Jeanette - Off The Cuff

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My name is Jeanette, and I was born in Sweden, but unlike the famous Muppet, I am not a professional Swedish Chef. I actually went to school for art, design, and photography. Beyond that, I worked as a freelance indie-rock critic for several magazines in the late 90s and early 2000s. I even took a crack at running a PR company for a while. However, cooking has always been in my DNA--my dad's brother was a chef and culinary arts instructor, my dad's father was a pastry chef, and my mom's mother was a caterer, and at the age of 92, she published a cookbook of traditional Finnish breads and pastries. Everyone else in my family loves to cook, too, and we're not afraid to experiment. Usually I end up inventing dishes (with or without outside inspiration) with whatever I have on hand, hence "Off the Cuff." I might make very Scandinavian dishes (meatballs, and salmon with dill-potatoes) or ethnic like Thai, Japanese, Mexican, Italian or Spanish. By the way, you can put bell peppers in almost all cuisine! (Drop me a line, at o f f t h e c u f f c o o k i n g "at" g m a i l followed by the dot-com. :)

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Some Tips about Onions

Given that I have not bothered to write up a recipe for a good while, I'm going to 'pepper' my blog with some random tips, as in the previous entry about cleaning a stove without the use of chemicals. 

So we shall talk about chopping onions, fast and efficiently.  If you weep uncontrollably at the thought of chopping onions, you can borrow my little trick of keeping some swim goggles handy in the kitchen.  No -- not a snorkel goggle-- I mean those sleek things that folks like Matt Biondi or Michael Phelps would wear. It might look a little ridiculous to wear swim goggles, but hey... better than having your mascara run all over your face.

Now, I realize that most people with rudimentary knife skills can probably figure out how to chop an onion.  I mean, you just chop it, right?   However, if you want to really increase your efficiency, I figured out a way to speed things up and control the size of your diced onion cubes with a little more calculation involved.