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.
For those who regard cooking fish as difficult and demanding, frozen pollock is a gift. Delicately-flavored and fine-textured, frozen pollock is customarily cooked without thawing, making it easy for beginning fish cooks to handle.
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Breakfast sausage links are produced from a blend of lean ground pork, pork fat and spices. Generally smaller and milder in flavor than their Italian or Polish cousins, the sausages are sold in two forms: partially cooked that require very little cooking time, and raw uncooked links that must be thoroughly cooked.
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The aroma of roasting rotisserie chicken is enough to send any carnivore into a tizzy. Rotisserie cooking roasts in constant rotation, allowing drippings to fall away from the chicken, preventing it from stewing in its own juices.
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Although initially the cassava plant, or yuca, was native to South America, today farms grow this shrub throughout the world, particularly in Africa. Different sections of yuca work as food sources for humans and livestock, and can also be made into commercial products, such as glue or rubber.
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Instead of using ricotta cheese in your lasagna recipes, you may decide to use a lower-fat option such as cottage cheese. Choose small curd varieties to sneak into your lasagna dish. Additional options that you have for your ricotta cheese substitution include goat cheese, silken tofu or pot cheese.
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Banana squash is the offensive lineman of the vegetable garden, a behemoth that frequently tops 100 pounds and can easily grow to more than 3 feet long. Although its size makes it impractical for most home gardeners, it works in the favor of cooks.
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Opuntia cactus, native to Mexico but now grown in many warm climates, produces two kinds of food: the prickly pear, and nopales or nopalitos, cactus leaves. Nopal is a common ingredient in Mexican and Central American cuisine, and readily available in Hispanic grocery stores.
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Homemade pizza is cheaper, more nutritious and more versatile than the pizza you'd get from the freezer section of the grocery store or the local pizza parlor. The tough part is having the dough prepared and on hand when you want to make pizza in a hurry.
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Ground beef with onion is a flavorful combination called for in a number of recipes. Sometimes -- as with sloppy Joes or beef casseroles -- you can just toss diced onion into the pan with the meat while you cook it. This doesn't work for solid preparations, though, such as meatloaves, meatballs and hamburgers.
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Cabbage consists mainly of delicate, thin-walled cells that rupture when the moisture they contain freezes rapidly. You can freeze cooked cabbage rolls, but it is likely they will fall apart into a soupy puddle when reheating them.
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Cream of Rice cereal is simply rice ground into granules, but it can be a lot more if you know how to work with it. Cream of Rice cooks in fewer than five minutes if you're serving it as a stand-alone dish.
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Known for their sweet, earthy flavor, oatmeal cookies are a popular choice for a homemade dessert. Many oatmeal cookie recipes call for butter is it provides a sweet, creamy flavor and also gives the cookies a soft consistency.
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Frozen cooked shrimp is a super-quick option when preparing weeknight meals, last minute appetizers or late-night snacks. It lends itself well to dishes served cold, such as shrimp cocktail and shrimp salad, and adds an elegant touch to pasta, pizza and stir-fries.
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Chicharon bulaklak is a traditional Filipino dish made from fried pork intestines. Chicharon bulaklak is crispy with a mild flavor that is accentuated when you dip it into a powerful sauce. You can purchase the pork intestines to make the chicharon bulaklak from many butchers for a relatively low cost.
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USDA guidelines recommend thawing meat products in the refrigerator or cold water to prevent foodborne illnesses. But when you're short on time, go ahead and cook chicken straight from the freezer.
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Cumin -- from a plant that is indigenous to the Mediterranean -- brings the musky edge to curries and deepens the flavor of chili. Its seeds are sometimes used whole, but more commonly they are ground into powder. Whole cumin provides intense bursts of flavor when you bite into the individual seeds.
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Unlike its precooked counterpart, raw bratwurst sausage is just what the name implies -- uncooked meat that has to be heated through sufficiently for safe consumption. No matter what cooking method you choose, it must be heated to a temperature of at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit.
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While you really shouldn't "cook" a raw brat straight from the freezer, if you don't have 25 minutes to let the brats thaw in tap water, you can. However, you will need to break an unwritten bratwurst cooking rule to see if they are done; you'll have to poke them with a meat thermometer and allow juices to seep out.
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All ovens cook with both convection and radiant heat, but what makes a convection oven different is that it cooks by circulating heated air with a fan. Convection ovens can be used for baking or roasting; roasting vegetables in a convection oven produces crisp, uniformly browned vegetables.
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The USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline receives thousands of calls each year regarding the safety of frozen foods, according to the United States Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service.
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