How To Impress Your Friends And Family With Your Cooking

Were you ever so impressed with a meal at a restaurant that you found yourself wondering about how it was prepared? Maybe youve already tried to repeat the dish in your own kitchen. Use the following tips to learn how to make your favorite meals, and create new ones, for all occasions. Youll have fun learning and youll get to enjoy a yummy hobby!

When you shelve an herb or a spice, make sure its dark and cool. Exposure to heat, light, and humidity can cause them to lose their flavor. Do not expect your spices to last more than a year. Whole spices can keep their flavor for up to five years. If the spices are stored properly, they will stay fresh for a longer period.

When cutting onions, hold a match between your teeth while you cut. Make sure the match is not lit. This will keep those stinging eyes and unwanted tears away. Your experience cutting the onion will be more pleasant if you follow this simple tip each and every time.

Think about buying large beef roasts or pork shoulders to make during one of your weekend nights. After you have this for dinner, store it in your fridge so that you will be able to create many different types of sandwiches, as the week progresses. Maximize your value and limit your expenses by conserving food.

Learn some proper knife-work techniques to make your time in the kitchen safer, more productive, and more enjoyable. Proper cutting techniques not only help to ensure safety in the kitchen, but food cut properly and uniformly looks better (which of course makes it tastes better!) and cooks more evenly. Stop cutting off your fingertips and burning half of the French fries with proper cutting skills!

If you want to optimize the amount of juice that you get from a lime, put it in the microwave for 10 seconds. This will allow the liquid to flow easily when you cut the lime, so that you can add this to your favorite meals. Use this trick anytime you serve a lemon or lime.

One of the greatest things that you can do is to cook with family members or friends. When you cook with someone else, you will be able to pick up on tricks that they implement and will be able to better yourself as a cook. Talk to them to see how their thought process works, to elevate your expertise.

While garlic is a great addition to many dishes, it has the frustrating feature of rubbing off on your hands. An easy way to prevent such scents from adhering to your skin is to rub exposed areas on the stainless steel of your sink. This will clean your hands and keep the smells from permeating whatever food you are handling next.

Nutrition

When making a meal that needs milk or water, try a different substitute to make the dish taste different. When you cook vegetables you can use chicken broth or add beef instead of water. If a recipe calls for milk, try using buttermilk, yogurt or sour cream. Substituting the liquid in a dish can add nutrient content, flavor or both.

To preserve more of the nutritional value of your vegetables dont cook them for too long. As you cook a vegetable, its nutrient content diminishes. Good techniques for quickly cooking vegetables are steaming and stir-frying. Slow cooking has its place, but dont neglect the quicker techniques with their greater nutrition.

You can now begin your journey to being an accomplished chef at home. You can be creative in using favorite recipes and try new ones with confidence. There are so many amazing foods and spices from around the world, so your opportunity to experiment is limitless!