Eggplant as a stand-alone dish doesn't respond well to freezing. With porous, spongy flesh combined with natural tannins, you inevitably end up with a thawed piece of mushy vegetable matter with a bitterness that overtakes its nuanced flavor. But prepared eggplant dishes like baba ghanoush can handle it.

You can cook two things in the oven at the same time as long as they cook at the same temperature or you pay close attention. Oven temperatures are set to achieve dual objectives: heating food all the way through so it is appealing and safe, and achieving effects such as drying and crisping.

Cuts of beef -- from the delicate tenderloin to the flavorful but leather-tough shank -- vary widely in flavor and tenderness. Often, a tough large cut contains one or two small muscles that are unusually tender, which can be separated out by a careful meat cutter.

Toaster ovens can be a great way to broil steaks indoors, without heating up the kitchen. Toaster ovens do not use a lot of power, and, because they aren't burning charcoal or propane, are greener than an outdoor grill in terms of emissions.

Rival is the manufacturer of many kitchen appliances, including the countertop roaster. This device was primarily designed to roast meats such as chickens, beef and pork roasts.

You can prepare doughnuts, the ultimate in indulgent, sugary confections, a number of ways, including both yeast-raised and cake-like doughnuts. Traditionally deep-fried, cake doughnuts start with a flour batter made with baking powder, sugar, milk and butter.

A pressure cooker can cook sweetened condensed milk, transforming it into caramelized milk, or Dulce de Leche, in less than a third of the time it would take to make the sweet dessert spread traditionally in an open saucepan. A pressure cooker uses steam and pressure, at 15 lbs.

Aluminum foil can be a handy way to contain the mess of broiling food, especially meat. Fat drippings that are caught by the foil can be easily thrown away without a lot of messy cleanup.

As a somewhat fatty cut of meat, lamb shoulder is best cooked slowly, either roasted or braised. Unlike the lean leg of lamb, shoulder is laced with fat and tissue that melts into the meat when slowly cooked, resulting in very tender, succulent meat, though you can trim away some of the outer fat if you prefer.

Lobster tails are often sold raw and frozen in the shell, but it's less common with whole lobsters. They're ordinarily pre-cooked and then blast-frozen at the processing plant, to preserve the fresh and delicate flavor of the lobsters and make them more durable for shipping and storage.

If you have purchased frozen catfish fillets, you might be wondering what you can do with them. You can thaw catfish fillets to fry them, but you don't need to thaw them, unless the fillets were frozen without breading and you would like to bread them. Instead, fry your frozen fillets as is.

Puff pastry is pre-made flaky pastry dough that you can cut into pieces to form into mini-shells for appetizers or desserts. Making the pastry into shells lets you create individual delicacies that are easy to both serve and eat.