A catchup
I hope not too much of this is duplicated - I’m never sure whether you see my Notes.
At the moment my Notes feed is a mix of SAVE DEMOCRACY and people yakking on about Substack metrics. I saw a thing the other day about ‘auditing your Substack like a strategist’. I suppose maybe that could be useful for some people (?), but I can’t think of anything more off-putting.
Please know - I’m sure you already do, it’s fairly self-evident - that nothing I post is ever calculated to maximise clicks. It’s what I find interesting and/or useful at that particular moment in time, posted in the hope that you might too and in the full understanding that some things will be more popular than others. And that’s the way I like it.
Anyway, my dahlias, The Last Dahlias of 2024, look. I posted them on Notes at the weekend. Sorry if you’ve seen them already but it was a moment that felt worth marking.
Food-related
Skye McAlpine posted a really good list of random kitchen knowledge.
Here are a few of mine. Do add yours in the comments - I could turn them into a handy pdf so they were all to hand. I’m planning on doing this with all your brilliant comfort reading recs btw, so they’re all in one place and no one has to scroll up and down.
Frozen chopped onion, always, but also frozen ginger cubes, frozen garlic cubes and frozen green chilli cubes, all from any large South Asian shop.
And/or a huge jar of green chilli paste, ditto. Keeps forever in the fridge and makes the plainest cheese toastie amazing (I put chaat masala on top).
A wire spider for scooping things in and out of boiling liquid or hot fat, e.g. stuffed pasta always breaks if you use a colander. It stays whole with a spider. I love spiders.
Most people don’t use enough salt. Salt, e.g. in the vegetable water (or the pasta water for that matter) makes a huge difference to flavour.
Those tins of caramelised onions are pretty handy if you’re short of time. Belazu do a superior version in a jar.
You don’t actually have to pre-heat the oven for most things. Whack it in, unless you’re baking. Saves time and energy.
Lining a tin: dampen baking paper and then crumple it up before putting it in. It won’t ping off or curl annoyingly.
Controversial, but I never soak (basmati) rice.
And I reheat it all the time. The problem isn’t reheating, it’s storing cooked rice incorrectly. In the fridge asap and there’s no issue. Except I have to say, in my childhood cooked rice sat about for ages in the kitchen at room temperature and no one ever got even mildly ill. I think people are slightly dramatic about rice.
I don’t always peel ginger (in which case I wash it).
Chop herbs in a glass with scissors. They’re captive and it’s much easier.
A really good leftover gravy from a meat roast = a really good emergency pasta sauce.
Put a wooden spoon across the pan and the water won’t boil over because the surface tension is broken (I had to look up the reason).
Freeze things flat - decant into bag, squash down so it makes a slab, file efficiently into the freezer.
I also loved Ella Risbridger’s labour of love post on soups. I really like the down-home cosiness of the concept of soups, but I often find them boring to eat. These have changed my mind, though. Soup is such a silly word. Soooooooooop.
