Use a flat bottomed over sized coffee mug or smallest size souffle/casserole dish…it will shrink on cooking, so dish must be bigger than finished omelet. Give it a spritz of non-stick spray.
An easy way to chop fresh herbs is to put them in a glass, and just cut madly with your scissors until they look as though they’ve gone through the blender. It’s very quick.
If a sauce hasn’t thickened properly, I prefer using a beurre manié instead of a slurry. It tends to give more even results in the gravy. Put a bit of butter in a saucer, add about the same volume of flour. Blend them together thoroughly with a fork. Grab the mixture with the fork and slowly swirl it through the boiling sauce.
Too many people boil the crap out of their hardboiled eggs, then wonder why they have rubbery whites with yolks that are practically powdered.
Perfect Hard-boiled Eggs:
Start with older eggs - those that are really fresh are harder to peel. I’ve heard salting the water well helps too. I always do it out of habit, though I’m not sure how much it really works.
Put your eggs in a pot, then cover them with cold water
Bring water to a rolling boil. As soon as water is boiling, shut off heat & put the lid on the pot.
Wait ten minutes.
Run eggs in cold water until they’re cool enough to handle, then peel. If you’re not planning on peeling them right away, keep running the cool water over them. It cools them down faster than just putting them in the refrigerator, and prevents them from getting over-done in the middle
Something I’ve started doing lately - if you need to chop up canned tomatoes, dump them in the pan and cut them up with the can itself. If there’s already stuff in the pot, scoot it to the side and chop away. Make sure the can is clean, of course. And obviously, this won’t work if there’s already liquid in there!
Hey now, that’s bloody well brilliant! I’m going to do this next time we’re camping! Everyone can put whatever they chose in a bag and we can all have the omelet we like and cook them all at once in one large pot of boiling water - and boiling water is a hell of a lot easier to clean up when camping than a frypan full of egg gunk!
Thankyouthankyouthankyou! (And my son, the dishwasher, also thanks you.)
True enough, especially the chicken stock bit. It was always a bit of a challenge going out for food with vegetarian friends in Eastern Europe, where “vegetarian” generally means “as long as you can’t see animal flesh, it’s vegetarian.”
While I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few varieties of dried beans which may be unusually susceptible to salt, in all dried beans I’ve tried (I also eat many beans, all from dried beans), the salt/no-salt practice doesn’t really matter (except pre-salting may allow more penetration of salt to the inside of the beans – I don’t know if this is really true, but it’s my own superstition, and I think it works, anyway). It’s easy to do a small experiment, anyway, if you’re so inclined.
I’m steering clear of the soak/don’t soak debate, though – while I almost never soak, I think it might be a more personal decision based on availability of cooking fuel/age (dryness) of the bean/relative humidity of the atmosphere, and so forth. I know some very clever cooks who still soak and salt-near-end-of-cooking of their beans as well, people who I really respect, but the debunker in me sometimes wishes the mystique about cooking beans weren’t as magical, or something.
In addition to using chicken or beef stock when cooking rice, try using pineapple juice…Yum!!!
One of the best cooking tips I have run across is when cooking steaks (or other cuts of beef), bring them to room temperature before cooking. Makes the meat much more tender. (of course don’t let the meat sit out overnight or something silly, 10-15 minutes is about all you need. Not recommended for chicken!!)
A baking tip I use to keep cookies from getting dried out and brittle is putting a slice of bread in the container/ziploc bag after the cookies have cooled. I usually only bake chocolate chip cookies and I prefer them moist and chewy. Will definitely try the “double the salt” next time I bake them!
Wonderful tips in this thread! Will also try the “omelet in a bag” trick…
I used to work w/ a girl who used unsweetened coconut milk to cook her rice in…never tried it myself, but respected her cooking, as we exchanged alot of recipes, so would definitely be game.
No kitchen should be without an immersion blender, especially one with a chopping cup. It takes about 30 seconds to chop an onion, and no tears. Plus, it’s way easier to blend soups in the pot than in batches in a full-sized blender (less cleanup, too).
And no kitchen should be without a vacuum sealer, either. You’ll save a ton of money not throwing out spoiled foods (moldy cheese or freezer burned meats amongst other things). The bags also make excellent ice bags – no dripping when the ice starts melting, like with a ziplock bag!
Building on that, buy meat in bulk at discounts stores like Sam’s or Costco, separate into individual pieces or appropriate serving sizes, vacuum seal and freeze for months.
Don’t splash water into a pan of oil to see if it’s hot enough to cook in; use the end of a wooden spoon. If the oil bubbles around it, it’s ready. No splatters that way!
Don’t scrimp on olive oil. Use some of the money you save by better preserving with the vacuum sealer to buy the good stuff – you will be able to tell the difference. I’d recommend ordering it straight from the orchard (our favorite – the Arbequina is to die for).
I met some people who did the boiled omelet thing! It sounds like it would be weird, but it’s remarkably wonderful – especially, as said above, for campouts. The kindly folk who fed me that morning called it “breakfast haggis.”
Never, ever, ever use jars of spaghetti sauce. Or at least, if you do, never eat anything else. After I lived on homemade for years I decided to buy a jar for a lazy day. I couldn’t stomach more than a bite or two – it was SWEET! :eek: Tomato sauce, tomato paste, a little red wine, your choice of appropriate spaghetti herbs. I don’t care if your daddy put Ro-Tel in it or scattered store-brand orange cheese on top. You might think it’s tasty, but it ain’t right, and it ain’t spaghetti.
There IS one exception: take 1 jar of pre-made vodka sauce, which appears to be a creamy tomato-based pasta sauce. Take 2 boneless skinless chicken breasts. Chop breasts into bite-sized pieces; brown with some garlic in a fairly shallow pan. Add sauce. Cook it all up hot. Eat. Thank not me, but my buddy who thought of it.
Also – I’ve never doubled the salt in a chocolate chip cookie recipe, but the last time I made it and fed a cookie to an acquaintance she took a bite and looked as though she’d just seen the heavens open up.
“You… you put salt in here!”
“Well yes…”
“Nobody ever puts salt in their chocolate chip cookie batter. They think it’ll ruin the taste, but they just DON’T KNOW!”
The boil-in-the-bag omelette thing is pure genius; I too will be taking that idea camping.
Here’s a random, kind of obvious tip for cooking meat; generally speaking, cook it really hot and fast, until it’s just done, or cook it low, for a long time, with some kind of sauce on it - anything in between and it will probably be tough and rubbery.
I’ve got one of those stainless steel soap bars - it’s nothing more than an oval chunk of stainless steel, but it really works - washing your hands in plain water while rubbing with steel really does remove the garlic odour.
You can also use a stainless steel serving spoon - just wash the spoon!
Coffee grounds are also excellent for removing onion/garlic/fish odors from your hands. I make kitchen hand soap with coffee grounds and orange oil in it; it smells wonderful and acts as an exfoliant too. But in a pinch, I’ve been known to scoop wet grounds out of the coffeemaker.
