Tips for the Starter Home Chef
The Huffington Post (My new favourite online newspaper) ran an article today entitled – Learning to Cook Can Save Your Life: 5 Tips to Get Started
I’ve started cooking heapsand have been reading anything that will help me in the kitchen. Here are the five tips that they suggest:
1. Invest in quality cookware, tools and accessories. Having a sharp, professional-grade knife can cut your prep time in half, is safer to use, and will last you decades. Have trouble finely slicing a tomato or lemon? Try using a quality knife. An end-grain cutting board, quality sauté and sauce pans, measuring cups and colanders are also great basics.
2. Enroll in a class in your community. You may never have thought that learning cooking basics could be so fun! Learning how to pan-fry, par-boil, poach and blanch can making cooking much simpler than you could ever imagine.
3. Designate a home chef. A mentor and inspiration to myself and many Natural Gourmet Institute grads, Annemarie Colbin, always suggests appointing someone to be “in charge” of the kitchen. It makes things more organized, stable and promotes planning. Everyone else preps and cleans!
4. Create your personal repertoire. Having a suite of standard, go-to, memorized recipes for fruits and vegetables, grains and proteins, is critical. Learning to prepare one or two simple salad dressings can make eating veggies far more enjoyable. Although “red wine vinaigrette” may sound imposing, it’s far simpler than you may expect.
5. And finally, give shopping, preparing and cooking quick meals the respect this beautiful ritual deserves. Food, although plentiful and ubiquitous in our country, is a blessing, and treating each food item with respect will change your outlook on food and healthy eating forever.
You can read the full article here
