Cooking Techniques and Kitchen Gadgets

I’m not really a baker.  I make perfect oatmeal cookies (once every three years), perfect chocolate chip cookies (if really bored – Laraine Newman thinks the Joy of cooking recipe is the best, I just use the one on the back of the Nestle’s chocolate bits bag) The secret to chocolate chip cookies is fresh nuts, if you ask me, the quality of the pecans or the walnuts, changes the equation.  Sometimes, if I’m feeling really wild, I’ll make butterscotch chip cookies, same recipe, but butterscotch bits instead of chocolate and totally delicious.

I went through a phase where I made bread (when I was at boarding school in Vermont and there was a Country Store down the road that sold 100 varieties of flour from the grist mill down the road) so it was sort of hard to resist.  And we didn’t have a television, but we had a kitchen in our dorm with a sweet old Wedgwood stove and somehow, the smell of bread, and an occasional roast chicken, made it feel somewhat more like home.  But I can’t really find good flour any more and fresh baguettes abound.

If you think dry and crumbly when you hear cornbread, you're not alone. That's exactly what I used to think. I remember the square cake pan of cornbread my mom used to make. It was so dry, I could hardly speak as I tried to swallow the sticky crumbs.

After much experimenting, I came up with a recipe that is moist with a much finer texture than most cornbread. The batter includes 1 cup of oil. Several years ago I used vegetable oil. As I became a bit more health conscious, I began using canola oil. Now I use walnut oil. Clearly one of the most healthful oils, it is a great source of antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids. Its mild, neutral flavor makes it perfect for using as fat in baked goods. It's a bit more expensive than canola oil, but so worth it for the health benefits it delivers. It can sometimes be found near the the other cooking oils in the grocery store. I find it at my local natural food co-op and the natural food section of the local grocery stores.

Another way to kick-up the nutritional benefits of this bread is to use whole white wheat flour. This flour, which has all the nutrition and fiber of standard whole-wheat flour but with a lighter color and milder, sweet flavor, is milled from a hard white winter wheat berry, rather than the hard red spring wheat berry of traditional whole-wheat flours.

I think I'm taking this cooking business a little more seriously than I thought I would.  You may not actually call it cooking.  It's more Sandra Lee than, say, Ina Garten.  But I think I am truly more Sandra Lee than Ina Garten.  In the days when my kids were actually kids, I got a meal on the table every night.  Sometimes I did a complicated dish, but mainly it was throw together.  And they loved it.  To this day, when asked, any of the three of them will point to my tuna casserole as the finest of meals.

Noodles, canned tuna, canned peas, parmesan cheese, buttered dish. Who couldn't turn that baby out.  In my present circumstance, cooking for one but cooking lots of it for "later", kind of rules out the fabled tuna casserole.  So I'm turning to some of the other family favorite standbys, that actually also involve cans.

Did you know, for example, that a truly delicious way to make sweet and sour meatballs involves simmering a can of  Sauce Arturo with a can of whole cranberry sauce and then dropping meatballs of your liking in, and cooking, is foolproof.  If only there were canned rice.

If you look in the dictionary under the word "impatient" you’ll most likely see my picture a few rows down. My disdain for playing the waiting game is a big reason why I don’t pickle, bake, brew or preserve too well, although I have aced the sauté, grill, and fry like nobody’s business. So you can imagine my dilemma when I first learned about brining meat. There were numerous knuckle biting moments when I had to accept that soaking meat for what seemed like an eternity really did yield a more flavorful, juicy bite. I may not have learned to deal with sitting around doing nothing, but I have certainly surrendered to the divine brine.

Brining is soaking poultry or pork in salted, seasoned liquid prior to cooking. It’s similar to marinating, but this process actually changes the texture of the meat. And it’s very simple. Depending on the brine and the cut of meat, the process can occur overnight or in as little as a few hours in your fridge–and the results are spectacular. The meat is juicy and flavorful, seasoned from within. And the best part happens when you grill: you’ll get that desired smoky char on the outside with a tender, moist texture on the inside. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time achieving both when I grill if I don’t brine.