Cook a Perfect Medium-Rare Steak in a Beer Cooler

We've shown you how to get started with sous-vide cooking before, and even how to do it on the cheap, but this video and guide from The Food Lab's J Kenji Lopez-Alt shows you how to get a perfect medium rare steak by cooking it in a beer cooler and then finishing it on the stove—and why you'd want to.

The "steak in a beer cooler" technique isn't new in itself, Kenji explained how to do it at Serious Eats back in 2010, and our primer to sous vide cooking followed their example pretty closely. Still, it can be tricky to get right, and Kenji walks you through the process in the video above in great fashion. If you have the money or the desire to pick up a real water oven like the $300+ Sous Vide Supreme, it can take some of the guesswork out of this for you, and it'll maintain your water temperature without you having to check on it or adjust it, but the beautiful thing about using a beer cooler is that it's insulated enough to hold your water temperature for a few hours without you doing anything to it.

As long as you get the water to the right temp first—by adding either boiling (to bring it up) or cold (to bring it down) water to a large volume of it—you can cook a few steaks with no problem, and hold them at the perfect temperature for hours before serving. Once your steak is up to temp, you can sear it in a hot skillet for a couple of seconds to get that delicious crust on the outside—just don't sear it too long or you risk overcooking the interior. When you're all finished, you'll have a steak with a great crust on the outside and that's perfectly medium rare from edge to edge, without that ugly strip of well-done ringed around a tasty center. Hit the link below for Kenji's full guide.

How to Cook Your Steak Sous Vide in a Cooler | Serious Eats

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Keep Sunscreen in a Cooler for Better Comfort and Effectiveness

If you're going to be out in the sun all day, sunscreen is your friend. However, warm, slimy, and runny sunscreen is a very unpleasant friend. Protect your skin and make putting on sunscreen more comfortable by keeping the bottle in a cooler bag.

This tip comes from the Be It Ever So Humble blog, where Mrs. Mordecai writes:

I put the sunscreen in an insulated lunchbox and kept an ice pack in the top when we were away from home. Not only has the sunscreen remained effective through the summer (we have had NO sunburns this summer, hooray!), it has been much nicer to put on. I hate putting on warm, oily, slimy sunscreen.

As a bonus, the sunscreen is always corralled in one place now, and it's easy to grab if we want to take it with us.

Toss your sunscreen in the cooler when you head to the beach not only to prevent the sunscreen from becoming gross and separated, but also to keep it from losing its effectiveness.

Keeping Sunscreen Cool | Be It Ever So Humble via Parent Hacks

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Vintage cooler cabinet

My wife and I found an old sewing machine cabinet at a flea market and decided to turn it into a cabinet to hold iced beverages on our patio.  Although the cabinet  was in bad shape cosmetically (much of the veneer had peeled off) , it was structurally sound.   Someone had already removed the sewing machine which was fine, since we didn't need it for our purpose.The first thing I did was to finish removing the veneer that was barely hanging on.  Using a scraper, I simply ran the scraper blade under the veneer and that which remained came off easily.  The veneer on the top and the lid was still tightly attached, so I re-glued a few loose edges to keep it from coming loose in the future (photo 1).

The next thing was to build a platform for the cooler to sit in.  I selected two boards from my scrap pile and screwed them into the bottom of the cabinet (photo 2).

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