Facts About Food Friday – You ooze, you lose
FAF #3When baking a pie, if you have issues with your filling bubbling or oozing out (oo, you’re losing :P), add a tablespoon of tapica to thicken it up a bit. You can also stand a tube of wide pasta like rigatoni in the middle of the crust to let air out.
I’m going to have to do this and take a picture. I just spent 20 minutes looking for a good picture of a really, messy, oozy pie….and could barely come up with even a slightly messy one. :( Good thing I didn’t look for an example of macaroni sticking out of the center of a pie or I bet I’d be even more disappointed.
A teaspoon of salt – Sometimes all it takes is a visual
Picture from myrecipes article about sodiumOn one of my lazy nights a while back, I opted to serve tomato soup from a can. I tend to avoid it, but I do like having some on hand. Sometimes when I’m sick, it just sounds really good, and who wants to cook from scratch or kick themselves for not having something homemade in the freezer already?
Anyway, that’s getting a little off base. The main reason I cringe at canned tomato soup is the sodium count.
On this particular night, the little one asked me if it was going to “be really salty like so-n-so’s?” I told her I didn’t know because well, canned soup ‘is’ rather salty. She then asked me if we could put more salt in then.
Yikes! No way!
So I told her that there’s a ton of salt in it already, even if it doesn’t taste that salty to her. “Oh.” I tried pointing out the 760mg on the label *per 1/2 cup serving* but I might as well have been speaking Japanese.
I did the only thing I knew to do. I grabbed a container of salt and poured it out into a teaspoon. I put enough in for two servings, knowing she was going to be eating more than 1/2 cup, and a little bit extra for good measure. ;)
Then I had her hold out her hands as I sprinkled it all in. Needless to say, she didn’t ask for salt again. And I haven’t bought canned tomato soup since either, ha.
Tip – Regular table salt is about 40% sodium and 60% chloride. A teaspoon of salt is equal to about 2300mg of sodium.
Extra large pocky wands (chocolate covered pretzel rods or sesame sticks)
rThat’s what the kids described them as anyway. The teen loves pocky but it’s not easily accessible where we live. Basically, she used to be able to get it at the bowling alley, but it’s not exactly cheap, she and her friends aren’t exactly rich, and they aren’t huge bowlers either.
She’d been begging me to try to make pocky myself, but I got really lucky and this turned out tasting like it instead. I was expecting them to taste like chocolate covered pretzels, but turns out, those are large sesame sticks….and are much softer than hard pretzel rods. I broke several just while trying to dip them in chocolate.
I had made these as a last minute appetizer to hold the kids over at a birthday party. The food wasn’t going to be ready for a little while longer, but I knew everyone was hungry. I don’t even buy sprinkles, but a friend of the family had passed a box of stuff she’d never use on to us, and there was a tiny container of those lovely pink, red, and white sprinkles up there. Perfect!
Ultimately, they were a *huge* hit, especially for such a last minute idea. I scored a million extra bonus points for them tasting like pocky and the begging for more has increase 10x. Unfortunately, sesame sticks were a random purchase at a store that had them as a feature item, and I haven’t seen them since. Maybe I could find them online?
Tip – Turn these into a themed item. Have a Harry Potter fan? Skip the sprinkles. Got a magician on board? Dip the whole thing in dark chocolate and just the tip into white chocolate. Get creative!
Tip – Whether you’re using fragile sticks like this or normal pretzel rods, lay them across a 9×13 pan (or an appropriate size depending on the size of yours). Avoid letting the chocolate end touch the pan as much as possible to avoid sticking. Toss them in the freezer for a quick set so your treat will be ready in a matter of minutes.
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