Recipe

Cleaning your house doesn't have to clean out your wallet

Household cleaners are becoming more specialized with each passing year, it seems. Do we really need a cleaner for every different type of surface in our home? There's granite, laminate, wood, glass, stainless and the list goes on. I'd like to argue that we don't need different cleaners for everything. At least, I'm too cheap to buy cleaners for everything. Use these tips to cut down on your cleaning expenses.

Vinegar: It cleans almost everything.

Image:

What's a sweet potato and how do you cook it?

Even though I have greatly increased my vegetable competency over the years, I have to confess that until recently, I knew next to nothing about sweet potatoes. And aside from trying a sweet potato fry once, plus taking a small dollop of baked sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving or Christmas (just to be polite) I had barely ever eaten them.

Image:

Man adopts Soylent shake diet

Food. We love it, we eat it, we take time out of our day to purchase ingredients and put it together. But one guy thinks that all the effort involved with preparing and munching three times or more a day is a complete waste of time and money. In order to maximize his efficiency, software engineer Rob Rhinehart has put together everything you need to survive into one convenient shake. He calls it Soylent, but it’s not made out of people.

Image:

How to hard boil eggs - and four things to do with them

Every year at Easter, many families buy enormous amounts of eggs. For a lot of people, Easter is the only time of year when they buy eggs in those triple-wide cartons of 18 eggs apiece, or even in the giant open cardboard flats.

First, a word of caution. Eggs should always be kept refrigerated, even after they have been hard boiled. Eggs should be refrigerated within two hours of being boiled. Assuming they have been kept properly in the refrigerator, hard boiled eggs should be used within a week.

Image:

Protest Knitting: A basic how-to guide

This woman's work of knitting is absolutely amazing, don't you think? She has knit a round pie chart representing the federal budget, in protest of the defense budget which - as you can see from her knitwork - takes up more than half of the federal budget. She is also sporting a slipcover on her chair which reads "OCCUPY GRANDPARENTS" and "Pay It Forward." I love this woman; she is awesome! Way to rock it!

Image:

Beyond corned beef: Five other Irish foods for St. Patrick's Day

Every year on St. Patrick's Day, the same foods get the spotlight. Well I for one detest corned beef, which is what motivated me to dig a little deeper for some fun and interesting foods to eat on March 17th.

Image:

Dietary elitism in the NYT. Surprise!

I'm pretty tired of "experts" telling you what you should eat. Mark Bittman (a food writer I usually respect) rubbed me the wrong way with his recent article on the Mediterranean Diet. This diet is supposedly good for your heart, but as Bittman admits, the control group was faulty, and the conclusions of the original study were far from earth-shaking.

Image:

Pad Thai: A nation-building ambassador food to the world

I had never really stopped to think about Pad Thai before reading this article about its historical underpinnings. I vaguely knew that it was a street food in Thailand, cooked up in a million different variations at a million different market stalls. And I knew that the Americanized version is a far cry from "authentic" Pad Thai.

Image:

Pinworthy Pinterest apps

Pinterest, the online pinboard and time-suck for women everywhere, is pretty straightforward. You find something you like on the web, pin it (or repin it) and voilà! That craft project you’ll probably never get to is right at your fingertips. With one in five women online using Pinterest, there’s more to pin and repin than ever. To satisfy your pinning addiction, these 13 apps will help you get the most of that precious pinning time.

Image:

The Jell-O box that doomed the Rosenbergs

The 1951 trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg as Communist spies was the biggest event of the day. The Rosenbergs were accused of feeding secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Soviet Union. And one of the key pieces of evidence turned out to be a humble Jell-O box.

Image:

Pages