the best cooking advice?
Posted by arif on 11 Jun 2008 at 10:56 am | Tagged as: Get Real, Musings
years ago, when my father was starting to teach me about cooking, he shared with me the single best piece of cooking advice I’ve received:
He said “you have to be patient. The food will get done in the time that it needs to get done. If you’re patient, it will come out well”
And he was totally right. Nothing likes being rushed, but least of all food and I remember that lesson often as I sit there waiting for my onions to get just dark enough or my risotto to be properly tender, or any of the million other things I do in the kitchen that get done in their own time.
Another great piece of advice I’ve had was to start boiling a pot of water when you start cooking - you’ll either need it for your food (thin a sauce, moisten your gravy, etc), or you can make a cup of tea. This has been mostly replaced by my electric kettle, but it still a very very good thing to keep in mind.
What’s the best cooking advice you’ve given or received?
Wait, Yoda was your father? I’m so confused.
In all seriousness, I definitely feel like cooking is one of those things you have to relax into. You can follow a really tricky recipe and read it ten times over, which is not relaxing, but if you’re trying to make dinner again tonight and you want to enjoy it you have to chill. You have to turn the radio on and put some dishes away and think about whether you could maybe boil some eggs and make a nice sandwich with sliced eggs and cheddar and pickle relish for lunch tomorrow. And then stir the onions some more or drop everything because you relaxed a little too much.
I love the Tassajara Cooking book for a kind of general approach to banging around in the kitchen for a while and emerging with a pretty good dinner. After a while, you’ve got roasted anything in all its variations down and you want a recipe for a soup you maybe wouldn’t have thought of.
[...] 17 Jun 2008 at 06:28 pm | Tagged as: Pasta, Vegetables, Vegetarian This was definitely a night for boiling some water while considering my [...]