#Improving your COOKING SKILLS is quite essential in spicing up your personality and your loved ones. To your spouse, it is a way to rekindle a new romantic experience or re-energizing your relationships. Food keeps your relationships glued. Here are a few tips to help you improve your cooking skills and make you that “mama too good oo”. Optimism:: Being optimistic and determined is the primary step towards improving your cooking skils. This will give you an easy ride towards achieving your cooking goals. You need to identify the reasons why you need to improve your cooking skills. Write them down. These reasons will be your goal, Visualize yourself attaining your goals, these will keep you focused. Understand cooking terms and learning basic techniques:: Understanding cooking terms and basic techniques are key to improving your cooking skills. In order to improve your cooking skills you may need to consult cooking books for new recipe. Most culinary books use terms which are basic to culinary arts which could be staggering if you do not have a pre knowledge of culinary/cooking terms. It is therefore important to understand culinary terms in order to be able to interpret and understand new recipe. Knowing basic culinary techniques is also important in improving your cooking skills because you can build on such basics in developing new recipe and trying out advanced techniques. Always use the freshest ingredients:: The freshness of ingredients determine to a large extent the quality and success of a dish, for instance you cannot make a fresh fish sauce by using stale fish and expect to get a fresh tasting sauce . no matter how much you spice it you cannot have a great tasting sauce. The best way to ensure you are using fresh ingredients is to get them on the day you need them and inspecting the ingredients thoroughly before making a buy. Incase you cannot visit the market on a daily basis; you can refrigerate but must not take long before using up. Incase you wish to freeze your fish and meat, wrap them tight in nylon bags in order to preserve the freshness and flavor. Fresh meat /fish is most preferable for cooking. Invest in cooking tools and cooking equipment:: Most people neglect this area thinking they can improvise. Many people think having a pot, pan, spatula and knife is enough to get things done in the kitchen. People might call this the economical way but if you mean business in cooking, then you should get additional cooking tools and kitchen equipment to assist further and make every cooking experience as easy as possible. Each cooking tool and equipment serve specific purpose. Cooking pots serve for making stew and soup, chef knife are used for slicing while paring knife is used to peel and carve. Try using skillets instead of using pots and pans if budget is an issue. Skillets can beautifully sear meats, it can also be used in roasting and making casseroles. It is best to have a set of kitchen knifes to make slicing and cutting chores faster and easier. If you cannot afford a set you should at least get a chef knife, paring knife and fillet. Know the characteristics of every ingredient you wish to use:: Having an idea on how your ingredient will behave while been cooked will help in planning ahead and deciding the sequence or steps in making your dish. Lets take for instance you wish to cook a catfish stew, you wouldn’t cook your catfish in the stew for too long because you know the fish tissues is to fragile that it will disintegrate if cooked for so long this will guide you to know when to add your fish. Never mind to get messy: Using utensils while cooking is quite fanciful but sometimes you have to use your bare hands actively while cooking, you may literally have to feel your food. Don’t get grossed out at such times you may have to use your hands. There are times creating a mess in the kitchen is unavoidable, don’t freak out, cleaning is part of cooking. Make it a habit to clean the mess you crate when you are done with cooking. Always have it in mind that a clean kitchen is a healthy kitchen. Master simple dishes before moving to advanced ones:: Some times you may come across new complex recipes in culinary books, you may have tried it countless times without success, maybe because of its complexity but most times complex recipes are built on basic recipes and methods. In order to be able to tryout new recipes and even develop your own recipes, you need to understand and master basic methods which will guide you to successfully making new recipes built on basic ones. Timing is everything:: Have you tried watching a baseball game? Observe how the batter hits the ball – there is a proper time when he swings the bat towards the approaching ball to hit it. That is timing my friends. Proper timing is one of the factors for a successful dish. Imagine that you will fry fresh fish on a regular pan. You turned the heat on and poured-in the cooking oil in the pan. You then placed the fish immediately even if the oil is not hot enough. When the pan and oil starts to heat-up, the skin of the fish will stick to the bottom of the pan since the fish sits directly on the metal end. When you try to flip the fish to fry the opposite side, you’ll see yourself scraping the spatula just to let the fish loose. You won’t be in this situation if you only waited for the oil to be hot enough before frying the fish. Develop a sense of timing by knowing when to start and when to stop. Think outside the box: How many times have you heard this phrase? This might sound overused but if you’ll ponder on it and read between the lines you’ll see a whole new meaning that you can apply to almost anything. Sometimes living a square life and following everything by the book is boring. Try to hype things up. Improvise a recipe by adding ingredients or do some cooking experiment and develop a new recipe. Try to combine two dishes and see how it goes. Plan ahead of time: What has this got to do with improving your cooking skills? If you think that cooking starts when the pan is heated, you need to rethink and look at the bigger picture. A good cook should be able to plan a menu. Are you aware on the consequences of poor planning or not planning at all? This is a big waste of time, energy, and money. Planning your menu ahead of time gives you control and allow you to select and purchase only the ingredients that are needed. This also gives you time to double check recipes and ensure that everything is in place. You don’t want to cook a dish if you are missing the major ingredient, do you? Practice over and over again: This needs no explanation at all. I believe that you are determined to be a good cook if you were able to read up to this point. Do a lot of practice by cooking for your family everyday. You are hitting 2 birds with1 stone; you develop your cooking skills while making your family/spouse happy and satisfied.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 10:09:03 +0000
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