Cooking & Baking Tips: Healthy Fats, Grain Prep & Substitutes

Mastering the kitchen involves understanding healthy fat profiles, variety-specific grain preparation, and safe food handling techniques.

Homemade Muffins and Donuts

How to Calculate the Percent of Total Carbohydrates That Are Sugars

The number of total carbohydrates in a product includes both sugar and fiber. If you are trying to reduce your sugar intake in general, knowing what proportion of your carbohydrate intake is sugar allows you to track how you’re doing and adjust your eating habits, if necessary.

Read more →
rice cooker and the tray for steaming food

How to Cook Rice Without a Lid

Typical instructions for cooking rice on the stove include covering the rice after it boils. This steams the rice in addition to simmering.

Read more →
Baking tray

How to Bake with a Dark Nonstick Pan

Dark nonstick pans have become a very common sight in kitchens. While you still have to grease the pans in many cases, the nonstick coating makes it that much easier to extract the food from the pan.

Read more →

Calories in Popcorn With Olive Oil

Popcorn is often touted as a low-calorie snack that fills you up before you can eat too much. Add something to it, though, such as oil for popping or flavoring, and you increase the calorie count, sometimes substantially.

Read more →

Sesame Oil Nutrition

Sesame oil is fragrant and tasty, but it’s not just liquid fat that you pour over salad. While it is fat -- it doesn’t have any carbohydrates floating around in it -- the type of fat and the vitamin content in sesame oil might have a beneficial effect on your health.

Read more →

Is Pure Maple Syrup Healthy?

Sweetening foods can be tricky if you’re trying to clean up your diet. A pure, natural sugar such as pure maple syrup could seem like the perfect healthy substitute, and in fact, pure maple syrup does have something to offer in terms of nutrition.

Read more →
Pasta with olive oil

How to Cook Spaghetti Using a Pasta Pot & Colander Insert

The colander insert you find along with pasta pots is supposed to make draining the pasta much easier than holding the pot over a sink. Instead of trying to simultaneously drain the water and stop the pasta from falling into the sink, all you have to do is lift up the colander insert.

Read more →
azuki rad beans

How to Cook Adzuki Beans

Adzuki beans, also called aduki or azuki beans, are small, red, dry beans often used in Japanese and Chinese dishes. Their small size lets them cook more quickly than other beans, and they have a reputation for not causing quite as much of a gas problem as other beans.

Read more →
Tasty lasagna

How to Freeze Lasagna After Baking It

Lasagna is a convenient meal to make before the start of a busy week because you can prepare a large amount and sock away individual portions in the freezer for later cooking.

Read more →

Can I Still Bake With Stale Nuts?

Finding out that the nuts you have in the pantry have gone stale is disappointing, especially if you found out right as you were mixing up your favorite quick bread, or worse, if you found out by biting into a rancid-tasting cookie that you just baked.

Read more →
"Oatmeal with almonds,apple and glass of milk"

How to Ground Oats

Oats are sneakier than they look. Not only can you use them in cereals, cookies and breads, but you can hide them in soups and smoothies.

Read more →