Thursday, April 26, 2012

Learn Some New Tricks To Cooking

Developing your culinary skills is simple, as long as you do your research. You can enjoy experimentation while you learn to cook, in order to develop your skills. These tips will help you expand your cooking expertise and allow you to try new things. These tips are here to help improve your skills easily. Tying a turkey with a string is called trussing the turkey. This process tucks the legs and wings closer to the bird's body, which allows everything to cook more evenly. If you do not do this, the wings or legs will burn easier. Never use oil when you are boiling pasta. Try not to let any oil get in the pot when you are boiling water to cook your pasta. The oil will transfer to the pasta. This will leave the noodles slick, which means any sauce you put on them later will not stick.
TIP! Get more out of your small kitchen appliances by considering alternate uses for them. Waffle irons can make a great grilled cheese sandwich or sunny-side-up egg, for instance, and your coffee maker make a wonderful stand-in for a kettle to heat water for tea, soup, oatmeal or anything else that you just need to add hot water to.
If you are trying to lose weight or lower your cholesterol, try to decrease the amount of fat in your diet. Unnecessary fats are contained in butters and oils. Nonstick cooking sprays are a great substitute which ends up giving you the same result except in a healthy way, as opposed to the oil which is unhealthy. It is important to keep your items fresh, so always store your perishable items, sugars, flours, etc, in sealed, airtight bins. Keeping food fresh and bug-free is simple with these containers. These containers can be bought at just about any store. If you're tired of sauteing the garlic, only to have it burn, try slicing it into strips instead of mincing it. It is much less likely to burn that way and you can always cut it down into smaller pieces after you have finished the saute, if you need to.
TIP! After you have cooked a piece of food in the oven, you should give it several minutes to rest before serving. The last thing that you will want to do is serve any part of your meal that is too hot, which will ruin its overall quality for the person you are serving.
Make good use of leftovers by throwing together a wok full of tasty fried rice. Day old rice tastes best in stir fried rice because of its drier taste, but fresh rice will also work. Just add slightly less water than normal. Fry the meats and veggies in a bit of oil, then add the rice and season with soy sauce, garlic, ginger and other spices. Utilize these suggestions to build up your skills in the kitchen. Experiment with each of these ideas at least once. It is a great idea to practice these ideas in order to perfect your cooking techniques. You can quickly improve your culinary skill by utilizing these suggestions.

Friday, April 13, 2012

The Lunch Time Musings of A 17 Year Old

There is a place that every child dreams of, one time that remains sacred, it’s the mention of this spot that itches at the minds of grade-schoolers, and is the vicinity where immature crushes, childish torments, and the realities of life slap each generation’s slew of youth in the face. Through the heavy scents of overcooked meat and the feel of the thin and soggy pieces of bread, reside the memories of the survivors of the public school system. Once, I too strode the orange carpeted halls of Griffin Creek Elementary, to make my way to the dirty blue linoleum patches and whitewashed outer reaches of the cafeteria, where I too—like the generations before me— left some of my childhood innocence behind.

Everyday my mom would make my lunch, this meant I didn’t have to wait in line for it, and in turn that meant I could get a good seat. Through the socialistic system the first grade employed, it was heavily recommended that we sit with our class. I always sat by my friends, and seeing as I was a thick glasses wearing Amazon girl (as I spent much of my youth viewing the tops of my peers’ heads) my friends were also—in some respects—strange. Together we sat at the head of the table and ate our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches like dainty queens and kings. For that, I earned an unnamed respect from my peers. On my blurry thrown I demanded fair treatment, once kissing a boy to prove that he was appreciated, once cutting my hair to match my tormented friend’s boy cut, and once searching though trash cans to find a missing watch.

The plastic tables and bouncy yellow cheese of the Griffin Creek Cafeteria are still like vivid colors of a Crayola set painted across my memories and dreams. I remember the Friday fifty cent ice creams where I unwittingly had my change pillaged from me. I am still haunted by the tiny red speck that sat high on a far wall, that everyone called Larry the Lost Gummy Bear, and the ghost stories spread by the older kids about the chocolate milk being cow’s blood (we still all drank it anyways). In order to preserve our eternal glory, we all had our turn carving our names in the green paint of the cabinets. The bloody knees, fistfights, and “no-run” tag games were no match for those twenty minutes of growing up. Everyday fighting the bullies and the bossies, acquiring new vocabulary words such as ‘rad’ and ‘crap’, having bouncy cheese contests, and attempting to schmooze the cafeteria ladies for the big piece of pizza became a part of life for the common grade-schooler. So now, where ever life decides to take us, we can all know that at one point all of us kids were on common ground.