Cooking & Baking Tips: Healthy Fats, Grain Prep & Substitutes

Mastering the kitchen involves understanding healthy fat profiles, variety-specific grain preparation, and safe food handling techniques.

Hot oatmeal cereal

How to Cook Old-Fashioned Thick Rolled Oats

MayoClinic.com advises eating more grains, such as those in old-fashioned thick rolled oats. When combined with fruit, the cooked oats make for a complete, nutritious breakfast. Rolled oats are a source of complex carbohydrates and essential vitamins and minerals, and they are low in fat.

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Red beans

Can You Substitute Kidney Bean for Cannellini Bean?

Understanding the difference between the cannellini and kidney beans can help you decide if a substitution is possible, depending largely on the recipe you are using and how the beans are prepared. The beans have some similarities that make them interchangeable in some dishes.

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Emptying Ingredients into Frying Pan to make Italian Sauce

How to Neutralize the Sugar in a Tomato Sauce

Sugar adds sweetness to tomato sauce and offsets any strong or tart flavors. Adding too much sugar to tomato sauce is not only unhealthy, but also can make the flavor unappetizing. If the sauce is too sugary for your tastes, add lemon to neutralize the sugar rather than throwing out the sauce.

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How to Identify Bad Olive Oil

Bad olive oil, also termed as rancid, is affected by a variety of factors. All olive oil goes bad at some point no matter what you do to prevent rancidity. The length of time it takes to go rancid depends on its exposure to air and light and the temperature at which it is stored.

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How to Cut Fresh Rosemary

Cut fresh rosemary from your herb garden to use its aromatic leaves in any of your chicken, fish, pork or meat dishes. The leaves this woody-stemmed plant produces are also tasty in breads, butter, soups, sauces and vegetable dishes.

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Nachos

How to Cook Nachos in the Oven

It's easy and quick making nachos in your oven. The dry heat of your oven melts the cheese while keeping the chips crisp. Using extra-thick tortilla chips in this recipe keeps the chips from breaking when you make the nachos as well as while eating this game time or anytime snack.

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Rice Soup with Mushrooms and Spinach

Adding Cooked or Uncooked Rice to Soup

When it comes to adding rice to soup, there is no one way to do it. Whether to cook the rice first depends on your recipe, when you want to add the rice and the variety of rice you are using. Ultimately, you want the rice to be done but not cooked so long that it turns your soup into a gummy concoction.

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Bowl with cooked Jasmine rice

How to Pre-Cook Rice

Pre-cooking rice is not so much about how to cook the rice, but how to store it. You follow the same cooking instructions as you would for immediate consumption, making sure to cook the rice to a fluffy texture and avoid a gummy outcome. Once the rice is cooked, store it properly so it's ready to use in dishes.

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How to Make Spanish Rice With Sofrito

Sofrito is an aromatic mixture of a few different ingredients chopped into very small pieces. It usually includes tomatoes, onions, green peppers, cilantro and garlic, but different products or recipes leave out one or more of these. Usually the sofrito is cooked down into a concentrated paste.

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