I am not a great cook.
I burn bread, overcook fish/chicken/leftovers, don't like to measure ingredients, often don't read the entire recipe and wing the last 25%, make dishes that taste like... nothing, undercook pasta/rice/any other grain you can cook, and only make things I would like to eat (aka, it's sweet or spicy and often nothing in between).
But I cook nonetheless. A lot. Many days, I make breakfast, clean it up, make lunch, clean it up, make dinner, and finally... clean it up.
So taken with a grain of salt, here's 6 (yes, a completely random 6; the other 4 will be continued next week) of my 10 Kitchen Tips for the Cooking Impaired:
- Use a larger cutting board. The bigger the better. Because this sucks. And yet I do it all the time.
- Use a larger pan. When you're cooking meat, especially. Something about the heat circulating around the ingredients and not stewing in its own juices. This article puts it all nicely. How many times have I tried to smash 4 chicken breasts into my little saute pan and wondered why it took forever? A lot of times. Here is a better layout.
- No-knead bread is my lifesaver. Need a sandwich? Need some french toast? Need some pizza? Need some kind of food in a hurry? This dumb bread, which takes no skill and about 3 minutes to start, is the best go-to ingredient I've found.
- Parchment paper. Use it. Love it. Put in under anything you're going to bake: the bread mentioned above, cookies, pizza, cakes... and never wash your pans again. Okay. Maybe you'll have to wash them, but at least they won't look like this.
- Sharpen your knives. It is a pain in the ass to cut with unsharp knives and most of the time, you won't realize why your chopping/mincing/dicing is so lame. This video will show you how to sharpen your own; hopefully you'll give them a tune-up after each use.
- If you cook meat (which we do, a lot), you might have a little can or jar on your stove to pour the grease into. When you have this nasty grease can full of your bacon and hamburger fat, don't take it out to the garbage with your hands and arms full of your purse, workout clothes, dance shoes, and Goodwill donations while carrying your beloved Nokia 3320 cell phone in your mouth because you will drop that awesome stripey-cased phone into the jar o' goo and the T-Mobile guy will laugh at you when you bring it in to be fixed because cell phones can't handle that much bacon. Put it in a plastic bag, okay?
