Category: Baking/Recipes

“Food, Glorious Food”, unlike the singing waifs in the musical ‘Oliver!’ we do not have to imagine food other than gruel. Gruel; which came first, it sounding nasty or gruel actually being nasty? Setting that aside, we’re going to take a look at upping your game to create some glorious food.

Modern Food Making

Eating may arguably the true American pastime. Cooking used to be a skill that everyone had because without it you didn’t eat. Our cultural evolution introduced massive food options, so that you can hand over your money and you will get stuff to eat. As we all know, this ‘stuff’ will range from the mundane to the amazing, from eth healthy to the life threatening…bound to happen when restaurants literally have names like the Heart Attack Grill!

Cooking at home has begun a renaissance, and as DIY fans we couldn’t be happier. This brings up another interesting issue. Not everyone learned to cook at the feet of their parents as in days past. Now it becomes necessary to self-teach, use the wonder that the internet (occasionally) is to find the tools that will help you up your game.

Setting The Bar For Your Table

We all know the friend neighbor or family member that makes Martha Stewart look like a piker when it comes to cooking…or at least those folks talk a good game. The key is finding a starting point. We have a couple of looks at core items for your kitchen right here starting with knife basics and smart cooking devices to consider.

Consider two things as you chart a path to improving your kitchen game. What do you like to eat? Seems basic, but kind of important, why learn what you won’t enjoy on the table? Then look at the techniques involved. Building Boeuf Bourgogne from scratch might be better to pursue when your skills have been developed. It is worth the wait, but like any skill you want to get a good basic foundation.

A Restaurant Interlude

Yes, the place to find food that someone else put the efforts in to making is a restaurant. You have to like a place that you ask and they bring you things. They also know how to cook. Perhaps not at the drive through. But most restaurants still have someone in the back cooking things up like they are going out of style.

It only seems appropriate that we learn about how they do that, how they bring full meals out in a matter of minutes. This article gives you an excellent look at some of the most popular restaurant dishes and a walk through a variety of techniques, and ideas, that commercial kitchens use.

Breakfast

Breakfast is a great staring point because it will expose you to a whole gamut of basic cooking techniques to master. Cooking bacon in a pan, learning how the heat affects it, how to avoid scorching. Pancakes and French toast for working with a flat grill and learning spatula skills to flip them. Basic sauté techniques when making great, fluffy scrambled eggs by keeping the food in motion in the skillet. Baking biscuits, even from a mix, builds basic oven knowledge.

Pancakes for example, start with a good mix, and get proficient with techniques to end up with a good cake. Then take the next step, build them from scratch. You’ll learn about working through with dry ingredients, how to bring fluids into the mix properly. They’re forgiving, so you’ll get a decent cake even if you miss a step, but still get all the necessary ingredients together.

Hot Meals

The first dinner dish to consider learning is baked chicken, especially a batch of all the same cut, like thighs. Evenly spaced on a foil lined baking sheet skin side up, sprinkled with your favorite seasoning, baked at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. That’s what’s for dinner! Add taters, cut in half, face down in another flat baking dish with a little melted butter, sprinkled with salt pepper and garlic, same cook temp and time, and the meal is ready.

Point being, cooking does not need to be complex. There are so many meals that you can easily put together and bring to the table for you, your family or your friends. Absolutely feel free to experiment. The chicken just mentioned. Try a Cajun spice blend to get some zip, or a smoky barbecue seasoning blend that will open a bunch of flavors. Start with the kiss rule, finding simple recipes that have great flavors, and incrementally advance as you master new skills.

Never Ending Story

The most amazing thing about cooking, is that even for those of us who got an early start and have long hours in the kitchen, there is still more to learn! Whether it is a dish or technique from another country, or the latest and greatest cooking trend, the vistas offered on the food panorama are endless. Wherever your starting point, have a great time advancing your skills, eating the tasty results, and trying new things.

Mmm…meatloaf! Hopefully this dish brings back those memories we can only associate with comfort food as well-known as this. Imagine a college kid, with this great deal. Do all the cooking for a group of 4 and they do all the cleaning. Yes, it created a messy cook, that’s another issue. . So, if you have only been following your mother’s or grandmother’s recipe and didn’t see all the new takes on this dish that has existed since Ancient Rome, you might have missed all the amazing new ways to cook it, like an electric skillet.

