Operation Stop Cooking: Part 5 - Kitchen wishlist

I've bumped this post up the list because Christmas is approaching, so it might be handy to eye up what you fancy while people are asking for gift ideas. This isn't a comprehensive list of everything a kitchen needs, just the things I find especially useful for bulk-cooking, from stocking-filler stuff to Big Gifts. And I wouldn't suggest anyone rush out and buy the whole kaboodle, just add bits and pieces as time and money and gifts allow. (As you'll see, masses of mine were gifts.) I'm putting them in approximate order of what I'd consider most essential, with a bit at the end of how the hell I fit all this stuff in my dainty kitchen.

Operation Stop Cooking: Part 4 - Lasting Salads

The One Big Dish and More of the Main Bit tend to be heavier slow-cooked foods, rich on flavour, but not much crunch. Some of the Very Lazy Sides bring in a bit of crunch and freshness, but we want more than that and more variety: lovely fresh crisp and crunchy salads, in the same spirit of utterly venal sloth that I've been inculcating for the last three posts. Enter: salads that last!

Operation Stop Cooking: Part 3 - Very Lazy Sides

The One Big Dish has you covered for veg as well, cooking More of the Main Bit leaves you free to make elaborate sides like pomme dauphinoises or hasslebacks should you so desire, but you can also crowd a plate with side dishes with minimal extra work. My definition of Very Lazy Sides is that it takes less than 3 minutes of prep AND that you can get it ready beforehand or throw it together just before you eat - no faffing about with multiple steps. So even Will's Amazing Seared Broccoli doesn't make the cut for a Very Lazy Side, because the broccoli needs chopping and it's about ten minutes with occasional shaking. When I say lazy, I mean lazy. And also delicious.

Operation Stop Cooking: Part 2 - More of the Main Bit

The One Big Dish gives you two complete nights off cooking, but it's also the most freezer-space-hungry option and it restricts your choices to one-pot dishes with cooked veg only. So the next trick up your sleeve is to make more of the main bit of the meal, which is usually the schleppy bit. This takes up half the space in your freezer, and then you only have to make the sides that go with it. (The next post or two will be about Lazy Sides and Lasting Salads, so that even there you're streamlining your cooking.)

Operation Stop Cooking: Part 1 - One Big Dish

 

 The secret to loving cooking more: not cooking

How to make yogurt

I recently read an article which suggested, to my absolute horror, that my friends in the States don't have proper access to real yogurt, only the kind to which sugar and syrups and suchlike have beeen added, an idea I find so upsetting that I have to put it right immediately by teaching you how to make it.

How to make (chicken) stock

Very short summary: after a roast, throw the carcass, some onion, any veg peelings, and maybe bay leaves and peppercorn into a large pot, cover with water, and simmer gently until you go to bed. The next day, drain it, simmer some more to reduce it if you want, done.

Stock cubes are to homemade stock what packet soup is to homemade soup. I hate foodie snobbery so if you don't have homemade stock and some recipe's insisting on it, whatever, use a stock cube - but that is the difference. A considerable one. (Whereas the difference between fresh tomatoes or tinned is generally very minor. Provided you're making a sauce, not salad.) Some recipes are very insistent on homemade stock - the recipes that really need it are the ones that rely heavily on the flavour of the liquid, eg risotto, a broth, French  onion soup, without much else (as opposed to bolognese, which has tons else). But sometimes the recipe writer is just demanding, so if they're also insisting that something has to be pancetta and bacon won't do, or that you must specifically use gorgonzola and no other blue cheese, then take their advice with a pinch of salt. They are living in their own, rainbow-filled unicorn-populated magical ideal world. Bless.

ALL THAT SAID - stock is very, very easy to make, especially if you don't forget about it and nearly burn the house down. Three times, people. Three times.

Freezing (even without a freezer) and some food safety tips

I said that I freeze and freeze and freeze - I've worked out some useful ways to do that (and useful quantities) and learnt a lot about food hygiene from Will's restaurant experience. We now have two freezers: one is part of a fridge-freezer; the other (same size, about waist height) we got for twenty quid off The Daily Info (Oxford's lovely classifieds site) in April, when my endo was coming back and I wanted to be able to more in-advance cooking. We also spent three years living with just an icebox, though, so I'll add what I learnt from that, and also totally ice-zone-free fridge-only suggestions. Whatever you're using, though, HEALTH WARNING: FOOD SAFETY.

