Cooking Tips

Finding your way around any kitchen can be an intimidating and time-consuming task. Whether you are a first-time chef or a master, there are always more cooking tips to learn that will give you the best dishes to share with friends and family.

Basic Cooking Tips

Basic cooking always starts with kitchen safety and includes tips on how to cook foods in common ways like how to saute or tricks for getting the most out of microwave cooking.

• Find out which foods you've been peeling and eating wrong with tips on how to peel a potato without a knife or eat a mandarin orange without peeling it.
• You'll always be ready to make a great dish when you print a list of basic foods you should be keeping in your pantry.
• Keep a printable cooking measurement conversion chart handy so you can use your kitchen tools no matter what type of measurement a recipe calls for.
• Learn how to fix too much salt in a dish for those moments when you pour just a little too much.

Tips for Successful Ingredient Substitutions

Sometimes you start cooking and realize you're missing one of the key ingredients. Other times you might want to substitute ingredients to make a recipe healthier. Either way, having some go-to ingredient substitutions come in handy for any cook.

• Substitutes for yeast in bread-like products include baking soda, baking powder, and eggs.
• If you don't have buttermilk, a great substitute is a milk and lemon juice mixture.
• Almost any sweetener can be used as a suitable substitute for corn syrup.
• You can make your own powdered sugar substitute from arrowroot powder and another sweetener.

Tips for Using Ingredients in New Ways

If you're getting tired of eating the same foods over and over, look for new ways to use common ingredients. You can cook something you know everyone will love because the flavors are familiar, but the end result will be more exciting.

• Take food you'd normally throw away and turn it into something delicious like using stale bread to make bread pudding.
• Make leftovers taste amazing by cooking them in new ways the second time such as heating up french fries in some oil in a frying pan.
• Create unique popsicles, pancakes, and even banana bread using your leftover pumpkin pie filling.
• Hot dog buns can be used for more than sausage-shaped meats. Try making them into pizza boats or even sweet strawberry sandwiches.

Kitchen Gadget Tips and Tricks

One of the trickiest parts of cooking is determining what tools you need and which ones can save you time. Whatever your instrument of choice, these cooking tips can help you use different kitchen tools and maintain your small appliances.

• Waffles aren't the only dish you can create from a waffle iron! Learn how to make other breakfast, lunch, and dessert items with this one tool.
• Modern technology plays a big role in kitchens today with amazing kitchen gadgets you never knew existed such as onion goggles and oilless fryers.
• Wow your family or party guests with bizarre kitchen gadgets that make your food look stellar like a wavy knife that makes crinkle cuts or a cream whipper.
• Forget dicing and chopping when you learn to use a spiral vegetable slicer and reinvent your veggie dishes.

Keeping Track of Your Cooking Tips

As you find cooking tips you rely on, keep them together in one place for easy reference. Write down your favorite tips in a small notebook and keep it in the kitchen or organize them online in a word processing document or on a sharing site.