What you need to know about the top 10 essential tools for your kitchen. A client of mine just bought a second home near a lake. She faced the same problem all cooks face when stocking a new kitchen – what are the basics necessary to prepare meals for her and her family? What are the absolute essential kitchen tools? One of my favorite websites, Bon Appetit, posted an article titled 10 Essential Tools for Beginner Cooks. Here are my notes on the ‘Essential 10’. The first item is a 10” stainless steel skillet. “Stainless steel” because you don’t want anything that will chip, stain, or break. Personally speaking, ‘non-stick’ surfaces are a ‘non-starter’ for the “essential” list because this will be your workhorse tool. Nothing against ‘non-stick’ (I have a small one for my morning eggs) but they do need a bit of extra care to protect them from…
You’ll be blown away how much easier it is to BAKE your bacon. I may be stating the obvious but frying bacon is a real hassle. Everyone loves the taste, hardly anyone complains about the smell of bacon cooking BUT, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know a single home cook (myself included) or chef who actually likes to watch bacon fry. Here’s the scenario: you’ve invited everyone for brunch and decided that your menu will include bacon – which, to be fair, is an integral part of most brunches. You need to make bacon for a group of 8-10 people but the last thing you want to do is stand over a spitting frying pan cooking enough bacon for the crowd all while watching your stovetop go from shiny and clean to a total greasy mess. And, the bacon curls – won’t stay nice and flat and some parts…
A little “insider” trick that keeps your salad from wilting. The fact is, a slightly wilted salad isn’t bad for you. But, it looks terrible on the table and it certainly isn’t very appealing either. There’s nothing worse than a soggy salad to ruin a beautiful meal. When you have guests over, not only do you want your food to be appetizing and tasty, but you also want your guests to be eager and happy to try every dish you serve – including the salad. It should be no surprise that as a restauranteur for more than twenty years, I had the same goals. I was always on the lookout for tricks and ideas that made our food taste great and look the very best. Some of the “tricks” I picked up from my chefs (they always had the best ideas). Others were simply things that are passed along from…
Make your kitchen functional and safe with sharp knives that can get the job done! Maybe you’re thinking it’s time to get a nice block of knives for the kitchen. I couldn’t agree more. MOST kitchens need an upgrade. But let me put a stop on snagging those knife sets you see on special at the department store (usually on sale). You know the ones I’m talking about: the nice wood block set with eight or more knives, kitchen scissors, and steak knives to boot. Save your money. Those sets are a complete waste. It’ll be better to purchase what a chef would get: what I call “the essential 5”—everything you need to get just about any job done in the kitchen. Watch my video so you can see what these look like and how they handle. Most important is what we call a “chef’s knife.” They come in different…
A quick recipe for Parmesan Crisps that will also introduce you to the Silpat non-stick baking mat. Here’s a recipe that you can literally use for anything – add to a salad, as a topping for a dish, or just for snacking. One very nice benefit of this recipe, if you haven’t been already introduced to the “Silpat,” here’s your opportunity because they will make your cooking/baking life so much easier. Silpats are made from fiberglass and food-grade silicone. Use them with a high-quality baking sheet, and NOTHING will stick to them. They can be washed and reused thousands of times. They’re approved by every international agency that watches out for food safety, and they’re Kosher certified. Every professional kitchen has been using these products for years. In fact, they’re so commonplace among chefs and bakers that saying the name ‘Silpat’ is like saying “Kleenex” or “Xerox”. There’s nothing else…
If you love cooking, then technique matters: the right way to prepare jalapeños for your recipe. One of the things I’ve learned about home cooking: you don’t have to actually be a chef to cook excellent meals. But, I have so many chef friends that I have cooked with that I’ve been able pick up a trick or two. One of the most important culinary techniques I have learned from them is that the little things really count. “Details detail details!” as a chef-friend often says in her kitchen. And some details are easy to miss, but once you see it, you’ll never forget. For instance, deseeding and chopping jalapeño peppers. Sounds simple enough, right? Maybe you just thought that if a recipe calls for jalapeño peppers that it was going to be spicy. So, you washed them and cut them like anyone else. Perhaps that’s okay for a Super…
