Mastering the kitchen involves understanding healthy fat profiles, variety-specific grain preparation, and safe food handling techniques.
Rojak is a vegetable and fruit salad commonly served in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. The vegetables and fruits in rojak are tossed with a thick, brown sauce. Rojak sauce has the consistency of melted caramel and a complex, sweet, salty and spicy flavor.
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Rice is a low-cost, fat-free and cholesterol-free food. Rice with a removed husk, germ and bran is known as white rice. When cooking white rice for multiple people, you must consider the serving size of the rice before and after rice is cooked. One serving size of cooked white rice equals a 1/2 cup.
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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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Pre-cooking pasta allows you to do the bulk of preparation before a dinner party. When party time rolls around, you only need to reheat the pasta with a quick plunge into boiling water. Restaurants use this technique to get pasta entrees to the table faster.
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Prebiotic and probiotic substances can help you maintain the health of your digestive tract by affecting the bacteria in your gastrointestinal system. Honey is not normally a probiotic substance, but it can serve as a prebiotic.
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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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Dried bean curd, also known as dried tofu or kyadofu, is tofu that has been freeze-dried to extend its shelf life. Dried bean curd sheets are typically sold in sealed packages, and are commonly available in health food stores in the United States.
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All-purpose flour works in many baking situations, but it's not right for every cake. Flour contains protein, which forms gluten when mixed or kneaded. Gluten gives yeast breads their chewy, rustic texture, but it makes cakes tough and dry. The lower the protein content of the flour, the more tender a cake.
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You can save time and energy by cooking a ribeye roast in a convection oven. Professional chefs have used convection ovens to prepare roasts for many years, but you can now get a smaller sized convection oven for home use.
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On busy weekdays, a quick, fuss-free chicken dinner can be a lifesaver. Your oven is a good option for preparing these meals -- while dinner cooks, you can turn your attention to steaming or microwaving some vegetables, cooking rice or pasta and setting the table, all in under 40 minutes.
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Oil, particularly unsaturated oils like canola, olive, peanut, or vegetable oil, go bad quickly. The traditional enemies of oils -- heat, light and oxygen -- can turn it rancid in a short time. While rancid oil may taste bad, it doesn’t normally make you sick, at least not in the short term.
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Mincemeat or minced meat, is meat that has been finely chopped and separated. This is the same technique used in ground meats. Usually the meat is run through a grinder that cuts and separates the meat fibers and then is run through several more times for a tender ground meat product.
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Homemade donuts let you bring this favorite treat home, and if you skip the fryer in favor of the oven, you can keep the fat and calories under control. While specialty doughnut pans are available, you can make donuts in your favorite flavors in the oven on a standard cookie sheet without any special equipment.
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Cooking a turkey on a Weber gas grill may require a few more steps than traditional oven roasting, but results in a much crispier and well-browned skin over juicy turkey meat. Weber gas grills vary in size and accessories, but even the smallest should be able to accommodate a whole turkey.
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When you season ribs before preparing on the grill or in the oven, you ensure that the meat retains its delicious flavor. Because ribs have a lot of fat and bone, make sure you purchase plenty if you are preparing the meat for a large gathering. A hungry adult may consume as much as 1 lb. of ribs in a single sitting.
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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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When it comes to coating chicken for cooking -- particularly for fried chicken-- flour is the common go-to, but if you want very crisp, crunchy skin, cornstarch is the better option. Cornstarch is a pure starch often used as a thickening agent for sauces and soups, and is commonly used in Asian cooking for stir-fries.
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Brownies dry out easily, especially if they weren’t stored properly. Even when kept in an air-tight container, brownies tend to lose their moisture within a couple of days. Fillings such as fudge, pudding and other moist fillings tend to lose texture as well.
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Most cookie recipes call for all-purpose flour. A very few require cake flour or bread flour; however, sometimes you need to work with what you have on hand.
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When a cake recipe or box mix calls for vegetable oil but there's none in the pantry, canola oil seems like a handy substitute. Canola oil substitutes for vegetable oil in most recipes, including cakes, while keeping just a few principles in mind.
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