Food Prep Tips for Efficient Cooking

All cooks learn cooking tricks and techniques to create cooking shortcuts or to enhance a finished product. Here are some tips to make food preparation more efficient and enjoyable.

Garlic: Garlic tends to burn easily, so it is advisable to add it at the end when we sauté it with onions or other vegetables. To easily peel a large amount of garlic, you can bake the entire bulb in the oven at 300F until the individual cloves just start to open. Garlic will make the yeast less active, so be careful when adding it to bread recipes.

Spinach: When cooking fresh spinach, wash it well and then place it in a skillet over medium heat and stir gently until softened. The water washed from the leaves is enough to cook it. Serve with butter and a squeeze of lemon juice.

Basil: Basil will spoil quickly if refrigerated. Store at room temperature by placing the basil in a glass with just the stems in the water, like a bouquet.

Soy sauce: Soy sauce can be used to flavor and color the sauce. Just add a couple teaspoons in place of the salt when you make your sauce.

Mashed potatoes: To make fluffy mashed potatoes, add a pinch of baking soda along with the milk and butter.

Chilli Peppers: Wear disposable rubber gloves when cutting hot chili peppers to prevent your hands from getting burned. And be very careful not to get any juice near your eyes. If you are cooking a dish that calls for hot peppers and want to make it milder, remove the seeds as they contain most of the heat.

Fish: Soak frozen fish in milk before cooking to remove the fishy taste.

Cheer up: Recipes sometimes call for zest, which is the finely grated rind of a lemon or other citrus fruit. For added convenience, store the skins of lemons and other citrus fruits in the freezer for when you need to add flavor to a recipe.

Cheese: If there is mold on the outside of the cheese, just cut off the moldy part before using it. Cheese can be frozen although the texture will be different after freezing. In that case, it’s excellent cast.

Homemade soup: The soup can be thickened by blending a portion in a blender and adding it back to the pot. The soup will be more flavorful if you saute vegetables like onion, celery, and carrot in olive oil before adding broth and other ingredients. When you have small amounts of leftover vegetables, sauce, meat, and pasta, store them in the freezer to add to your homemade soup.

golden meat: Dry meat well with a paper towel before cooking for best browning.

Herbs and Seasonings: When using your slow cooker or cooking any dish for a long period of time, add fresh herbs about an hour before the end of the cooking time. Dried herbs and spices can be added at the beginning. Be careful when using seasonings because the flavors will become more concentrated during the cooking process and you can always add more if needed. When cooking beans, always add salt last or they will get tough.

Pasta: Cooked pasta should not be rinsed unless it is being used on a cold plate.

Rice: When you’re too busy to pay attention to cooking rice on the stove, cook it in the oven. Use the same proportions: 1 cup of rice to 2 cups of water; place in a covered saucepan and bake for 45 min-1 hour at 350F.

Hopefully these tips will come in handy and add to your enjoyment of cooking.