When Life Gives You Lemons …

Culinary timesavers and meal-salvaging tips

By Warren Rojas

Courtesy of The Taunton Press

“A little help?”

This plaintive refrain, undoubtedly familiar to frazzled cooks the world over, can be both battle cry—as in, “All hands on deck! Your dinner depends on it!”—or admission of defeat (prime fodder for FAIL blogs).

Whether that one meal makes it remains rather trivial in the long view. What’s critical is learning from every mistake and applying that knowledge to future endeavors.

Fine Cooking has saved us hours of humiliation with “How-to Squeeze a Lemon,” pooling the collected wisdom of professional recipe testers, food writers and home cooks into 1,000+ tips for heading off kitchen nightmares.

Suggestions range from incredibly resourceful (use the bottoms of unglazed ceramic mugs for impromptu knife honing; produce insta-slurries by flipping water and flour in a cocktail shaker; a French press makes rehydrating and straining dried mushrooms a breeze) to indubitably delicious (use pineapple cores as marinade starters; pour discarded nutshells over hot coals for epic smoking; prep anchovy paste on the fly by running anchovies through a garlic press).

An in-depth troubleshooting guide, grimly tagged “When Things Go Wrong,” is refreshingly uplifting, offering up last-minute fixes for stubborn cakes, pies and other confections, breaking down bread baking, explaining away “egg-ravations” and charting acceptable ingredient swaps.

“How-to Squeeze a Lemon: 1,023 Kitchen Tips, Food Fixes, and Handy Techniques” By the Editors, Contributors and Readers of Fine Cooking. The Taunton Press, 270 pgs., $19.95

(March 2011)