Everyone loves the idea of sitting down to a delicious home-cooked meal, but with today’s busy schedules, it can be harder than ever to find the time to put one together. Fortunately, help is out there. The tested advice in this article will help you put together healthy meals for your family in a surprisingly, short time.
Cook your pasta for one minute less than the box recommends. Look at the cooking time on your box of pasta and subtract a minute. If you are including the pasta in a dish, it will cook the rest of the way when you are cooking it with the sauce.
If you are making a sandwich and adding mayonnaise, make sure that you spread the mayo from corner to corner to give you the ultimate coverage and a delicious taste in every bite. Each and every bite that you take should be outstanding, as spreading mayo will achieve this goal when you eat sandwiches.
Damp paper towel and a plastic bag can extend the life of your greens. If you wrap your fresh herbs or fresh greens with a damp paper towel and then place them in a plastic bag, they will last longer. They will normally stay fresh three to four days longer if you do.
When you are seasoning a salad, add a small dose of olive oil in addition to natural sea salt. This will help to give your salad a crunchy appeal even after you add the dressing. Keeping your salad as crunchy as possible will create a feeling of freshness upon consumption.
Rising the dough requires patience and an optimal environment. Don’t just leave the bowl with the dough where it’s not in your way. Create the perfect conditions to get the best results. Find a place with constant, warmer temperatures without a draft. Constantly changing temperature and draft makes the dough rise slowly and unevenly.
Soy products and beans are a wonderful place to get protein if you need to add some to your diet. Both can be purchased at just about any grocery store. A delicious alternative to meat is tofu pan fried with your favorite seasonings. Beans boiled with herbs is a flavorful source of protein.
Roast nuts briefly in the oven and then sprinkle some flour on them before using in a cake to prevent them from migrating to the bottom of the pan. Applying heat and coating lightly with flour keeps them in position in the cake batter and reduces the likelihood the nuts will settle before the cake is done baking.
Use either a steaming or a stir-frying technique to cook your vegetables. These two methods help the vegetables retain both their color and their nutrients, providing your family with a healthier side dish that also looks attractive. Your children, in particular, are more likely to eat their vegetables if they look nice.
Avoid dry sandwiches by making sure the spread reaches every corner of the bread. Whether its mayonnaise or a cucumber cream cheese spread, it rids the sandwich of the dry taste of bread, meat and cheese. A quick dollop in the middle leaves only a well moisturized middle and less flavored and prepared edges.
If you have leftover wine in a bottle from dinner or drinks with friends, you can pour out the remaining wine in an ice tray and put it in the freezer. When you are making a sauce that has wine in the recipe you can drop in a couple of cubes.
To make perfect deviled eggs, ensure the yolk is evenly centered within the egg by spinning the egg on a flat surface before boiling. Place an egg, lengthwise, on the top of the kitchen counter and gently spin it a couple of times. The spinning action helps center the yolk within the shell. This method helps create perfectly-formed deviled eggs.
When a sauce is too thick or too thin, it’s useful to add either flour or water. Flour should be pre-mixed in a little bit of cold water to prevent it from clumping when you add it to a sauce. Water can just be added and stirred in. This is helpful when you want the consistency of your sauce to combine with your meal. Thicker sauces will tend to stick to noodles better than their watery counterparts.
To add a little extra special flavor to a plain vanilla or yellow cake mix, use the liquid from any canned fruit that is packed in water instead of the plain water called for when making the mix. Most every variety of canned fruit around comes packed in syrup or water. Choose a water-packed can of fruit your family loves to make a plain cake extra tasty. Frost the cake using vanilla or buttercream and add the fruit chunks as decoration on top.
Fresh lemons are a very versatile garnish in many recipes, but getting the juice out of a lemon can seem like a huge chore. Rather than pulling out the big juicer, try this trick. Roll the lemon on the countertop for a few seconds, then place it in the microwave on high for 15 seconds. Take it out and cut it open – you should be able to squeeze twice the juice as before!
To keep cookies from spreading while baking, chill the unused dough and cool off cookie sheets between batches. If cookie dough is allowed to reach room temperature before baking, either in the bowl or on the pan, then the ingredients in the dough are doomed to expand. To get a dense yet still moist cookie, just chill the remaining dough between batches and cool an already used sheet in cold water before returning to the oven.
As you’ve seen, cooking a delicious meal for your family doesn’t have to mean spending hours slaving away in the kitchen. There is any number of recipes you can use to whip together a great meal in a short time. Just remember what you’ve learned from this article and soon your family will be enjoying the fruits of your labors.
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Photo credit to Alina Karpenko/Unsplash.
