xtn’s guide to demystifying cooking

Disclaimer: these are not necessarily authentic or traditional methods to cooking. This is practical cooking. It’s what you make for lunch on a trip away with leftover ingredients from dinner. Uh huh.

To show you all that I have another side to xtn the homewrecker, I will now become xtn the homeMAKER.

I talk to so many people who say they can’t cook and lot of them aren’t lying! They really can’t! Well not that I’m a world class chef or anything, but I can hold my own in the kitchen. Kinda. Maybe. Well I’m not so bad.

Anyway, I think people just approach it the wrong way. I think cooking is much easier if you look at it the right way. So here I am offering you my many years of accumulated gastronomic gestations to make easy (relatively) tasty food that may not be the most authentic anything, but hey, they work and are practical!

I’m basing today’s lesson on my one principle when it comes to cooking:

Generalise, don’t specialise.

Or more specifically:

Learn techniques and strategies, rather than specific recipes.

Learn proportions rather than specific measurements.

I think this makes things a lot easier for me. So with that in mind, here are three steps (or stages) to DEMYSTIFYING COOKING!!!!! Oh and also for today’s lesson, I’m sticking to European cooking. Mostly it’s because I just know more about it.

Step 1 Basics

Learn a few basic techniques. Keep things simple. Since a lot of dishes are derivatives of other more basic dishes, go right up to the top of the family tree. Sauces are good. Here are two essential ones.

Tomato sauce – Dead simple. Fry some chopped onions and garlic in a saucepan, add tomato paste, then some peeled Roma tomatoes, water, then salt and pepper, as well as basil and oregano. In approximately that order. Boil until it looks like what you get out of the bottle.

White sauce – Slightly more complicated. Fry some butter in a saucepan with equal parts flour. When it forms a semi doughy thing (called a roux but who cares), add warm milk and stir until you get a thickened sauce. Season to taste.

Both these sauces are really flexible.

With the tomato sauce, add mince and you get your basic Bolognese. Add a mix of seafood and you get Marinara. Dead easy.

With the white sauce, add nutmeg, salt and a bit of sugar, and you get you Béchamel sauce. Goes with potatoes, vegies, whatever. Add cheese to that and you get a simple Mornay sauce. Add mushrooms and ham and you get a Boscaiola-type sauce (well not really, but close enough!) to go with pasta.

Moving along from sauces, here’s all you need to know to make risotto: 2 parts Arborio rice to 5 parts liquid. That’s it. What comes next happens in Step 2.

Step 2 Combine and create

With just those two sauces you can cook up a whole range of dishes. Lasagne is an obvious one. Use the tomato sauce with mince with the pasta sheets. Then pour Béchamel sauce on top. Voila!

But the point of this step is that with every dish you cook, learn the essentials and then you can combine and create with other dishes that you know. For example, you know it’s the roux that thickens the milk to make the sauce. So try it with roast dripping to make a type of gravy. You can thicken a whole range of liquids this way.

Coming back to the risotto. Now that you know what proportions you need to cook the rice, everything else is up to you. Add the tomato sauce, seafood and you get seafood risotto. As chicken stock, white wine, garlic, milk and mushrooms and you get a mushroom risotto. Add pumpkin soup, vegies and chives for… yep… you guessed it, pumpkin risotto. Add saffron, paprika and seafood (and seafood stock) and you get a kind of seafood paella. You get my drift.

OK, it’s getting late so on to Step 3.

Step 3 Flair

Modify existing dishes and techniques to create new dishes or solve problems you have with them. Think outside the square kind of stuff. For example, if a dish uses cream, try sour cream instead and see what happens. Remember, if something works well in one dish, it will often work with others.

With respect to the problem solving side of things, here’s an example: if you’re making mash pumpkin, depending on several factors, it can often become mush instead of mash. So what do you do? What do you know is similar but won’t turn to mush? How about potato? So add a proportion of potato to your pumpkin, add cream and seasoning and you’ll get perfect mash pumpkin everytime. (My auntie taught me that one!)

I’m going to leave you now with one last tasty idea.

Lots of people like fish. But usually, due to the fragility of its meat, whole pieces fish are either steamed, fried or grilled. As an alternative, why not poach your fish with milk. Get a frying pan (shallow) on low heat. Pour in milk. Add in seasoning of your choice (I’d recommend garlic, salt, pepper, lemon, chives but whatever’s available) and bring to simmer. Next, place the fish in, cover and cook for 10 minutes or so (depending on size of fish, heat temperature, etc. – check often if unsure). When fish is done, remove it from the pan. What you have left is a delicious fish-flavoured milk. Now, going back to previous steps, fry equal parts butter and flour to form a roux. Add the fish milk with some cheese a bit of honey and you get a wonderful fish-infused white sauce. Pour this over your fish. Now try telling me that doesn’t sound good! (Unless you’re one of those people who don’t like fish – and you don’t count because you’re freaks)

Anyway, there you go. That’s how I think about cooking. And it’s worked quite well for me so far. But I’ll stop writing now because I doubt anyone’s gotten this far into the entry. If you do, give me a wave. I’ve probably taken this a lot more seriously than I had intended. But it’s supposed to be fun OK? That’s important.

Happy cooking.