I hear the other prisoners loved her corned beef recipe...
I picked up Martha Stewart’s ‘Cooking School: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook’ at Ross for $9.99, copyrighted in ’08, the book is a dense 500 pages. That’s 2 cents a page; this will be my cheapest education to date. I have a new goal within food, cooking, health and eating enjoyment for 2011, back to basics. I critique food when I eat out, but what do I really know about classic cooking? Not much. I’ve never cooked a roast, prepared a stock, cooked a whole fish or rolled sushi. I have made plenty of other things from scratch, like bread and pasta, but my basic cooking skills have a long way to go and I was reminded of this yet again this morning. I was dicing an apple and sliced the tip of my pinky finger off. It’s still bleeding.
Important skills, like simple, handy and safe knife skills are taken for granted, especially by the home chef. Martha opens the book with explaining that to refine your cooking skills and repertoire it’s paramount to understand cooking basics like knife skills and have a properly stocked kitchen. This isn’t to say that you need every kitchen gadget known to man, but quite the opposite. A few well-purposed and multiple use items can save you time and money in your cooking endeavours. The book is laid out like a textbook, with the basic and introductory information in the beginning (knife skills, necessary kitchen pans and cooking gear, herb essentials, etc.) to the implementation of those skills and practices in key recipes. Items like how to make a basic chicken vegetable soup in the basic stockpot (that every chef should have) using basic herbs like sage and rosemary.
As I venture into this behemoth cooking goldmine we’ll learn together as I experiment sauteing, braising, how to cook dried beans, make fresh pasta, how to coddle eggs, make dashi, souffle, custard, granitas…and on and on. This leads me to my first lesson of how to hold a chef’s knife and the proper way to chop vegetables. Two pieces of information that I could have benefited from this morning before turning my oatmeal routine into a bloody mess.
-Hold the handle near the blade, grasping the blade between your thumb and forefinger (called choking).
-With your other hand, secure the food to be cut, curling your fingers under so they’re safely out of the way.
–This will feel awkward at first, but just as it was awkward to type on your smartphone soon after you bought it, you’ll adjust quickly. Muscle memory is a magnificent thing. Begin to cut with fluid motions, moving the curled hand back with each chop to expose a portion of the food to be cut.
Safe chopping everyone! And stay tuned for basic cooking school within the next two weeks…
Biggest Small Town 