From the category archives:

Tool of the Trade

Tool of the Trade: The Crockpot (and: Recipe Open Thread)

by C on 01/19/2010 · 65 comments

We were pleasantly surprised when numerous commenters to our What to Eat When You Have No Time to Eat post started mentioning the crockpot — we thought it was our dirty Midwestern secret. But it truly is one of our best tools in the kitchen, and if we’re preparing dinner (beyond boiling water) it’s pretty much all we can manage on work days. (Pictured: Hamilton Beach 33967 Set ‘n Forget 6-Quart Programmable Slow Cooker, available at Amazon.com for $58.)

If you don’t have one, here are the reasons we love it:

The food is amazing. Moist, falling apart, delicious. It’s particularly great for recipes involving spices, as they tend to soak in.
You don’t have to totally know what time you’re coming home. Recipe directions frequently say things like “Cook 6-8 hours on low” — and we often find that if it cooks for 10 hours it’s just fiiiine. (And we have a super old crockpot that does not have a “warm” function.) If a meeting goes long, or if you end up bumping into a friend on the way out, or if you just need another half hour to get home — it’s cool. Whenever you arrive home, dinner will be there waiting for you.
Prep is, generally, easy. We’re a fan of simple recipes (we’re posting one of our favorites below) that take very little prep — more intricate things exist, but for many recipes the most difficult part is measuring out the spices, which can be done the night before.
Clean-up is, generally, easy. Particularly with the advent of crockpot liners, cleanup often consists of a) removing the food to serve you and your family and eating it, b) after dinner, removing the leftovers (if any) and packaging them up, c) discarding the crockpot liner, and d) rinsing the crockpot. Done. No baked-on goo to scrub at, or soak, and the dirty dishes are minimal.

Some possible misconceptions:

You need a family of four to use one. Nonsense — even if you’re just serving one the leftovers are awesome.
The food turns to tasteless mush. Again, this is not our experience. Keep in mind, if you want to serve something like chicken cutlets, the crockpot is not your friend — chicken tends to fall apart and shred in the crockpot — but otherwise, how tasty your meal is depends on how tasty the recipe is.
They’re expensive — not true! Most crockpots are $50-$100. Just make sure you get one with a removable stone container (our very first crockpot, 15 years ago, did not have one) but otherwise, it’s pretty easy.
You can only make stews. Again, not true. Last night we made the filling for enchiladas — over the weekend we made a whole roast chicken. (The meat was falling off the bone — delicious.) We also frequently make pasta sauce or soup.
They’ll burn your house down. We admit, the idea of leaving an appliance on all day worries us a bit. But you leave your TV plugged in all day, right? And we have never burned down our house (or heard of anyone else burning theirs down with the crockpot), for what that’s worth.

Readers, what do you love about your crockpot? What is your favorite recipe or recipe source? (Our favorite is after the jump…)

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Tagged as: crockpots, eating, food, recipes

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Tool of the Trade: PDF Factory

by C on 01/13/2010 · 14 comments

in Tool of the Trade

We don’t know about you, but for the past few years we’ve shared a printer with a group of people. We frequently prefer to read things on paper rather than online — especially if we’re marking something up or comparing documents — and so it’s annoying when we get to the printer to discover that someone has taken part of our printout, or we thought we printed seven or eight documents and can only find some of them. Did we forget to print the other docs? Did someone take them unwittingly? Who knows. (Pictured: hacked printer, originally uploaded to Flickr by jez.)

As a solution to these problems, we’ve been a fan of a program called PDF Factory for a while now. The idea is that instead of printing directly to the printer, we choose the option to “Print to PDF Factory” instead. A new window opens, and you can see what’s in your budding PDF file. You can move the pages around, and when you’re done you can save it to PDF or print all or some of what you’ve just created.

It doesn’t sound that useful, we know, but here are some examples of how we find it useful:

- Printing Excel documents – we can see exactly what the page looks like and what’s cut off or too small to read, without running back and forth to the printer numerous times. Ditto for printing web pages – you can see exactly what’s cut off and what’s wasting paper (such as a “Comment here” link and nothing else on the final page).

- Making a “package” PDF file that’s useful for later – for example, an e-mail that comes with five or six hyperlinks in it. You take the time to print the e-mail as well as open the web pages, and print them all — and it comes out to about 35 pages or so. When you eventually print those pages, it will be a 35-page “job” — no one else’s papers will be stuck in between yours. Depending on your printer, you can also have all 35 pages automatically stapled, or printed double-sided. Furthermore, you can save all of those 35 pages as a single file, which is handy if you a) lose your package, b) want to refer to it again, or c) want to pass along to a superior for easy printing.

- Printing personal documents. If we’re printing a personal document, we tend to stick it near the end of a PDF Factory print job; that way we can better guestimate when it will be shooting out (and make sure that no one else picks it up by accident).

The program offers a free “trial” version that does not expire — the only catch is that it prints “Printed by PDF Factory” on the footer of every page. The paid version is only $50, though.

Do you use a product or tool that makes you more efficient, or makes your working life better? Write to us at editor@corporette.com to let us know. To see previous “Tool of the Trade” posts, click here.

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Tagged as: PDF Factory, printing

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Tool of the Trade: The Wrap

by C on 10/26/2009 · 21 comments

in Fashion,Tool of the Trade

We were thinking last week of the multitude of uses for the wrap, of which every woman should buy one or two to keep at the office. (Pictured: Made to order fabric shawl from Nitscreation, available on Etsy.com for $15-$30.) In addition to being a great way to keep warm during the summer (when air conditioning goes into overdrive) and the winter, they can be used to:

- Fold for use as a pillow for a power nap

- Add more color to your office, either thrown across a visitor’s chair or folded on the back of your chair

- Warm your legs when wearing a skirt, using as a lap blanket

- To add length/coverage to skirts when working alone in your office… Maybe it’s just us, but: when we’re working behind a closed office door, we tend to put our feet up on the desk and otherwise sit in positions that can be troublesome with a skirt (particularly A-line). And, of course, we’ve been embarrassed at least once when our secretary opened the door without knocking, or when that guy down the hall mistakenly opened our office door, thinking it was his own. Sure, we could stop sitting like that, but instead we tend to compensate by wrapping the scarf around our hips in order to add length to the skirt and to keep it closer to our body.

