was surprisingly easy. I have to thank Stella Parks for her article, Decorative Crust 101, on Serious Eats that walked through step-by-step how to construct a…
Why We Joined A Meat CSA
On our trips to Los Angeles to visit Alex’s parents, we drive down the I-5 corridor. There’s always a stench near Coalinga. The smell used to not bother me much. When the smell approached from afar, I would quickly push the circulate air button and wrinkle my nose for 5 minutes. In the past year,…
How to Plant Garlic In Pots
Three weeks ago, a brown paper bag sat on my desk, quietly waiting for me to open it. I was both excited and dreaded opening the bag. You see, I knew that opening that bag meant I would be opening Pandora’s box. “What if it’s a lot of work?” “What if I ruin it?” “What…