A cook’s night off one of the roomies grabbed an electric skillet and cooked meatloaf!? But…but…that’s an oven baked food dish. Well no. In this case it was set right on the metal and carrots and potatoes thrown in on the sides to roast with it. Yes, the bottom got a little crustier than many folks may like, but the idea of using that device for this food has great merit.

Why an electric skillet?

What a modern oven offers is accurate temperature control. Until recently, getting accurate temperature control using a surface heating source, electric or gas, was very hard to accomplish. Unless you have an electric fry pan. That is exactly what it offers, a thermostatically controlled heated surface.

Before microwaves, these may have been the most common device in any kitchen. They still have a place, accurately cooking everything from pan fried chicken to pancakes and French toast…even hamburgers. Which, if you think about it, a meatloaf is nothing more than one huge hamburger with seasonings and other goodies built right in.

Of course you cannot flip a meatloaf very effectively, or without a mess likely. To make up for that, you have the snug fitting lid that comes with the electric skillet. This brings the added benefit of retaining moisture that can be lost if oven baking, and keeping in the heat to cook the upper surfaces.

Avoiding the scorch

If you crank the skillet up to 350 degrees and drop your meatloaf on there you will get a nice crispy crust on the bottom. If you have a rack that will fit into your skillet then you can use that to elevate the meat. If your meatloaf recipe is softer to start with, line that rack with aluminum foil to keep from making deep indents while it cooks.

The other advantage of a rack is that this allows the fats bleed away from the meat. Again, a trade off. Some folks swear by using an actual loaf pan, keeping the meatloaf in contact with all the fats until you remove it before serving. This will make for a moister meatloaf. Some would say a greasy meatloaf. Perspective and personal taste.

Another work around is to fold a layer of aluminum foil and set parchment paper on top for the meatloaf to rest on, This will allow for much of the fat to drain away. It will also reduce the scorching. Drop your temp to 300 or 325, add a couple minutes of cook time and you will get great results. In short, you can avoid the scorching and rendered oil issues with just a small amount of planning.

Breaking with tradition

Since we’re already out of the oven and venturing into new territory, what can you do different? First thing that comes to mind is onion. That’s right, skip the rack and line the bottom of the pan with one-half inch thick slices of onion, peeled and cut across the rings.  Set your meatloaf right on top of the onions, use 300 degrees and in about 90 minutes you have seriously caramelized onions to serve with your meal. Or rack it on some thick cabbage rounds, cook, drain the oil and use them as an incredible base flavor for your next soup or stew.

Moving on with the vegetable world, if you use leaner meats, 90% lean beef, lean ground turkey, chicken or buffalo, you can expand your horizons. Now it takes on pot roast like versatility. Fill the sides with carrots, taters, celery, sweet potatoes, rutabaga…any of the usual suspects you enjoy cooked that way.  This approach will yield juices that can be made into a gravy or sauce, although some skimming of oil may still be needed.

More temp and time tweaks

You can emulate most recipes from a crockpot, or even in the direction of a sous vide. A note of caution on the latter. A sous vide works with complete immersion of the meat in a water bath. This contact, and lack of air contact, allows for lower temperatures than you may want to use in the electric skillet. For example, you could easily cook a meatloaf in sous vide for 4 hours at 140 degrees and your meat is safely pasteurized, fully cooked and good to serve. In the skillet the ambient temperature of the air, with the skillet set at 140, is going to be decidedly less, possibly dipping into the danger zone by health standards.

But low and slow at say 200 degrees will give you a more tender, and juicier meatloaf with a texture leaning toward that of a cooked cased sausage. If your preferences run toward rarer meats you can certainly monitor the interior temperature, watching for standard ranges; 130-med rare, 140-medium, 150-med well, 160 and up-well.

Which sums this up with the thought that an electric skillet is a fine way to cook a meatloaf, with some variables and controls you can use to make a better meal for your family and friends.