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Ten Tips to Help You Cook to Beat the Clock
1) The supermarket
salad bar may seem like an expensive way to buy fresh vegetables,
but you're not going to use that much. Sometimes it makes sense
to buy already cut bell peppers, onions, celery, and carrots; cauliflower
and broccoli broken into florets; and cleaned spinach.
2) Also convenient
are packaged cut vegetables such as shredded cabbage for coleslaw,
trimmed salad greens (usually called a gourmet or mesclun salad
mix), and sliced mushrooms.
3) If you have
a butcher in a supermarket or in a real butcher shop, befriend him
or her. Ask the butcher to pound pork tenderloins or chicken breasts,
so that they can be sautéed much more quickly.
4) Even without
butchers, there are shortcut options in supermarket meat cases.
For example, more convenient than boneless and skinless chicken
breasts are chicken tenders, strips of boneless and skinless chicken
breast meat ready for cooking in dishes like chicken fajitas or
easily cubed for chicken stir frys or chicken curry.
5) Shelled shrimp
saves a great deal of time but cooked shrimp not so much because
shrimp cooks so fast. Also, reheating cooked shrimp usually overcooks
them, making them rubbery.
6) Peeling and
cutting one or two large potatoes takes less time than preparing
three or four smaller ones. (The same holds true for onions and
tomatoes.) To facilitate peeling potatoes, trim off both ends, then
peel from the middle to each end all around.
7) The easiest
way to peel, then chop or slice an onion is first to cut off a thin
slice from the top and bottom. Then halve it lengthwise. The peel
from each half comes off easily. With the flat side of the onion
half on a cutting board, chop or slice as required.
8) Much of
the chopping in my recipes is done in a food processor. The principle
technique is to put big chunks of (not whole) onion or cucumber
in the bowl of the processor, then pulse, meaning to turn the machine
on and off in quick bursts using the pulse bar. This prevents chopped
onions from becoming onion slush. The second technique involves
adding small ingredients through the chute or feed tube while the
motor is running. This enables garlic and chile peppers to be puréed
more finely than if chopped from a dead start.
9) Always use
bigger mixing bowls than you think you need so that you can mix
quickly without the ingredients spilling over. (A large cooking
pot is fine for mixing if you don't have a large bowl.) Once combined,
you can transfer the mixture to a smaller serving bowl.
10) Most recipes
call for cooking over high heat. This is how restaurant chefs can
turn out meals in a hurry. In some recipes, I lower the heat to
avoid burning. Since you can't do this easily on an electric stove,
keep one burner on high and another on medium or medium-low (depending
on what the recipe calls for). Then switch back and forth between
heat sources as needed.
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