Every kitchen is a little different. Every oven has different hot spots, and every stove heats up at a different speed. This can make following recipes difficult: a recipe might say to cook something for five minutes at medium heat, but you might find that your food is still raw when you do that. Learning how your particular kitchen works is integral to understanding your cooking.
On my stove, for example, there is one burner that is hotter than the others - so I use it to boil water for pasta, but not to saute onions. My oven has a hot spot in the back left, so if I make a cake I need to rotate it to make sure it cooks evenly.
There's no sure way to figure out your kitchen. It just takes a bit of time and patience and awareness. So when you start cooking, don't count completely on the recipe to tell you exactly how long to cook things. Take it as a guideline - when you bake, bake for a few minutes under the listed time - if your oven runs hot, it might be done already. When you cook on the stove, keep your eye on your food to make sure that its not burning and that its still cooking properly.
After a little while, you'll get used to it. You'll start to know which burners to use, and how to place things in your oven, and it won't seem like an issue any more.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Saturday, December 17, 2011
What You Need
You don't need a whole lot to start cooking. It's true! Here is a list of things you should stock your kitchen with.
A frying pan. I advise avoiding Teflon. There are great nonstick pans out there that are not Teflon, and some of them are great! I have an EarthChef skillet that is amazing. I got it for Christmas last year and it is in exactly as good shape as the day I bought it - unlike a lot of other pans I have had, it doesn't have gross build-up from burnt stuff. Everything just slides right off of it, which makes clean-up a breeze.
You want to avoid Teflon because it is carcinogenic and flakes off into your food after a while, which is obviously a pretty bad thing.
Never use metal utensils in your pan, especially if it is non-stick. Invest in some wooden spoons, which are seriously cheap, and really handy. I recommend a few, because I always lose mine, somehow.
A good-sized pot. Want to make pasta? You need a pot. Rice? Pot! Soup? Obviously, a pot. Come on, that's a silly question. Even if you're only cooking for yourself, don't get the tiniest pot, because it is really hard to cook pasta in a tiny pot. A 2-quart pan should do you pretty good, I think.
A chef's knife. A really good quality chef's knife is going to run you between $100 and $200. But don't worry! For your everyday use, you can get something pretty good for cheap. My first knife was an IKEA knife that cost me five dollars, and I used it solidly for three years with no problem, as long as you take care of it - I'll get to that in a later post.
The title of "chef's knife" is referring to the shape: it has a blade that curves upwards to allow you to chop without lifting your knife. The tapered point allows you to do more detailed work. While you can get away with just a chef's knife, a paring knife might be a good addition: paring knives are very small and are great for peeling vegetables, picking out bad things (like bruises or potato eyes), and lots of other things.
A cutting board. Look, I'm going to put it to you straight here. Your landlord does not appreciate cuts in the counter, and if you own your place, you're not going to like it either. Get yourself a cutting board! It doesn't have to be huge, just make sure it is large enough to have both hands comfortable on it - you don't want to be awkwardly balancing a vegetable off one end of the cutting board while you try to cut it. I recommend wood cutting boards (bamboo is pretty great), simply because I like the feel of them - but you can get plastic ones for very little money as well.
An oven-safe pan. A pyrex casserole dish, a metal cake pan, whatever. But once you discover the joy of roasting vegetables, you are going to want one! An eight-inch square pan is fine, but you can go up to 9x13 if you're feeling adventurous. I absolutely recommend checking out second-hand shops for pyrex or glass baking dishes. Almost every time I've gone to Value Village, I have seen at least a few. I got mine there for about four dollars and I use it all the time. These baking dishes are thick and heavy and sturdy-feeling, even though they're made of glass. They should be free of scratches and stuff stuck to them, but don't worry about staining, it won't hurt you.
That's it! Were you expecting the list to be longer? Because honestly, you can be up and cooking for less than a hundred dollars, easily. Once you get to more complicated things you might find that you need more - maybe a second frying pan, a vegetable peeler or even a food processor - but to start, to be able to feed yourself, this is all you really need.
A frying pan. I advise avoiding Teflon. There are great nonstick pans out there that are not Teflon, and some of them are great! I have an EarthChef skillet that is amazing. I got it for Christmas last year and it is in exactly as good shape as the day I bought it - unlike a lot of other pans I have had, it doesn't have gross build-up from burnt stuff. Everything just slides right off of it, which makes clean-up a breeze.
You want to avoid Teflon because it is carcinogenic and flakes off into your food after a while, which is obviously a pretty bad thing.
Never use metal utensils in your pan, especially if it is non-stick. Invest in some wooden spoons, which are seriously cheap, and really handy. I recommend a few, because I always lose mine, somehow.
A good-sized pot. Want to make pasta? You need a pot. Rice? Pot! Soup? Obviously, a pot. Come on, that's a silly question. Even if you're only cooking for yourself, don't get the tiniest pot, because it is really hard to cook pasta in a tiny pot. A 2-quart pan should do you pretty good, I think.
A chef's knife. A really good quality chef's knife is going to run you between $100 and $200. But don't worry! For your everyday use, you can get something pretty good for cheap. My first knife was an IKEA knife that cost me five dollars, and I used it solidly for three years with no problem, as long as you take care of it - I'll get to that in a later post.
The title of "chef's knife" is referring to the shape: it has a blade that curves upwards to allow you to chop without lifting your knife. The tapered point allows you to do more detailed work. While you can get away with just a chef's knife, a paring knife might be a good addition: paring knives are very small and are great for peeling vegetables, picking out bad things (like bruises or potato eyes), and lots of other things.
