How Important Are Oven Temperatures? Oven temperatures are a tricky thing to nail down and you don’t want to get it wrong or else you’ll be sick at home with under cooked food or your whole meal will be burnt, right? How important is it that a chicken thigh be cooked at 375° Fahrenheit, or […]
Talk about a popular fish these days, branzino (sometimes spelled bronzino) can be found on more and more restaurant menus and is showing up in many of my favorite fish markets and supermarkets. We find it served as a whole fish with head on or as fillets in restaurants but sold mostly as a whole […]
Steamed Potatoes With Lemon Juice and Herbs Recipe One of the downsides of boiling potatoes is that quite a bit of their nutritional value goes down the drain along with the cooking water. You can bake the potatoes, but even using a microwave this can take a long time. Steaming is one fast way of […]
More Steaming Mistakes and How to Avoid Them This is Part 2 of How NOT to Steam Foods. If you want to read Part 1, click here. Mistake #5 Covering the Pan Loosely If you think that you are steaming in a vessel without a lid, or just loosely covered with a piece of parchment, […]
How NOT to Steam Foods Steaming is arguably one of the healthiest ways to cook because no added fat is needed. It is also a very gentle method as foods aren’t knocked around by boiling water or stirred over high heat. Rather, the steam gently penetrates and cooks all foods at around 212ºF, the boiling […]
The Importance of Good Kitchen Equipment Before You Start a Recipe Mistake #6 – Not Having the Right Equipment As part of reading the recipe and getting your mise en place together, you should also have inventoried your cooking equipment. While it is acceptable to make some substitutions with equipment – using a sauté pan […]
More Mistakes Home Cooks Make When Starting a Recipe Mistake #4 – Not Prepping Your Ingredients Almost as important as making sure you have all your ingredients is making sure that your ingredients are cooking ready. How many times have you started a recipe only to realize you need a chopped onion or diced carrot […]
Before You Even Think of Starting a New Recipe, Read This Mistake #2 Not Giving Yourself Enough Time I cannot stress this enough: just because recipes say that they can be made from start to finish in thirty or forty-five minutes does not mean that a person who is unfamiliar with the recipe or the […]
What A Recipe Is Before I talk about how not to start a recipe, I want to take some time to talk about what a recipe is. According to Miriam Webster, a recipe is “a set of instructions for making something from various ingredients.” The second definition is “a formula or procedure for doing or […]
Common Mistakes When Seasoning With Salt Salt is critical for bringing out flavors in the foods we cook. One of my problems with eating out, especially at good restaurants, I find chefs often over salt their dishes. I’m not sure why and this would be a great topic for another article but I find it […]
I'm a work-at-home dad who enjoys cooking, learning everything I can about the culinary world and sharing it with you. To learn more about me... Read More
How to Grill Your Turkey on a Gas Grill
Something Different – Grilling Your Turkey I wanted to share with you a novel way we cooked our turkey one year while we were still living in Park City, Utah. We grilled it on the barbecue. Now I’m sure many of you are saying to yourselves, “RG, get real. We’ve been grilling our bird for […]
Turkey Buying and Cooking Tips With Thanksgiving right around the corner, I thought you might enjoy talking turkey including some tips on choosing a bird and how to cook it. You would think cooking a turkey is not that big a deal but looking at all the articles in the current November issues of cooking […]
Moist Thanksgiving Turkey Tips
How To Roast A Perfectly Moist Turkey A whole turkey, perfectly cooked, juicy in thigh and breast and richly caramelized all over is a thing of beauty, but it is, indeed a rare bird. Turkeys are large, they have a big hole inside them. They are thick in some places and thinner in others. They […]
