How frequent do you cook? Do you love your own food?
Home-cooking can be very stressful and sometimes scary for some people. Cooking your own food used to be optional before but it is now a survival skill.
It's not easy to find food, not easy to cook or even challenging to learn the art of cooking.
So how can you survive home-cooking during this quarantine period?
1. Learn How Sautéing Works!
Sautéing is a form of dry-heat cooking that uses a hot pan and small amount of oil. Using this method you can play the fusion of flavors and aroma of the most common spices - garlic and onion. The easiest way to know if you can already add vegetables and meat in Sautéing is when the onion and garlic will start to turn light or golden brown.
The type of oil or fat used in Sautéing can also help improve the taste of your cooking. Olive or Virgin coconut oil can be the healthiest choice, but vegetable oil is common. Butter add drama to your cooking!
2.Do You Simmer or Boil?
Not to be confused with boiling, simmering is a moist cooking method. Simmering is a gentle technique, where the liquid is kept just below the boiling temperature, this is useful for cooking dishes like vegetables, soup, and stews.
But boiling too is a good way to cook your food. Opposite to simmering boiling needs more heat. There are foods that taste better when they are boiled well. The time spent in boiling the food can affect the taste of the food since the aroma of the spices and meat blends well in boiling temperature but make sure to not overcook the vegetables.
3. Blanch It Nicely!
Blanching is a technique typically used for cooking vegetables. This is ideal if you want to keep the crispiness of vegetables like carrot or broccoli. It's also a good way to keep the nutrients in the vegetable by avoiding to overcook it. Vegetables are submerged in a pot of boiling water and cooked for 1-5 minutes depending on the vegetable, for example, baby carrots take five minutes while asparagus will blanch for about three. The vegetables are then immediately transferred to a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking process.
To add taste, salt and pepper is fine.
4. Steaming.
Steaming is a method of cooking using steam. This is often done with a food steamer or rice cooker. This is one of the healthiest way of cooking meat, fish or vegetables, specially when you are trying to avoid oil.
I hope that using these cooking methods, frying is not your only way of cooking. Explore the flavors of the spices and avoid artificial seasonings but salt. Yes you can use salt but don't overuse it too. Go for healthy eating by starting in your healthy cooking.
P.S. Be careful. Cook at your own risk and reward!