Produce

Blood oranges make a great addition to any home cook’s pantry. They are easy to peel, ready-to-go for breakfast, and can be used in savory dishes as well as sweet.

This post will tell you what makes them so special and why they should be on your shopping list when in season.

Dried beans can take a long time to soak and cook (sometimes, you have to plan a day or two ahead). Unsurprisingly, many end up taking the familiar and low-cost shortcut of using canned beans instead.

What if you want to take it even further? Can you skip the cooking altogether and eat your beans straight out of the can?

Everyone knows that beets are loaded with nutrients. They’re low in calories and fat, and contain small amounts of almost all the vitamins and minerals you need on a daily basis.

As with many other things that are really good for you, beets come with a character. No matter how you clean and cook them, they always end up smelling and tasting like dirt.

Why is that so?

I was slicing cherry tomatoes for a salad yesterday until I came across a couple of tomatoes with black spots on their skin. The first question that popped in my mind was, “Are these even safe to eat?” 

So I put my knife down, opened my laptop, and started researching on the Internet. Let’s just say it turned out that I wasn’t the only one asking.

Here’s what I found.

Canned tomatoes are a pantry staple. Delicious and versatile, you can cook up any meal with canned tomatoes. From cold gazpacho soup in summer to hearty ragú sauce for a pasta meal on a cold winter night, canned tomatoes are a favorite in our household.

Here’s the thing about canned tomatoes. Sometimes, you like them so much, that you stock up really well whenever your favorite brand is on sale at the grocery store (mine is De Cecco). You stock up so well, in fact, that you have more cans than you could possibly cook before the expiry date.

If that’s what happened to you, you’re searching online and wondering…

Can you eat canned tomatoes after the expiration date?

Cooking with herbs is a great way to make tasty and healthy food at home. As with any group of ingredients, some herbs are more popular than others. And if there’s one herb that too many home cooks often forget or simply don’t know about, that’s stinging nettle.

This post is all about stinging nettle. You’ll see why and how stinging nettle is edible. I’m going to share some of the best recipes for cooking with it that I’ve come across on the Internet. As well as a couple of tips for making the best use of it to make really tasty dishes.

So keep on reading if I’ve got you curious.

Vegetables are a source of vitamins, minerals, and dietary fibers that help you stay strong and healthy. From the moment vegetables are harvested on the farm to when they’re cooked on your stove top, their nutritional value gets altered in one way or another before ending up on your dinner plate.

Of all cooking methods for vegetables, boiling is one of the ones that tends to lose the most nutrients. This is why making soup has mixed effects on the nutritional value of vegetables.

Conventional wisdom tells you two things about cooking dried beans. First, that you must soak the beans overnight. Second, that you can only add salt at the end of the cooking process. The people who give you this advice say that this is the only way to not have your beans come out hard and inedible.

But is this really the case? I’ve been cooking beans without soaking them overnight for years — and so have some of the most trustworthy cooking authors I follow online. The beans not only come out nice and soft, but aromatic and tasty.

Through research and experimentation, I’ve come to the two best methods for cooking dried beans, along with a pretty good rule of thumb for how much water to use and how long to cook popular bean varieties.

So let’s get to it. How can you cook dried beans without soaking them overnight?