Random marinated olives ~ with future flavoured oil

Sometimes I do large quantities of marinated olives in big jars with much planning and special Buying Of The Olives And the Olive Oil; this evening I absentmindedly and sleepily pootled about the kitchen throwing stuff in a jar and literally throwing coriander seeds about the place, all because I'd absentmindedly and sleepily drained too many olives at lunchtime, for salad, and the remaining olives were starting to look all dry and sad in the colander in the sink. It took about ten minutes. It would've taken five, if I'd been less absentminded and sleepy, and hadn't spent quite as much time collecting coriander seeds I'd thrown around. You also end up with amazing flavoured oil.

The Patented Bacon-Pan Cleaning Marrow Method

This is brilliant. You will love me forever. And you will also never have to scrub to the point of ruination a pan in which you have had the audacity to fry bacon, apparently rending null and void all its purported non-stick properties!  Short version: scoop out the bacon and dump in some chopped marrow / courgettes, and leave it on to simmer. Pan is easy to clean PLUS you get a lovely bacony marrow/courgette side dish. WIN!

How to roast garlic

Any time the oven's on 180 degrees anyway, and you have a head or two of garlic about the place, you can pop them in to roast. When they're done, unpeel the cloves, put them in a clean jar, and cover them with olive oil. Voila: roasted garlic whenever you need it, kept safe under the oil, plus roast-garlic-infused olive oil. (Every time you use the oil, top it up with some more.)

Perfect rice

I hated rice as a child. We had this revolting stuff in South Africa called Tastic rice (taking the fan out of fantastic - took me years to work out what they'd done there) and as far as I was concerned, it was like chewing wool.  Unless it was brown Tastic rice, which was like chewing wool with added wood shavings. I knew that in some countries people had rice as a staple food, and by God I pitied them.

How to chop a bell pepper

Maybe this is super-obvious, but I spent several years when I first learnt to cook using a lot of peppers and being baffled at how best to disassemble them. So for anyone else that's puzzled, here you go!

Who wants to make garam and Balti masala?

I learnt to make both these spice mixes from The Balti Bible, which my dad gave me in 1999. I'll be posting a few of the recipes, but if you like curry, and you like cooking, I seriously recommend it. Most of the main-meal recipes use both garam masala and Balti masala, and the side dishes generally get a sprinkling of garam at the end. Nothing compares to the smell (and flavour) of freshly made curry mix; the exorbitant supermarket jars fade to dust in comparison. Little jars of spice mix also make super presents. (Masala means mix.) This is project-cooking, weekend daytimes, holidays: the mix you make will last you plenty of time so you don't mind spending a sunny or rainy Saturday afternoon filling the house with spice smells.

How to make a white sauce (bechamel)

"MOMMEEEEEE! MY WHITE SAUCE IS GETTING LUMPY!" Wail of my teenagehood echoing out the kitchen into the soft air next to the gigantic hibiscus hedge (two storeys high and more, you can lie in the extra-deep bath upstairs and stare out at blooming hibiscus) and Mom runs in from the studio and commits witchcraft with extra flour and rapid stirring, and the untenable white sauce is tenable once more.

How to make a bouquet garni - Megan trick

I spent years of my life painstakingly stripping tiny thyme leaves off tiny fragile thyme stalks, flimsy wee oregano leaves off flimsy tearable oregano stalks, stripping and chopping rosemary... No. A real bouquet garni is a muslin bag in which you pop all your herbs. I believe there is a world in which people have muslin and sew little muslin bags, but I don't live in that world. I HAVE STRING!

 

How to chop onion - chef's trick

Nothing will stop onions making you cry. That is just part of the human condition. But they can be easier to chop and not go slithering all over the place. (That said, a really sharp knife can help lessen the amount of onion spray heading for your eyes, so there is that.)

Chop the onion in half with all its skin and bits on....

 

How to peel garlic - chef's trick

This is actually two tricks - depending how dry your garlic's skin is: the rub-it-off technique, or the knife-side-slam. Credit for teaching me the knife-side-slam goes to my uncle & godfather.