- To touch hot objects. Last week, we had to smile when we got one reader’s triumphant e-mail about her run-in with the hot office copier:

All alone in the office in the middle of the night, the copier broke. I took apart the machine to unjam the paper, but a mechanism had bent out of shape. Always one to listen to my mother (“don’t stick your fingers or a fork into the toaster while it’s plugged in! you could electrocute yourself!”), I struggled to improvise pliers out of non-conductor office items. I tried accounting tape ropes, inkless plastic pen wedges, and almost gave up–until I remembered the silk scarf around my neck. Wincing, I looped it around the mechanism and pulled–and it snapped back into place! Everything worked out and I finally left the office with all materials produced and the scarf none the worse for the wear! I can only thank myself, really, for matching that scarf to my shoes at the last minute this morning as I ran out the door!

Love it! A wrap would work just as well in this circumstance, we think. (And hey, we’ve all tried to fix the copier/fax machine/printer by ourselves in the middle of the night. It’s part of the fun of the job.)

Readers, what other uses have you found for wraps? We know there must be more…

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Tagged as: shawls, wraps

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Tool of the Trade: Facebook’s Privacy Settings

by C on 07/20/2009 · 16 comments

in Business Etiquette,Fashion,Lifestyle,Tool of the Trade

Facebook continues to grow in popularity, and it’s now entirely possible that your coworkers, bosses, former teachers–as well as your real friends–will see everything you post on there. Or at least they will if your privacy settings aren’t set just so. By setting things up properly, though, you can prevent everyone but a handful of people from seeing:

pictures that other people tag of you (because your friends may not have the same aversion to posting drunken pictures of you as you might),
status updates (because maybe you don’t want that guy you only vaguely remember from high school commenting when you post a sarcastic status update about being excited for another long day at the office)
your phone number, IM screen name, etc.

and more. (It seems to be easier to set up a “yes” group rather than setting up a “no” group — this way you don’t have to remember to add people to the “no” group as time goes on. Furthermore, if you’re like us, Facebook has become a bit like a high school reunion and office cooler party all at once, and while your number of “Facebook friends” has grown to stratospheric levels, the number of real friends has remained somewhat, well, small.)

Because this can be a bit confusing, we thought we’d post a primer on how to set your privacy settings… after the jump.

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Tagged as: Facebook, privacy

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Tool of the Trade: ShopStyle

by C on 12/08/2008 · 3 comments

in Fashion,Organization,Sales,Tool of the Trade

If you normally consider yourself “crazy busy,” the holidays can change the environment to crazy with a capital K. There are presents to be bought for seemingly everyone, and no time to troll the stores looking for that perfect gift. (Even with the later holiday store hours!) The answer for those working women confined to the computer for most waking hours: use ShopStyle.com, which not only does a complete survey of women’s clothing, but also men’s clothing, kids’ clothing, and home goods.

Here’s how it works: Let’s say your mother is looking for the perfect new purple v-neck sweater. In the search box, type “purple.” Then, using the drop-down menu, select “Sweaters” and then “V-neck” (we’ve highlighted them in blue on our screenshot, below — you can click the picture for a larger view). Voila — 111 options of v-neck purple sweaters are available right now. You can further refine your choices by store (in case you only want to get your mother something she can return to a local store) or by sale percentage (’tis the season of the sale, after all). You can also refine your choice by price, so you don’t have to drool over $500 sweaters. (We’ve also highlighted that section in blue, as well.)

Once you get your selection refined, you can see more detail on each sweater by hovering over the sweater with your mouse. It will tell you which sizes are still available, and will also let you set up a “price alert” on the off chance that item goes on sale.

The result is that you can quickly run a search for items you know your loved ones are looking for — doing a very thorough survey of what’s available right now — and all on your lunch hour. Handy!

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Tagged as: holidays, ShopStyle

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Tool of the Trade: FedEx.com

by C on 10/27/2008 · 0 comments

in Tool of the Trade

The most junior person on the team — whether woman or man — frequently gets assigned the more secretarial duties, such as FedExing letters, contracts, briefs, and document productions to the same people over and over (and over) again. (And, instead of re-delegating the secretarial task to the secretary, the junior person often ends up doing it themselves — either because their secretary has already left for the day or because they don’t trust their secretary to do it correctly.)

With FedEx.com, though, there’s almost no reason to even delegate the task of the FedEx label — it automatically prints a mailing label for you. The lettering is perfect — no need to write extra slow or ask your secretary to try to jam two typewritten lines onto one. Better yet, the program has bells and whistles your plain old mailing label doesn’t have: for example, it will remember previous addresses and the details of those previous addresses, such as whether there’s an internal billing code that should be assigned to that shipment. If you FedEx things to the same 4 people repeatedly you can create a “Group” and it will automatically print a mailing label for each of the 4 people. The program also will automatically e-mail you when the shipment is delivered (with information such as who signed for it), or e-mail you a head’s up if there are delivery problems.

The account is free — all you need is your company’s 9-digit FedEx account number (type it in the space we’ve highlighted yellow — the blue space is for your internal billing number), a clear pouch, and a laser printer (to print the bar code clearly) and you’re good to go.