Chef Tip: Use Your Slow Cooker to Melt Chocolate

This is a BRILLIANT tip from a lovely blog called The Yummy Life.  Melt your chocolate chunks or chips right in your slow cooker. 

See the recipe here.

Related Tips

See Allergen-free chocolate brands here.

Can you store your chocolate chips in the freezer?

Use your melted chocolate for some dairy-free, soy-free, gluten-free Almond Cognac Truffles or some Simply Coconut Truffles - yum.

Chef Tip: How To Blanch Asparagus

Blanching is usually 30 seconds to 3 minutes in already boiling water, depending upon your taste and the thickness of the vegetable. Here is a quick explanation using asparagus that will work for any veggie:

Fill a large bowl with ice water (including chunks of ice). Set it near the stove. Bring a large pot of water to boil and place the asparagus into the water for 1-3 minutes - depending upon the thickness of the stalks. Remove the stalks with a slotted spoon and plunge them whole-heartedly into the ice water. This will preserve the beautiful green color and keep them nice and crisp. Keep the veggies in the ice water for as long as they have been boiled. If you are in a time crunch, you can run cold water for the veggies for a minute or so to cool them down. this works a little less well than the ice bath, but it works!

RECIPE

Here is a recipe for blanched asparagus with a Dijon mustard sauce.

This is a rather adult marinade, but you can toss in Italian dressing (or Ranch as my nieces and nephews do, if they can have dairy), or simply serve it plain for your little ones.

KID TIP

Get Your Kids to Eat Blanched Veggies!:  Blanched Veggies Over Raw Work Better 

Wash your re-usable grocery bags

We are green, we use less plastic, and we save trees by using cloth grocery bags.  We carry eggs, raw meat, unwashed veggies in them.  Do we wash them?  Experts are saying that 85% of us do not. 

But we should.  Food borne bacteria, parasites and viruses can be carried in unwashed bags and potentially hurt us, too.  So wash them once a week in hot soapy water to keep them clean and spanky.

Chef Tip: Does your fresh-baked bread turn blue? or green?

I made a new recipe for banana bread this week, and as it baked it has a little bluish tint, but when cut, looked fine. I cut a slice and left it to finish cooling. When I came back to the kitchen to cover it, it was blue!  and then green!  A chemical reaction was at hand, but what? 

After a little research, I found that baking powder and / or baking soda reacts with the cloraphyll (chlorogenic acid) in the sunflower butter causing this fun discoloration, and in this particular version of the recipe, I used sunflower butter. Most plants only have Chlorogenic acid in the stems and leaves, but sunflower also has it in the seeds/oil/butter.

Perhaps for the University of Michigan game a little maze and blue bread might be appropriate!  ... or St. Patrick's Day!

Run Out of GF Baking Powder?

If you run out of gluten-free, aluminum-free baking powder, here's a great replacement:

for 1 tsp of baking powder = 1/4 tsp. of baking soda + 1/2 tsp of GF cream of tarter.