Cooking is an essential life skill that you need to know in order to survive. While cooking can be easy and fun for some, others find it difficult to enjoy cooking, especially when they have less than ideal skills or little time. Cooking at home can reduce your household bills, so it’s important to learn how to do it right.
Cooking doesn’t have to be difficult. It can be simple, quick, easy, and painless if you learn the right tricks to do it right. Here are a few food hacks to help you cook.
Buy A Slicer
If you want to easily cut food, the best thing you can do is purchase a mandoline slicer. Not only can it help you make food faster and easier, but it’s also ideal for those who aren’t skilled with a knife. With a slicer, you can slice fruits and veggies so that you can the perfect size each time. Kitchen accessories are key for hacking your cooking and cutting your cooking time in half.
Use What You Can
Because you’re not a professional chef, you might not have all of the items in your kitchen that you think you need to make a great meal. If you look around your kitchen and think, you might be able to come up with a solution if you’re in a pinch. For example, if you want to cook bacon and eggs, but you don’t have a clean frying pan, you can use a waffle iron instead. Getting creative is an essential part of spicing up your cooking. You never know. Maybe your family will enjoy waffle iron bacon instead of stovetop bacon.
Similarly, if you have an egg slicer, you can use it to slice softer food items like mushrooms and strawberries.
Save Food When Possible
Keeping your ingredients fresh is important for crafting delicious meals. There are a few ways that you can keep food fresh. For example, you can prevent apples that have been sliced from browning by storing them in a bowl of water with a couple of drops of lemon essential oil. You can also prevent your bread from getting stale by putting fresh celery in the bag with it.
Make Delicious Substitutions
When you don’t have an ingredient on hand, it’s okay to make substitutions (sometimes). If you’re making a recipe that calls for ricotta, but you don’t have any on hand, you can whip cottage cheese in a food processor. This alternative is actually cheaper as well.
When you start getting good at finding substitutions for ingredients in your recipes, you can start experimenting. For example, when making batter for cake or brownies, you can use brewed coffee instead of water to enhance the rich flavor of the chocolate.
Create A Recipe Book
If you’re someone who doesn’t enjoy cooking but enjoys eating, you might want to look into fast recipes that you can cook quickly. While the hopes are that once you get into it, you’ll enjoy cooking and make it a lifelong hobby, not everyone likes cooking because it can be time-consuming. We all like eating, though!
Find fast meals online that you can make when you don’t want to spend hours in the kitchen after a long day of work. Then, print them out or write them down so that you have a go-to recipe book for your next meal. Make sure to track your recipes so that you know which your family liked and which you can toss into the trash.
When you know which food hacks, whether it’s an ingredient substitution or using another utensil than what’s listed in the original recipe, write it down so that you can remember the easiest way of doing things.
Figure Out What’s Best for You
When it comes to hacking your food to spice up your cooking, it’s best to figure out what works for you. No matter if you’re the chef of the family or simply starting to cook more at home to save money, you can create your own food hacks and continue to use them as you cook more often.
