smitten kitchen

Do you have an instant-read thermometer? Used to quickly check the temperature of a dish whether frozen or mid-broil (they rarely go above 300°F), there’s a reason chefs find them indispensable. This is the only method that will absolutely guarantee you will not over- or undercook a dish, and is especially helpful if you are as new to cooking meat as I am. Check out USDA’s temperature-based food safety meat and poulty recommendations on their site.

Since the beginning of 2008, there has been one eensy change after another: we’ve bought some new furniture, so our living room looks largely different. I’ve changed both my work and personal computers, so finding files, editing pictures and even, say, learning control-alt-delete in Mac-ese has been a time-consuming task. We’ve (mercifully) switched gyms to one with–get this–a pool, thus I think I’ve spent a good amount of the last week (blissfully, kickily) underwater. And at work–yes, the place I hang out when I’m not having more fun with you–I’ve taken on a whole new coverage area, which while much more interesting for me seems to mean that work takes at least an extra hour each day, and that dinner at 9:45 p.m. doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. Last but in no way least are all of these major site changes we’ve been trying to put together in our ‘free’ (ha) time, including the one that, most unfortunately, took the site offline on a day I had no time to address it.

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If you’re like me, you’re probably constantly dividing and subdiving recipes to fit in whichever baking pan suits your fancy but could use more guidance to make sure you won’t have too much. I printed up some of these adorable Baking Pan and Volume subsitutions (PDF) a while back and haven’t taken it off my fridge since. One that it is missing: one set of 12 mini-cheesecake pans holds approximately half the batter that you would use in a 9-inch cheesecake. Find out why later this week!

Alex loves to eat pomegranates (as do I, but only if he does the peeling) but with our new cream-colored sofa, it is especially important that we keep the mess in check. Here’s his favorite technique: Score the pomegranate then submerge it in water and break it into pieces. Let the seeds sink to the bottom and the pith float to the top. Remove the pith and skin. Trust me, it makes much less of a mess.

Did you miss me? We here at the smittenkitchen are terribly sorry about this week’s downtime; I’ll do better to warn you (oh, and myself) next time. However, it was all in the name of, in Martha Stewart parlance, a “very good thing” which is a long-overdue migration from a hosting system whose customer service was nonexistent and whose servers we’d apparently long outgrown to a new, shiny and already more helpful one. There are still a few kinks being worked out, and there are still people (probably about one-third of you) for whom this site is not fully back up, but by the end of the weekend this will hopefully just be a blip on the radar screen of the complicated world of DNS propogation.

But you know what is especially unfair? It has been six whole days since this Yankee, this Jewish New Yorker without a single prior deep-frying experience under her belt, made her very first batch of fried chicken and she hasn’t gotten to tell you about it yet. But, oh, it was awesome.

Well, it was eventually awesome, if you must know. The first piece turned instantly black and filled our 660-square foot apartment with a thick plume of smoke, just as our first guest were arriving on Sunday afternoon to watch the Giants, astoundingly, win. The second batch wasn’t much better, and the third, in the spirit of honesty, was still not exactly a shade of cooked you’d be proud to serve to the eight and a half people in your living room. As it turns out my candy thermometer–which I had patted myself on the back for finding for a low $2.99 last year–well, it’s kind of a big, fat liar.

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