How-To Make Cheap Olives Taste Expensive

Tart-Up Your Olives I love olives. Green ones. Black ones. Even those anaemic-looking, skinny reddish ones. But I always tart them up a bit. Here’s what I do. I already have a bowl ready for New Year’s nibbles, by the way. I drain the brine away from a tub of cheap, pitted olives (approx. 500g),…

How to Clean Tarnished Jewellery

I don’t have a lot of jewellery, nor silvery for that matter. The silver stuff seems to go dull and tarnished the minute you remove it from its tissue paper. But … I’ve started wearing my silver stuff more often, now that I know an easy method of cleaning it. Easy as can be: just…

How to Extend the Life of Cut Flowers

Homemade Cut Flower Extender. This mixture is comparable to the little packets that you get with cut flowers. Works a charm! Ingredients 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice 1 tablespoon sugar 2 drops bleach Directions Add all ingredients to a vase 3/4 full of cool water. Mix to blend. Add fresh cut flowers to water making…

Cannellini Bean Soup with Porcini Mushrooms

This is a variation on Rufus’s Food and Spirits Guide for Cannellini Bean Soup. The day that I made this soup I had the mother-of-all-head-colds coming on. I didn’t have the time or temperament to soak beans for 8-hours; I needed an injection of garlic and onion, and the only thing with the truffles on…

Grilled Tuna Salad Sandwich with Lime Mayo

Dear John, Ready to kill off a few more tins of tuna? This is a really easy way of making an ordinary tuna sandwich just a bit special. In addition to the usual necessities of a tuna sandwich, you’ll need one ripe lime and some fresh chives. Dill works, too, but personally I’m not keen;…

How To Make Mayonaise

http://youtu.be/ZueneMaLyyc

That store-bought stuff isn’t mayo!

Pineapple and Prawn Salad

When I was on holiday in Hawaii, we went to the Dole Plantation. We packed up the kids, popped them into strollers with snacks and bottles of water, and off we went with the promise of a train trip. Emma was dressed in coordinated shades of pink; she was ready. Ethan was watching Micky Mouse…

I’ve Cracked It: How To Make A Poached Egg

How to Poach An Egg Have we been fooled into believing that poaching an egg is best left to the expertly trained chefs at The Savoy or The Park Lane. Is that why so few of us ‘cooks’ dare attempt it? Perhaps, but consider this: Firstly: In a quarter of a second, Google found 1,500,000…