Make It!

Summer lettuce comes in giant, colorful, healthful heads. Yet how many times have you bought one such beautiful head for salad only to watch the leaves go sad and limp in the fridge before anything resembling a salad gets made? Here’s how to make sure that never happens again.

This tip’s all about efficiency. It’s a weird one! But stay with me.

When you’re cutting a million cherry tomatoes each into two perfect halves this summer for panzanella, baked chicken, and pasta, you’re going to be seriously happy to know that instead of slicing one tomato with each cut, you can slice about 15. Sure makes those pints dwindle faster.

To make slicing tomatoes like slicing a bagel, you’ll need two plastic lids - the kind you get from Citarella or on wonton soup containers. And you’ll need a serrated knife.

Last week, when I posted a recipe for Iced Strawberry Green Tea, I felt like kind of an idiot trying to write instructions for how to make iced tea. Because I’m sure you all know how. But I actually do have a trick I learned from my mom to streamline iced tea making so you don’t have to worry about boiling water or dilution ratios or brewing time. I call it Sun Tea, because the sun does the work, but since sun is actually not required, you could just call it “cold-brewing.” (You can cold brew coffee, too!) If I had the counter space, I’d get one of these so I could guzzle quantities of sun tea all summer long.