A cutting board. Look, I'm going to put it to you straight here. Your landlord does not appreciate cuts in the counter, and if you own your place, you're not going to like it either. Get yourself a cutting board! It doesn't have to be huge, just make sure it is large enough to have both hands comfortable on it - you don't want to be awkwardly balancing a vegetable off one end of the cutting board while you try to cut it. I recommend wood cutting boards (bamboo is pretty great), simply because I like the feel of them - but you can get plastic ones for very little money as well.
An oven-safe pan. A pyrex casserole dish, a metal cake pan, whatever. But once you discover the joy of roasting vegetables, you are going to want one! An eight-inch square pan is fine, but you can go up to 9x13 if you're feeling adventurous. I absolutely recommend checking out second-hand shops for pyrex or glass baking dishes. Almost every time I've gone to Value Village, I have seen at least a few. I got mine there for about four dollars and I use it all the time. These baking dishes are thick and heavy and sturdy-feeling, even though they're made of glass. They should be free of scratches and stuff stuck to them, but don't worry about staining, it won't hurt you.
That's it! Were you expecting the list to be longer? Because honestly, you can be up and cooking for less than a hundred dollars, easily. Once you get to more complicated things you might find that you need more - maybe a second frying pan, a vegetable peeler or even a food processor - but to start, to be able to feed yourself, this is all you really need.
I'm not a dude!
It's true! I am, in fact, a 23 year old girl. Scandal, right?
So why the fuck am I writing a blog called Dude Cooking Lessons?
Well, I'll tell you: I grew up learning to cook at my mother's side. I cook a lot, and I bake a lot. I can bake a loaf of bread, I can roast a duck, I can intricately ice a cake (okay, I can't, because it is fucking hard and I am a terrible artist, but I get the ins and outs). But those aren't really the cooking skills I use every day. They aren't the things I learned from my mother and my grandmothers. The things I learned from them were way more helpful: how to chop vegetables properly. How to debone a chicken breast. How to put ingredients in a pan and come out with a meal that tastes good, without a recipe, and without poisoning anyone.
These are things that I have found a lot of dudes don't know how to do. Most young boys aren't that interested in cooking, so they're not going to hang around the kitchen by choice - there are videogames and sports to play, or whatever. And, traditionally, that didn't matter - but in this day and age, men are moving out of their parents houses and not immediately getting married and having a wife at home to cook for them. They're out on their own, and they have no idea how to feed themselves. I am constantly answering questions from my friends about how they can eat something other than peanut butter sandwiches and ramen. It was okay to do that in university, sort of - you made it through without scurvy, but now you're an adult. You have bills to pay, and student loans, and you work at a job! You neither have the money nor the time to eat out, and peanut butter gets a little sad after a while. But if you've never stood in front of a stove before, cooking dinner can look seriously intimidating.
Well, I'm here to help with that. I'm here to tell you what you need, what to do, and how to save money and get healthy at the same time. And who knows, you might even find yourself enjoying it.
Just as men are not instantly getting married, women aren't either - now that we go to school and get jobs and drive cars and vote, we don't spend our youth preparing for married life and motherhood. Back in the day, boys would learn to tinker with cars in Shop Class and girls would learn to tinker with stoves in Home Economics (and sew an apron! These are handy skills, people) - now, everyone's learning math and how to analyze literature and other shit that isn't going to help anyone in their everyday life. So while it is more common for girls to learn how to cook, there are still a ton of us who suck at it! So hopefully I can help people of every sex learn how to suck less at feeding themselves.
So take a look, as some questions, and get cooking!
So why the fuck am I writing a blog called Dude Cooking Lessons?
Well, I'll tell you: I grew up learning to cook at my mother's side. I cook a lot, and I bake a lot. I can bake a loaf of bread, I can roast a duck, I can intricately ice a cake (okay, I can't, because it is fucking hard and I am a terrible artist, but I get the ins and outs). But those aren't really the cooking skills I use every day. They aren't the things I learned from my mother and my grandmothers. The things I learned from them were way more helpful: how to chop vegetables properly. How to debone a chicken breast. How to put ingredients in a pan and come out with a meal that tastes good, without a recipe, and without poisoning anyone.
These are things that I have found a lot of dudes don't know how to do. Most young boys aren't that interested in cooking, so they're not going to hang around the kitchen by choice - there are videogames and sports to play, or whatever. And, traditionally, that didn't matter - but in this day and age, men are moving out of their parents houses and not immediately getting married and having a wife at home to cook for them. They're out on their own, and they have no idea how to feed themselves. I am constantly answering questions from my friends about how they can eat something other than peanut butter sandwiches and ramen. It was okay to do that in university, sort of - you made it through without scurvy, but now you're an adult. You have bills to pay, and student loans, and you work at a job! You neither have the money nor the time to eat out, and peanut butter gets a little sad after a while. But if you've never stood in front of a stove before, cooking dinner can look seriously intimidating.
Well, I'm here to help with that. I'm here to tell you what you need, what to do, and how to save money and get healthy at the same time. And who knows, you might even find yourself enjoying it.
Just as men are not instantly getting married, women aren't either - now that we go to school and get jobs and drive cars and vote, we don't spend our youth preparing for married life and motherhood. Back in the day, boys would learn to tinker with cars in Shop Class and girls would learn to tinker with stoves in Home Economics (and sew an apron! These are handy skills, people) - now, everyone's learning math and how to analyze literature and other shit that isn't going to help anyone in their everyday life. So while it is more common for girls to learn how to cook, there are still a ton of us who suck at it! So hopefully I can help people of every sex learn how to suck less at feeding themselves.
So take a look, as some questions, and get cooking!
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