Helpful Cooking and Baking Tips

Helpful Tips for your No Frills Cooking & Baking

 

I have compiled  a list of these very helpful  tips for cooking and baking.  These are not only helpful but time saving as well.  I am always on the lookout for helpful tips to save time and headaches while in the kitchen.  As I learn more and discover more I will share them with you.

*  To remove stems from Strawberries, remove green leaves, take a drinking straw and press down through the top of the strawberry and out the bottom. 

*  Use an egg slicer to get perfectly sliced strawberries.  This tip also works well with bananas you just have to cut your bananas in smaller chunks first.

*  To remove the bitter taste of Brussels Sprouts cut the stem end off before boiling, baking, or sautéing.

*  To reduce the shrinkage of bacon will it is cooking run it under cold water before cooking.

*  To have crispy bacon that is not soaking in grease, place cooling racks on baking sheet, place your bacon on the cooling rack and bake in the oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until bacon is at desired crispiness. 

 This bacon is not greasy and it melts in your mouth

 

*  To make the perfect hardboiled eggs bake them.  Place oven rack in the middle of the oven, place eggs directly on rack and bake at 325 degrees for 30 minutes.  If you are worried that an egg might crack place a cookie sheet on bottom rack in order to save your oven from the mess of a broken egg.  To hold eggs in place and keep them from rolling or to not have to worry about an egg breaking, place eggs in muffin pan.

*  To help making peeling your hard boil eggs easier add a 1/2 tsp. of baking soda to the water.

*  To keep the edge of your pie crust from burning place tinfoil around just the edge of your pie crust while baking.

*  To keep your stove top clean and to keep your pots from boiling over place a wooden spoon across the top of your pot while cooking.

*  To keep your eyes from burning while cutting onions cut and peel your onion under cold running water.

*  To keep your salt from sticking together in the salt shaker place a few grains of rice in your salt shaker before filling it with salt.

*  Don't add oil to your pot when boiling water for cooking pasta, the oil will keep the sauce from sticking to your pasta.

*  To get a perfectly cooked egg over easy, do not flip them and take the chance of breaking your yolk simply cover it with a lid and let the steam cook the top of your egg.

*  When cooking pancakes you know they are ready to be flipped when the pancake batter starts to bubble.

*  Bake your cookies in a muffin pan to keep them from spreading and they turn out similar to a soft batch cookie.

These chocolate chip cookies are soft and chewy

 

*  To keep from having a soggy pie shell bottom prebake your shell by adding a piece of parchment paper to the top of your pie crust and then fill your pie crust with dried/uncooked beans, bake until crust is golden brown.  Remove beans and parchment paper allow crust to cool, fill pie crust with your pie filling and baked as directed.

No Frills Cooking

 

Hello!!   My name is Wendy and I have decided to join the world of Blogging.  This is my first attempt at blogging so please bare with me.  If you chose to follow my blog you will soon learn a few things about me.

What I am NOT:
1 – I am in no way, shape or form a professional blogger.
2 – I am not a trained chef and I do not claim to be even close in skills to a trained chef.
3 – I am not a professional writer and actually never really liked writing much.
4 – I am not a professional photographer and I do not have expensive cameras or lighting.
5 – I do not have a high tech kitchen and my kitchen is not stocked with high tech gadgets.

What I AM:
1 – A mother of two teenage daughters, who works full-time.
2 – I love to cook and bake.
3 – I mainly use Pinterest as my recipe book.
4 – I love to find new recipes and try them out tweaking them along the way.
5 – I make dishes that my family likes and some that have been passed down from my grandmother, others I have learned from other friends or family.
6 – I am some what of a picky eater so I do have the tendency to make dishes that I do not eat but my family loves.
7 – I would love to have the fancy kitchen and all the nice kitchen gadgets, bakeware, cookware and be able to afford to cook with nothing but the best quality ingredients, but that isn’t always possible.

Now that most of everything is out of the way about me, I will briefly tell you why I am writing this post and what you will be able to see on this post.  I am writing this post to share my recipes, along with  my fails and success with recipes I find on Pinterest and to show you that just because you do not have all the fancy equipment, best ingredients or that your finished product doesn’t look like a piece of art does not mean that the recipes are not good or that the food will not be delicious.
So I hope you enjoy what you will see on my blog and what you will see soon as I blog about my cooking adventures and provide recipes and helpful tips about No Frills Cooking.