Do you have a young child or two or ten?

Do you find yourself cutting up their pancakes with a fork and knife? Isn’t it a pain?

A quick way to cut up the pancake(s) is to use a pizza cutter.

It works pretty well for waffles and toast as well.

You can also use it to dice up white bread for making croutons (mind you, if your knives are sharp, then you can do 4 or 5 slices at a time, whereas the pizza cutter restricts to one slice at a time – but, you could let the little ones help out with worrying about them slicing off a finger – as long as irregular shaped croutons are not a problem for you)

On the other hand, Ingrid, recommends the use of a long pair of scissors for snipping toast and waffles.

Soups based on a good stock made from boiled bones are wonderful and rich, but who has time to boil bones these days?

We take a shortcut and use a bouillon cube or packet. This gives a nice flavour to the soup (or dish to which it is added), but there is a richness, a certain silkiness that is missing. This is not surprising given that bouillon cubes are just cubes of salt and a bit of fat with flavour. That silky richness a soup gets from boiled bones comes from the protein the boiling extracts from the bones.

The next time you are in a hurry to make up a soup and don’t have time to boil some bones for the base, consider adding a packet of unflavoured gelatin. I like adding a packet to every 3 cups of soup I have.

Gelatin is a protein product obtained from animals.