Hours slaving away in the kitchen to produce a small dish of inedible rubbish, burnt hands and lots of waste and cleaning to take care of afterward. Laughing at your pitiful efforts and crying at the poor quality 'food' you've created. Cooking does come with some horror stories but it need not be like this. In this article, there are a few tips and tricks to getting your skills fast tracked to Masterchef finalist levels.
Fail to Prepare, Prepare to Fail.
The most important thing to remember when attmepting to cook something is to ensure you have ready all the things you will need to cook your delicious meal. This means having the chicken breasts defrosted or the pork chops bought and in the fridge ready. It also means having the spices and flavourings ready too. Don't be tempted to swap one thing that you do have for the spice that you don't have but the recipe specifies. As you go through your cooking career,
you will start to amass a great number of spices and flavourings that you can use. So it will enable you to experiment more and more as more combinations of flavours are at your disposal.
Read your Recipe
To ensure that you get your food exactly how you want it, it is a good idea to invest in a cooking timer or use the timer on your watch. It is important to ensure that you have a good sense of the amount of time your food has been cooking for as it's not nice to eat runny eggs or burnt steak. This simple device will help you time your cooking to perfection. As you start out with the cooking, it is a good idea to follow the times in the recipe but as you progress and develop a sense of how long food takes to cook, you can rely on the timer less and just cook as if it were natural.
Cleaning
The dreaded pots and pans put a lot of people off from cooking. But it shouldn't be feared. After each step of your cooking, simply pop the dirty equipment in the sink to soak so food doesn't dry onto it. The dried on food is difficult to and needs a lot of effort to remove so get those dishes in soak as soon as you can. The other benefit of cleaning as you go is that there isn't a massive heap of stuff to clean when your potato bake/ beef wellington/ pasta bake. Remembering this will make your life easier. Don't be afraid to get your hands 'dirty' either, many recipes that involve marinated meat or baking require that you get your hands involved and manipulate the food yourself. This is a close relationship with food that has been severed in recent times with the growth of sterile boxed food that is simply microwaved for convenience.
Good Luck
Once you've picked your recipe, gathered the ingredients and set the timers, dive in!! Don't be afraid to try any dish you want to because the worst that can happen is burned food and the best thing; tasty dishes all round. If at first you go wrong, don't worry, practise makes perfect and as you go through your favourite recipes, you will find that you can cook them better and better. Once you have this confidence, you can start tweaking the food and cook what your heart desires, changing spices and meats and accompaniments here, there and everywhere.