You’ll be ready for just about anything if you keep these items in stock at home at all times. I keep my pantry well-stocked at all times. I owe that habit to years in the restaurant business. One of the chef’s assistants always ran a thorough checklist of the pantry at the opening and closing of the restaurant. It would be unthinkable to open the doors with a ‘short’ pantry. The reasons for keeping a well-stocked pantry at home are not so different than for a restaurant. At a restaurant, it’s a matter of efficiency. If you run out of ingredients, you’ll have disappointed customers. At home, let’s say you have guests coming over for lunch or dinner. Do you want to run out of groceries just as you start cooking? If you keep these 7 items in your pantry you’ll be able to create all kinds of meals at…
Sophisticated but incredibly easy: smash some olives, crush a bit of garlic, shred some bread, and you’re good to go! Want to bring something different to your 4th of July party that DOESN’T need refrigeration or special care? A while back, I found something genuinely fabulous in my favorite place to find fabulous things – Bon Appétit Magazine. It’s a perfect recipe for things like 4th of July parties where light, savory snacks with friends really hit the spot. There’s only one part of this recipe that needs a bit more explanation – smashing olives and crushing the garlic. I know that there are all sorts of ways to do this, but my video gives you some easy ways that work for me. The rest is that simple. Ingredients: 4-5 ounces of drained green (I prefer Castelvetranos for their flavor) unpitted olives 3 medium-sized cloves of garlic 1 lemon ½…
A quick and easy way to save your refrigerated herbs – they’ll keep for a week! We depend on the excellent flavor of our herbs to enhance our cooking. I have many friends who wait until the day before they need them to purchase fresh leafy herbs like cilantro and parsley. The reason is sensible – you want them as fresh as possible. The problem with leafy herbs is that they tend to dry out in the refrigerator. After about three days – not so good. But even if you’re a flavor nut – as I am – going out shopping every time you need a bit of parsley is not at all practical. We’re all so busy these days – right? I mean, if you have the time, great! But if you don’t, what are your options? A friend once remarked that you should take care of your leafy…
Add a kick to your salads with home-made croutons – and it’s so easy. I love crunchy carbs, don’t you? The specific carb that’s on my mind right now are croutons. Okay – so not exactly health food. I think of home-made croutons as a sort of “love food” – for the love of cooking and entertaining friends. They can be used so many different ways – perfect for topping salads and crumbled over grilled asparagus just to name a few. Diving back to my restaurant days, croutons originate from France, early 19th Century, when an unknown chef had an idea to put small pieces of toasted bread crust into food. It was such a great idea that fragments of croûte (crust) found its way into all sorts of recipes, and eventually salads. Now, of course, we can buy croutons in all shapes and sizes; ready and prepared for soups,…
Kitchen sponges can be as dirty as your toilet! So clean or replace them regularly. I like smart people, but intelligent kids make me smile. Even when the smile is a tad uncomfortable. My friend and I were sitting in her living room chatting over coffee and cheesecake when her teenage daughter, Isabella, literally bounced into the room with good news: she got an A+ on her biology project. “What was your project about?” I asked. “Bacteria in the home,” Isabella answered. Mom didn’t look too happy. Without skipping a beat, Isabella explained how she and her lab partner set out Petri dishes all around her home and the homes of four other families (with permission, I assume). After exposing the dishes to the open air for a few hours, the young researchers sealed them and waited to see what kinds of bacteria grew. “We found 22 forms of mold…
How to chop leafy herbs AND keep all that wonderful flavor for your recipe. Open a recipe and you’ll find a call for a leafy herb – chopped. To be honest, unless you’re just using the herb as garnish (or really know what you’re doing), you always want to chop herbs like basil, parsley, cilantro. That’s the way to release the oils and flavoring into your recipe. But here’s the problem. Most people tend to over chop their leafy herbs – to the point of mashing all that extra goodness right into the cutting board. You’ve seen it, right? Chop away and, boom, green liquid stains all over the board! Here’s the thing – that green liquid is telling you that a lot of the vital flavor from the herb is NOT going into your recipe but has stayed behind. What do you do? I’m going to help you rescue…
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