About

This is a place to collect our family's favorite recipes so that when you leave the house (no hurry) you will always have somewhere to find them, and hopefully enjoy a few stories connected to the recipes—a sort of virtual family dinner even when you're not at home. If you learn something about cooking along the way, so much the better. Laurie Colwin said in Home Cooking that "[w]hen people enter the kitchen, they often drag their childhood in with them." If so, I hope that you have lots of good stories to drag into your own kitchens.

It's called "Use a Kitchen Scale" because that's the advice most often heard in our kitchen. I hate measuring cups. Not only is the measuring inconsistent among cooks and bakers, but why get five measuring cups dirty when you can just dump something into a bowl set on a scale, hit the tare button, and move on to the next ingredient, no mess, no fuss? I have a "Weights" page on this blog where you can look up the weight in grams of some commonly used ingredients. Here is a good place to find the weights of lots of other baking ingredients. See the picture? 120 grams. According to King Arthur Flour, that's what one properly measured cup of their all-purpose flour weighs. Impressive, right?

This is the kitchen scale I had for years:

It worked pretty well, had a tare button (the one on the right that zeroes it out), measured in ounces and grams (a must), and went up high enough to weigh my 4,935 gram (that's nearly 11 pounds) mortar. Unfortunately, it liked to cut out when I was halfway through measuring something.

Eventually, I replaced the old Salter scale with an Oxo Good Grips 11lb Food Scale. The Oxo solves the problem of shutting off in the middle of weighing something by having a longer time (6 minutes) before inactivity will lead to standby mode. In addition, you can touch any button in standby mode, for up to 24 minutes, to wake the scale back up and it remembers where you were. Other good features include a backlight option and a pull-out display that lets you see the readout even when you have a large container on the weighing platform.