Archive for the ‘In the kitchen’ Category

Some of our products have been featured in a beautiful photo spread by Inside Out Magazine.

Styling Vanessa Colyer Tay. Photography Sharon Cairns.

Our Australian Made ceramic Gift Tags and Bistro Board featured along side Coco (dinner plate, side plate, soup bowl and sugar bowl) and Rambling Rose (teapot and plate).

Click HERE to see our Australian Made Catalogue

Click HERE to find our Imports Catalogue with Coco and Rambling Rose

LIFE used to plate up Masterchef style!!

Masterchef magazine – June 2010

LIFE Pasta bowl

LIFE Tray

View range here
View stockist here

Have you seen our designer patty pans?

Available in a range of pretty patterns, these papers are fantastic for baking big batches of cup cakes. No muffin tray needed – bake flat on an oven tray. Available at all good homewares stores.

View range here
View stockist here

We love collecting kitchen tips. It doesn’t take much research to find hundreds of handy, interesting, space-saving and time-saving ideas. And everyone has a good tip or two or three, which we hope to collect and present the best of them here.

If you have a handy hint or a safety idea or any other kitchen innovation, share it with our readers by clicking on the Comments tag below right. We’d love to hear from you!

Calcium in kettles

No doubt your grandmother taught you the method for “defurring” a kettle, but if you’re like us, the lesson has grown a little hazy over time. Here it is again for the record: add 1 tablespoon of vinegar to the kettle and half fill with water; let the vinegar mixture sit in the kettle for at least two hours; rinse out calcium deposits with water. Any remaining calcium can be scrubbed gently with a scourer to loosen.

Oven cleaning

If you clean your oven while it is still warm, grease comes off more easily. Just make sure the oven is warm, rather than hot!

Cleaning the cleaner

Steel wool is an indispensable cleaning aid but, being steel, it has a tendency to rust. To prevent this, keep your steel cleaning pads in a jar of water to which has been added half a teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate. Change the mixture once a week. As a matter of interest, sodium bicarbonate is also officially known as sodium hydrogen carbonate, and is commonly called bicarb soda, sodium bicarb, or simply bicarb. It is a chemical compound with the formula NaHCO3. It is a component of the mineral natron and is found dissolved in many mineral springs.

Laminex

While you have the bicarb soda out, here’s another handy tip for its use — it’s great for cleaning laminex benchtops. Create a thick paste of bicarb soda and water. Spread it on and leave for one hour before wiping off with a damp cloth. This method is also good for stains on white stoves.

Versatile furniture polish

Kitchen tiles are easier to clean if, after a good wipe down, you apply some furniture polish. Buff the tiles to a shine, and you will find that grease will not stick to them, and they will be easier to clean in the future.

Out of the mouthes of babes, cooks and food critics come these entertaining observations about one of our favourite subjects.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), Lord of the Rings (1954)

Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Food to a large extent is what holds a society together and eating is closely linked to deep spiritual experiences.
Peter Farb and George Armelagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating (1980)

For the millions of us who live glued to computer keyboards at work and TV monitors at home, food may be more than entertainment. It may be the only sensual experience left.
Barbara Ehrenreich, author, social critic

It is illegal to give someone food in which has been found a dead mouse or weasel.
Ancient Irish law

A gourmet can tell from the flavour whether a woodcock’s leg is the one on which the bird is accustomed to roost.
Lucius Beebe, Quotations for our Time (edited by Laurence J Peter, 1977)

Never serve oysters in a month that has no pay check in it.
P.J. O’Rourke, The Bachelor Home Companion (1987)

Boiled lamb brisket … is either the national dish or just what everything is Australia tastes like.
P.J. O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell (1988)

Salad. I can’t bear salad. It grows while you’re eating it, you know. Have you noticed? You start on one side of your plate and by the time you’ve got to the other, there’s a fresh crop of lettuce taken root and sprouted up.
Alan Ayckbourn, Table Manners (1975)

Shake and shake
The catsup bottle.
None will come,
And then a lot’ll.
Richard Armour, Quotations for our Time (edited by Laurence J Peter, 1977)

We love collecting kitchen tips. It doesn’t take much research to find hundreds of handy, interesting, space-saving and time-saving ideas. And everyone has a good tip or two or three, which we hope to collect and present the best of them here.

If you have a handy hint or a safety idea or any other kitchen innovation, share it with our readers by clicking on the Comments tag below right. We’d love to hear from you!

Cast iron
Cast iron kitchen utensils can outlive us all if treated correctly. This involves basically two things: always season them correctly, and never wash them in soap. Cast iron is interesting in that has pores, and minuscule bits of food can get trapped in those pores, making the utensil’s surface sticky. Seasoning fills the pores with tiny amounts of fat, which has the same effect as a non-stick coating. Correct seasoning of cast iron starts with a rinsing and thorough drying. Now grease the inside of the pan well with a solid shortening. Place the utensil upside down on a baking sheet and bake in the oven for an hour at 175°F (350°F). If you intend cooking with acidic foods (such as tomato sauces), it will pay to repeat this process three or four times first. Also repeat the process periodically through the pan’s life. If you do, that life will be a long one. Always wash with water, a damp cloth and, if necessary, a brush or salt (as an abrasive). Always dry thoroughly.

Broken glass
This is always a concern. What if you miss a bit and the kids run through the kitchen in bare feet? What if you miss a bit and you walk through the kitchen in bare feet! While the big bits of broken glass are easy to pick up, the rest is a problem. A dustpan and brush is obviously the next best step, but it can always move rather than gather small pieces. One thing will, with patience, get everything — a slice of bread.

Glass kettles
Talking of glass, a glass kettle comes up like new when you boil water and a teaspoon of boracic acid.

Tea and coffee cup stains
The world can never be quite right if your favourite tea cup or coffee mug is stained. But stains are inevitable and, once there, they can resist the hottest of water and hardest of scrubbing. Here’s a trick: clean with a damp toothbrush dipped in salt.

Stained steel
It is almost, at times, as if stainless steel rebels against its name. When your stainless steel gets that stained look, one thing restores it to its sparkling best better than anything — a damp cloth soaked in vinegar.

We love collecting kitchen tips. It started, oddly, with a discussion about colanders, about which alone there is a world of handy uses. If you haven’t seen our list, look here and be prepared to be surprised at how many things you can do with a colander!

Kitchen tips, however, are a much bigger world. Everyone has a good tip or two or three, and it doesn’t take much research to find hundreds of handy, interesting, space-saving and time-saving ideas.

So, starting tomorrow, we’re going to present some of the best for you. We’ll keep researching, and periodically present more tips.

Most of all, however, we’d love to hear from you. If you have a handy hint or a safety idea or any other kitchen innovation, share it with our readers by clicking on the Comment button below. We’d love to hear from you!

People often come into Robert Gordon Australia shops looking for kitchen ideas, and given our range of items, they are rarely disappointed.

Some requests are more unusual than others, as you might imagine, and that’s what we thought of when we saw this amazing picture. It’s worth posting it here just for the sake of showing this sensational oven. Does anyone know what all those compartments do? Is that a tap on the right?

But this is about customer service too. We like to help in all eventualities and needs, so we are keeping this photograph for the next customer who asks, “I have just bought a castle and I’m looking for kitchen renovation ideas. I’m thinking medieval. Any suggestions?”

To be honest, we can’t actually supply the oven, but see us about filling the rest of the kitchen with wonderful wares.