I am very particular about my knives and my cutting boards. One of the things my mother in law has and my wife tried to get me to use is a glass cutting board. Yuk! Nothing ruins the edge on your knives faster than glass. However, she has also gotten me one of these pressed biomaterial cutting boards. It’s fine except it is quite thin and doesn’t stay in place when I am working quickly with a knife. The solution is to take a kitchen towel, fold it once and place it under the cutting board. This will keep it from sliding all over the counter top and making a potentially dangerous situation.

One of the things that kinda pisses me off is when I go to the grocery store to buy fresh lettuce and it is saturated with water. I know they do it to keep the lettuce looking fresh in the store but when you get it home it contributes to the lettuce wilting quicker in my fridge. You can perk up the lettuce by adding lemon juice (about three tablespoons or the juice of one lemon) to a bowl of cold water and letting the lettuce soak in the fridge for about an hour.

I’m sure you’ve done this. You’ve gone and made hard boiled eggs and  when you cracked them open, the yolk is all the way over to one side of the egg leaving a barely discernable coating of white on one side. In order to avoid this predicament, store your egg carton on its side in the refrigerator. This will keep the yolks centered when you cook them.

To avoid making pale or lumpy gravy, brown the flour by making a roux when adding the flour before adding the liquid. If there isn’t enough fat from the pan drippings, add a bit of butter to the pan first. Add the flour and whisk continuously over medium heat until the desired shade of brown. Then add the liquid until you’ve reached the desired consistency.

So your making a bit of pan gravy from the dripping left over from a wonderful fatty protein that you’ve cooked and as you finish adding the flour you look dawn and realize that it is clearly not the right color. Much too white in fact. What you do is to take a touch of instant coffee and add it to the gravy. Bang! It’s the right color and no bitter aftertaste.

We’re still talking about correcting for sweetness. If salt isn’t something that you would like to add to your vegetables, try a teaspoon of cider vinegar. This can also restore balance in the event that your veggies are too sweet.

Right now, we’re still talking about correcting mistakes made in the heat of the kitchen. Today we are correcting for the over sweetening of a dish or if a dish is too naturally sweet. Use a little salt to tame the sweetness and restore the balance to it.

Yesterday we mentioned that adding a cut up potato to a soup can extract extra salt. Another way to do this is to attempt to restore the balance of salinity to other properties of the soup. Try adding a teaspoon each of vinegar and sugar to help restore this balance. This can also work for vegetables that are being boiled or steamed.

We have a new feature starting today, I call it the Tip of the Cocktail. It’s really a tip of the day type of thing but I had to find a way to get me name in there somehow. Let me know if you like them or not.

Today we’ll start with a helpful hint on how to deal with an over salted soup. You an I both know that as your rushing around the kitchen, it is very possible to get a little heavy handed with the salt. You can save an over salted by cutting up some potatoes and throwing them in the soup. Cook them for 15 to 20 minutes, tops. As they cook, they will absorb some of the salt, thereby restoring balance to the overall soup. Remove them with a slotted spoon before serving.