Five Things I learned Since I Started Cooking

1. Mise en Place
As a French speaker, it is an expression that I understood right away. Mise en place means putting everything in place. This is the entire organization of your workplace before starting to cook, including chopping all your ingredients and setting them up in little bowls or neatly organized on a big chopping board. This means to saute or do anything that it says to do in advance. This way when you start cooking your recipe, you do it quickly and effectively and you don't end up burning one thing while looking for another. It's one of those cooking terms that you probably hear all the time on cooking shows but have never really paid attention to.

2. How to Chop
For many this is the most tedious, time consuming task to be done in the kitchen. I used to cut my salad in all different shapes and sizes, which made it not only unsightly but hard to eat. You need to take a class and get a good chef's knife for this(see number 3 for a better explanation). If you are going to invest in any cooking class it should be a knife skills class
because there are certain things you just have to learn hands on. There are also many sites that can help.
Click Here to Learn How to Chop an Onion
Most people hate cutting onions, but learning the onion cutting technique can make chopping them a lot of fun. I have heard from quite a few chefs that chopping onions is their cutting preference.


3. Get a Good Chef's Knife. This is probably the one thing that any chef or instructor has recommended to me. Yes, you have to spend a lot of money for this! Of all the things that I bought for my kitchen, this is one investment that I feel that I got the most use out of.
The brands that I have been recommended are Henckel or Wustoff but I am sure that there are many out there to choose from. A good knife should cost anywhere between 30 and 100 something dollars. There are better ones of course for more. Just make sure to take good care of the knife and never ever for any reason in this world put it in the dishwasher.

4. Don't Get Fancy on Your Friends. Picture this scenario. My friends are over for a dinner party. I decide to make homemade pasta. I make it in advance. My mise en place is ready and I am ready to toss the pasta in a pan for each one individually. They are waiting, they have already eaten the appetizers and are practically eating the furniture. Then, I realize I don't have enough plates. So I serve three people because some is ready and then continue sweating and grunting obscene swear words while trying to make the rest of the pasta. In the end, I join them after they have all finished eating and my sweating forehead and flustered cheeks reveal that this dinner was not as much fun as it should have been for me. Keep it simple. Make whatever you can in advance because when you have a dinner party, that's what it should be, a party. Even for the host.

5. Your Ingredients Count. If you are making quick meals for dinner just to feed the starving kids or find no pleasure in the act of cooking, then ignore this. I have come to the conclusion that Parmigiano Reggiano is not just a flashy name for a type of cheese, cheap olive oil is a lot of the time tasteless and fresh herbs really do taste better than powdered spices.
It's unrealistic to buy everything fresh all the time but spices like fresh rosemary, basil and thyme go a long way. When I do buy spices, I prefer to buy them at specialty spice stores or in bulk because you never know how long they have been sitting on the shelves of the supermarket.

Funniest Girl Ever!

Whenever I want a laugh I watch this video.

Squirt and Swirl

Do you need a new trick to woo your guests? Do you want to add some flavor to your soups? Flavored oils!
You can make flavored oils by mixing any fresh herbs with olive oil in the food processor.
My favorite is rosemary but you can do it with any fresh herbs. It adds taste without being overpowering.

Rosemary Oil Recipe

1. Pull leaves off a few sprigs of rosemary.
2. Place in food processor with a bit of olive oil.
3. Process for a few seconds and then transfer to a squirt bottle.
Use the squirt bottle to squirt a nice swirl design in your soup or decorate your mashed potatoes.
The only downfall with flavored oils is that they go bad quickly. So keep the oil in the fridge for a day or two. I tried to research this, some internet sites say that it is good for 3-4 days but I wouldn't take the chance.

I found a recipe on Emerill's site for cilantro oil.
His voice kind of annoys me but his food always looks so terrific!

This recipe for lemon oil looks really interesting too.

Have fun squirting and swirling your oily designs!

Will be Away for a Few days...

I will be away for a few days. I am going to San Francisco.
Any suggestions?

Art of the Table

Seattle foodies come together. The Art of the Table has a great restaurant concept,
communal dining.

The Weekend Supper Club
A dinner with guests sitting together. Every supper has a different theme. A great
way to meet other guests who like to eat while savoring a dinner composed of local ingredients.
48 dollars for a four course meal.

Sounds great, doesn't it?

Softest Salmon Ever

I am trying to eat more salmon. I need to get some omega 3. All this hype about omega 3 is scaring me. It's some guilt thing. The media makes me feel like I will croak if I don't eat omega 3. My hair will fall out, my teeth will drop like the coins on a Vegas slot machine and I will be an old woman in a rocking chair in the next 5 years. Okay, okay I am sucked in. I will eat some fish!

In a cooking class I attended at The Art Institute, we made poached salmon with a royal glacage sauce (a creamy sauce that took quite a long time to make) but tasted heavenly. We poached the salmon in Ziploc bags.
We stirred up a hot mix of liquids and then poured it into a bag with the fish. The fish was ready in 10 minutes.
Shocked at the simplicity of this, I bombarded the chef with questions. Are you sure it's okay to eat? What about salmonella? Don't you think we should leave it in longer? The chef calmed me down. No, there is no salmonella in salmon (how ironic!).

I decided to try the salmon in a bag technique at home. I thought I would try a different recipe, one that I found in an old issue of Food and Wine magazine. The salad was mediocre, but the salmon was unbelievable. It was flaky, tender and moist.

Poached Salmon Salad with Lettuce and Asparagus

Surprise, Surprise!

Yesterday my fiance told me to wear something nice because we are going to some party at work.
Okay, so I was dressed and ready to go and then he took me to this place and surprise! All my friends were there. A surprise engagement Party! My fiance knew because he had to give my friends the phone numbers but he
kept it a secret! I loved it!
The theme: Brown and Pink
The favors for the guests.... heart shaped cookie cutters.
Check out the lovely desserts!