Cooking Tips

This page is jam packed with cooking tips. These cooking tips that I got from my mother, family and friends. Some of them I picked up on my own.

• To make my salads very healthy, I make a salad dressing with Avacados. Just blend the avacado in a food processor, add salt and mix in vegetable(s). Great healthy cooking tip!!!


• For my Maraconi or Potato pies, if I don't have any grated cheese and I am too busy to grate some cheese (I don't have a food processor), I add some milk (required recipe amount)to a small pot and put the pot on the stove. I will then add a piece of cheese, season with fresh chopped herbs, salt and pepper etc, egg (optional). I continuously stir the ingredients together and as the mixture begins to get hot, the cheese will melt and the result would be a nice creamy mixture. I will then pour this mixture over my macaroni or potato, depending on which dish I am preparing.


• When you are preparing a dish that requires a lot of eggs, start with three bowls. As you crack the first egg, put it in bowl one and put the shell in bowl two. Now crack open the second egg into bowl three, if it is good, tranfer the egg into bowl one and put the shell in bowl two.
  Do this until you have opened all the required eggs. This system may sound tediuos but it is a safety method. There are times you may open an egg and it is bad. A bad egg is the most awful smelling thing ever and it is poisonous too. Sometimes bad egg maybe the last one that you open so if you do not use this method, you will have to discard the whole set and start over!


• Traditionally in Trinidad and Tobago, we make our curry dishes starting off with some oil in the pot and adding the curry to burn for about 2 minutes. I learned this technique from my son when he was about twelve years old. Put some water in the pot, add the meat, spices and curry and allow every thing to boil and cook. As the sauce begins to simmer, the curry will look like it was done the traditional way. Trust me, it works


• I have always had problems with stews and traditional dish like Peleau, not having the nice dark brown color that I like. The trick is to add a bit of browning (sold in bottles) to get the desire color.


• Sauce Thickner: Instead of adding flour to thicken my stews or curry dishes, I add some potato (cut up small). As the potato cooks and softens, it break downs and thickens my dishes.


• If you decide to peel the green bananas before boiling them, as you peel each green banana, place them in a bowl of water otherwise they will turn black. The same goes for potatoes.


• When boiling the green bananas with their skin on, pour a tablespoon of oil into the pot of water. The skin of the bananas eliminates a stain when they are boiled and this stain, leaves a residue on the side of the pot, is very difficult to remove.


• Add some lime juice to your favorite avacado recipes, it prevents the fruit from turning black.


• In deciding which is the right avacado to select at the grocery store or market, shake the avacado and if it makes a noise then that is the seed. If you don't hear anything, then the avacado is not quite ready to be used. If you do decide to purchase the avacado (if you don't hear the seed when you shake it), you may have to place it in a paper bag and leave it at room temperature to ripe properly.


• There are two ways you can desalt saltfish.
  Method I: Put the saltfish in a pot of water and allow the water to boil for about 10 minutes. Through out the water and repeat the process about three-four times.
  Method II: Place the saltfish in a bowl of water, the night before. The next morning throw out the water and prepare your meal in regular fashion.



• The Tong, helpful cooking tool. Having a tong in your kitchen could be quite useful at times. I use it frequently.

  What is a Tong? It is the most-used cooking utensil when cooking, as they provide a way to move, rotate and turn the food with delicate precision.

  When I am frying fish steaks, for example, I have a old habit of using a fork to turn the fish over. This method tends to break the fish up. Using the tong, would prevent the fish from breaking up when attempting to turn it over.

• Sometimes when I am cooking, lets say Stewed Chicken, I would add a tablespoon of creamy Peanut Butter. I received this cooking tip from my English cousin whose husband, now deceased, was a Nigerian. She said that this is what the Nigerians do when preparing their stews. When I first got this tip I was a bit disgusted and thought that my cousin was crazy. Then one day I decided to give it a try and was pleasantly surprised at the flavour of this stew!


• Cooking a recipe that requires dried pigeon peas or red beans (of course you can go the easy way and use the canned version of these beans), put the beans in a container of water the night before. By the following morning, the beans would have swollen and absorbed the majority of water in the container. You can now go ahead and cook the beans in a pressure cooker. This method of pre soaking the beans would greatly reduce the time the beans have to be cooked in the pressure cooker.
  
  Another option is to pressurize a large batch of the beans/peas in your spare time and when the peas/beans are tender and cool, put them in the freezer. When you are ready to prepare a meal with these beans/peas, just take out what is required and return the balance to the freezer.