Cooking can be Fun

Cooking can be fun, especially when you have a plan!
How many times have you asked the question, “What’s for Dinner?” Well, sometimes you have it all planned out. Other times you don’t. On the days when you don’t, that’s when people tend to make bad food choices and also waste unnecessary time in the kitchen or shopping blindly for ingredients you may or may not need.

A good way to get around this is to plan things out in advance. Come up with two weeks worth of dinner menus and shop for the ingredients at the beginning of each week. You can find recipes in cookbooks or come up with some of your own. However, if the recipe is in your head, it could help to write it down in its entirety. That way you won’t forget any of the ingredients. There are few things that are more frustrating than being in the middle of a recipe only to realize you don’t have what you need.

Invest in a Good Set of Knives

A good set of knives is easily the most important thing that you could have in the kitchen. That and a large cutting board. A lot of people buy the least expensive knives they can find. If you want to learn how to cook and be as efficient as possible in the kitchen, skimping on the knife set is not a good idea.

Visit your local home store and check out their knife display. Most of the knives are locked up but you can probably find a salesperson and explain to them your needs. They’ll let you hold them so you can judge how they feel.

Don’t buy a knife just because it is expensive, however. The grip and balance may not be what you need. Test out knives that are in all different price ranges. There is nothing wrong with buying something inexpensive, as long as it feels good. A good set of cooking knives is essential to being a good cook!

Top chefs seem to really have it together when they are preparing meals. When we watch them cook, they don’t scramble around the kitchen looking for last minute ingredients. Everything always seems to be right in front of them.

The French have a term for this – mise en place. This basically means “preparing the ingredients”. You chop and measure things out in advance. It may seem as if this will lengthen the cooking time. But it actually shortens it and helps make your food come out better.

Not convinced? Consider this. How many times have you left onions or garlic to sauté in a skillet, only to realize that you need to add the mushrooms ASAP but they are not cleaned or chopped yet? And by the time they are chopped, the onions are a burnt mess. Well all this could have been prevented if you prepared the ingredients ahead of time.

So, what’s for dinner?

So, what’s for dinner? Do you know? Sometimes it’s fun to shake things up a bit. If you find yourself cooking the same things all the time, it could be that you need try something new, you just don’t realize it. But just as you may be in a rut with the things you could be cooking, you may be looking in the same places to find your recipes.

Is your favorite cookbook getting a little stale? Try searching online instead. There are plenty of food oriented websites. Or, if you want to try cooking in a different cuisine, do a search for that cuisine. For example, if you want to find easy Thai food recipes, type in the search phrase “easy Thai food recipes” and you should be directed to a website that will help you out. This is a good way to shake things up.

Me! Learn How to Cook?

Do you know how to cook? Do you want to learn to cook? Well, maybe you think you don’t have what it takes. But consider this. You may already have the skills and you just don’t realize it. If you can operate the microwave, boil water, and make toast you may already be further along than you think. Granted, those are just simple things to do in the kitchen. But they form the basis of more complex dishes.

With a microwave you can warm up microwave meals. If you can boil water, you can make pasta. If you can make toast you can also make things like English muffin pizzas and bruschetta. You can cook these simple foods to help give you confidence and to help you learn that cooking is nothing more than a series of steps. Make it a point to learn one new simple skill or recipe at a time. Before long, you will have an arsenal of recipes you are good at.