The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share the surprising results of our marinara sauce cookoff competition. We eat a lot of pasta with red sauce in our house.  It's one of my daughter's staples, so we go through a couple of jars of marinara sauce a week.  Our favorite jarred sauce BY FAR is this Giant brand sauce.  Granted, it's their high end white label brand called "Taste of Inspirations", but it is the BEST thing going and in my area, it only costs $4 a jar.  Now that IS more expensive than Prego or Ragu, but the other front runners in our taste test were Rao's and Victoria's and they are both like $8 a jar, which at the rate we eat marinara sauce, would destroy our grocery budget.  So, after some taste tests, we have come to believe that the Giant brand is probably produced by the same people who make Rao's.  It tastes pretty similar.  Are you wondering how it is different from Prego o...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll tell you about the benefits of Kombucha, or fermented sweet tea, and step by step instructions on how I make it at home! There is good scientific evidence that Americans should have more probiotics in our diet.  Probiotics are the good bacteria that live in our guts and help us to digest our food properly.  Almost every culture has a fermented food or two that serve to replenish that good bacteria: Koreans have kim chee, Germans have sauerkraut, folks in the Mediterranean have yogurt, Japanese have natto, which is smelly fermented soybeans.  In the US, we have some foods we think of as fermented, but since we are bacteria-phobes, most everything is pasteurized which kills all of the good stuff.   I have been looking for a good fermented food to supplement our diet without having to buy a bunch of expensive probiotic pills.  First I tried making kim chee,...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today I'll discuss using Blue Apron as a Culinary school in a box for your kids.  I would like my kids to be competent cooks.  They are 13 and 15.  I'm not looking for next contestant on MasterChef Junior, but I want them to be able to find their way around a kitchen and make some reasonable meals. To this end, I have tried a bunch of systems with varying degrees of success starting when they were in early elementary school.  Let's see if I can remember some of the highlights: I joined a monthly mail away cooking club that sent these adorable cookbooks and little kid-sized kitchen implements, I created a summer cookbook for the kids to work through with easy recipes for lunch, I've signed them up for pricey classes at our local culinary school, I assigned them weekly nights to sous chef for me, and most recently, I implemented a Kids in the Kitchen Night once a month where they took ove...