Essential cooking basics include safe defrosting methods for steak and chicken, along with precision slicing techniques. Discover healthy substitutes for common ingredients like cayenne powder or beer to enhance your home-cooked meals.
Frozen bread is a convenient way to enjoy the taste of freshly baked bread. You can also make and then freeze the dough to keep it fresh until you are ready to use it. Store-bought frozen bread usually comes in two varieties: self-rising dough and ready-to-bake bread.
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Kale provides a sturdy green suitable for cooked dishes. It's often used as a substitute for spinach in side dishes, casseroles and soups. Kale is most readily available fresh in spring and fall, but frozen kale is available year-round.
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Whether you never eat meat or are simply trying to cut back for health reasons, frozen veggie burgers offer the kind of kind of quick-but-healthy meal option that takes well to more than one kind of cooking technique.
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The key to perfectly moist brownies is making sure they cook for exactly the right amount of time, says recipe creator Rochelle Palermo in "Bon Appetit" magazine. Overcook your brownies -- even by just a couple of minutes -- and they'll lose that rich, fudge-like moistness.
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Once relegated to become ground beef, tri-tips have gained favor with cooks who use smokers to produce flavorful barbecue from marginally tender cuts of beef. This cut is best cooked medium rare with a pink center; its dense fiber dries out easily and becomes stringy at higher temperatures.
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Baking salmon in aluminum foil packets makes it possible to flavor individual portions separately and the packets help ingredient flavors infuse into the salmon as it cooks. You can, however, cook flavorful salmon in a variety of ways without foil.
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Tri tip is a rarer cut of meat that comes from the bottom end of the sirloin. It gets its name because it is triangular in shape. It is a fairly tender cut of meat and well suited to quick cooking over high heat. While often grilled, you can also cook tri tip in a cast iron skillet.
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Air exposure causes peaches and other light-skinned fruits to discolor and become brown. The oxygen interacts with the enzymes naturally present in the fruit to cause the oxidation. Food-safe acids slow the enzyme reaction, preventing discoloration so your sliced peaches look as appetizing as they taste.
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Swai fish is catfish farmed in Southeast Asia, but sold in American stores as affordable packaged fillets. It is closely related to basa fish, a type of catfish, and can substitute for it or for flounder or tilapia in recipes.
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Melt-in-your-mouth, flaky buttermilk biscuits are a comfort food that often evokes warm, happy feelings. Though delicious with eggs or used for breakfast sandwiches, biscuits can be enjoyed any time of day and go well with salads for lunch or soups and stews for dinner.
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Hotdogs are a perennial favorite for cookouts or large kids' gatherings. Having to grill large quantities of them all at once is a challenge, however, and using a large roaster pan can solve that problem. The roaster gives you two choices, boiling or steaming.
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A 12-ounce beer can range in calories from 140 to 200, and a light beer averages 100 calories or more. While it can add flavor to food, beer also increases the calories in a recipe and may add alcohol, depending on how it is prepared.
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When it's impractical to use the temperature advised in a recipe, such as an 800-degree oven used for baking pizza, home cooks can sometimes produce similar results by changing the cooking time accordingly.
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For some outdoor chefs, cooking chicken turns the grill into a hot seat and a relaxed outdoor meal into a fire drill with refreshments. Getting chicken done means getting it dry, at best, or burned, at worst.
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Tri-tip steaks are a coveted cut of beef due to their rarity and flavor. In a July 2010 article for "The New York Times," Mark Bittman writes that there are only two tri-tips in an entire cow. Cut from the bottom of the sirloin region, the tri-tip's thickness and marbling produce a richly flavored steak.
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Moose is one of the most richly flavored game meats, and if you're fortunate enough to bag one -- or have a hunter in the family who has -- their sheer size guarantees you'll have lots of opportunity to learn how to cook it.
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Cooking with wine presents a conundrum for parents, whose instinct is to never let a child consume wine or other alcoholic beverages. Many recipes call for cooking wine, which enhances the flavor of sauces and gravies. Wine is also used in marinades, as a basting liquid and to deglaze a pan.
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Ground from dried red chile peppers, cayenne has been used to spice up meals for at least 9,000 years. Cayenne gets its heat from capsaicin, a substance that acts as a pain reliever. Cayenne is a common ingredient in many Cajun and Creole recipes, as well as Asian and Mexican foods.
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Part of the fun of going to a new restaurant, or trying a new kind of food, is learning about new and exotic ingredients. This is especially true for Westerners eating Asian food, with its diverse culinary cultures and its whole new world of unfamiliar colors, flavors and textures.
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Original Velveeta Shells & Cheese is a product from Kraft Foods. It is similar to macaroni and cheese, but it includes small shell pasta instead of macaroni and creamy Velveeta cheese sauce instead of a powdered cheese mix.
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