Advice For Cooking Your Best Meals Ever

Have you ever been at a restaurant and wondered how the food was made? Have you even tried to prepare the same dish at home? Use the following tips to learn how to make your favorite meals, and create new ones, for all occasions. Cooking is an enjoyable hobby for many people.

Make sure you are storing your herbs and spices in a cool, dark space. Many factors can cause herbs and spices to lose their flavor. Light, humidity, and heat can all cause them to lose some of their flare. To avoid this, make sure you are storing your herbs somewhere like a cool cabinet.

When making a stir-fry meal, meat should always be thinly sliced, and cut on the bias. Slicing the meat can take a lot of time and be rather tricky. Remove the meat before it is frozen, but still firm, and slice it at 45 degrees against the grain.

Make sure you spread out your condiments when making a sandwich. Most people rush through the early steps of making a sandwich. They spread their condiments around in the middle rather than making sure they cover the entire piece of bread. Cover your bread from corner to corner with condiments for flavor in every bite.

Saute tired salad greens. If your salad greens have seen better days, dont discard them - saute them! Salad greens such as radicchio, arugula and endive make a tasty side dish when sauteed. Cook them quickly in olive oil, chopped garlic and sea salt. Sprinkle with a little bacon and goat cheese, and you will be happy that you didnt throw away those unused salad greens!

Whenever possible, avoid canned ingredients in your cooking. They have numerous disadvantages. Canned food has lost vital nutrients that you want in order to cook the healthiest possible meals. They also taste different - if not downright worse - than fresh ingredients, potentially ruining your recipes. Finally, canned foods have unhealthy additives - especially extra sodium - that you do not need in your food.

If you are cooking pastries or foods that can get very messy, make sure that you wear an apron at all times. The last thing that you will want to do is to get food on your clothes and have to change before you eat your meal with friends or family.

Instead of approaching cooking as an analytic process, you should try to maximize the amount of fun that you have in the kitchen. Put the music on loud and dance from time to time to enjoy what you are doing. Keeping something fun and casual will reduce errors from anxiety.

Nutrition

Try different liquids in recipes calling for water or milk to add some new flavors to your meals. You could use chicken broth or juice, instead of water. You can substitute buttermilk, yogurt or sour cream in place of the milk. Using liquid substitutions in your cooking can increase nutrition and give a standby dish a new flavor.

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.

If you use the informatin from this article you have the choice of becoming a great cook-at-home chef. Unleash your inner cook and take your meals to a whole new level with these tips. There is no limit to how creative you can be with your cooking, and there are so many options when you combine foods from many cultures.