How To Cook For Beginners

Chocolate covered strawberries are one of the highest in demand things for Valentines day. So, what are you going to be making for your honey on the big day? Here is a quick recipe that you can do that will allow you to have a wonderful, hand made show of love for that special someone.

Chocolate Covered Strawberries Recipe

Ingredients You will need for your Chocolate Covered Strawberries:

* 6 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
* 3 ounces white chocolate, chopped
* 1 pound strawberries with stems (about 20), washed and dried very well

Directions for Chocolate Dipped Strawberries

Put the semisweet and white chocolates into 2 separate heatproof medium bowls. Fill 2 medium saucepans with a couple inches of water and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Turn off the heat; set the bowls of chocolate over the water to melt. Stir until smooth. (Alternatively, melt the chocolates in a microwave at half power, for 1 minute, stir and then heat for another minute or until melted. If doing in the microwave, you need to run it for 10 seconds at a time or you risk burning the chocolate.)

Once the chocolates are melted and smooth, remove from the heat. Line a sheet pan with parchment or waxed paper. Holding the strawberry by the stem, dip the fruit into the dark chocolate, lift and twist slightly, letting any excess chocolate fall back into the bowl. Set strawberries on the parchment paper. Repeat with the rest of the strawberries. Dip a fork in the white chocolate and drizzle the white chocolate over the dipped strawberries.

Set the strawberries aside until the chocolate sets, about 30 minutes.

Special Notes About Chocolate:

Make sure you use good quality chocolate. Get chocolate brands like Ghiradelli, Valrhona, Noel. Nestle won’t work in this application because, while it is good for baking cookies, the chocolate has lots of other things in it, and is not couveture…Couverture Chocolate is a very high quality chocolate that contains extra cocoa butter (32-39%). The higher percentage of cocoa butter, combined with the processing, gives the chocolate more sheen, firmer “snap” when broken, and a creamy mellow flavor.

When you get ready to dip your strawberries, make sure the chocolate is melted, but not hot! It will hurt the berries. Take some chocolate and dab it to your bottom lip. If it feels just cool, under body temperature ( under 98 degrees farenheight ) then you are good to go.

My favorite berries to use are Driscoll brand strawberries. If you look you will find them. Usually Whole Foods Market always has them.

Happy Valentines Day and have fun…maybe you and your lover should do the choclate dipped strawberries together…Sound sexy and sensual?

How to make a glazed ham is probably on the minds of many a new and seasoned home chef this Holiday time. When you are looking to glaze a ham, there are just tons of recipes to choose from. At the end of the day, what you are doing is making a glaze of sweet stuff that you are going to brush your ham with while you are baking it and allow the moisture to come of, and let the sugars caramelize too.

You getting hungry yet? I am Anyway, there are tons of best glazed ham recipes, and how to glaze hams..but I’ll give you a super easy way to make a great glaze and, I’ll post a bunch of great ones here as well.

Take about one cup of honey, and 1/2 cup of brown sugar. Moisten it with orange juice so it looks like wet sand or cement. Then add in about 2-3 tablespoons of Dijon mustard, and 1 cup of orange marmalade. Stir this up into a nice sauce.

Place your ham into the oven, and then while you are baking it, say at 350 degrees, generously brush this on the ham every 15-20 minutes. You should see a nice glaze starting…Now, if the ham is heated through, and it doesn’t quite have the rich caramized color, turn on your broiler and let it brown from the top. BE CAREFUL WHEN YOU DO THIS! THERE IS SO MUCH SUGAR, THAT YOU NEED TO STAY THERE..OR YOU WILL BURN IT! Watch it as it browns, and then pull it when you get the color you want. Continue Reading »

How do I make a ham? This another one of those questions that gets asked alot. And the real answer to how to bake a ham, or how to make a ham really depends on a few things. The thing you really need to understand is what kind of ham you have. If you are getting one of those cheap hams from the grocery store, you know the kind I mean, the one in the can, then there isn’t really alot you can do, since it is probably one of those that has tons fo brine in it and is pressed meat togetther.

Yes, they are cheap, but you get what you pay for , and that is crap.  So, what kind of ham should you get if you really want to have a good experience?

The kind of ham I recommend, if you don’t want to pay for the expensive honey glazed types of hams, or those ones that are dry curd or smoked, is at least gett a whole muscle ham and preferrably one with the bone in.

You can actually get a similar ham to a Farmer Johns Ham, the kind in the gold foil. Continue Reading »

How Do I Make Corned Beef With Cabbage? So you looking to make the traditional boiled dinner for St Patricks day? BTW this is also known as the New England Boiled Dinner. Well I’ll tell you what, this is actually one of my favorite meals of all time. I really like the flavor of the corned beef, and I love the braised cabbage and potatoes. When you make this dish, you need to serve with mustard, and horseradish cream sauce. Use the same one in the recipe I listed on how to make horseradish sauce.

Okay, so what goes into making corned beef and cabbage?

Here is what you need…

Ingredients for Corned Beef And Cabbage

4 lb corned brisket of beef
3 large carrots, cut into large chunks
6 to 8 small onions, peeled and quartered or halved
6 to 8 red bliss cut in half, soaked in cold water
1 cabbage
salt and freshly ground pepper

For service, colemans mustard that has been hydrated with water, and horseradish sauce.

Method:

Put the brisket into a saucepan and cover with water. Bring gently to a boil. Simmer, covered, for 3-3 1/2 hours. Once the beef is fork tender, remove it from the broth. Place in the carrots, onion, potatoes and cabbage that has been cleaned and quartered into the broth and cook until the vegetables are tender. About 15 minutes.

Serve the corned beef in slices, surrounded by the vegetables and cooking liquid. Serve with lots of sauce.

Here is a really easy cranberry sauce recipe for you all to use. The nice thing about this recipe is that it doesn’t require any cooking, and it can be done in about 5 minutes or less. If you like fresh cranberry sauce, and you are looking for a simple cranberry sauce recipe, then you are in for a treat.

1- 12oz bag fresh cranberries

1- granny smith apple, cored and cut into the size of the cranberries

1-orange, peeled, and diced into 1 inch chunks

1/2 cup honey or sugar

1/2 orange marmalade

Take all the ingredients and rough chop with a food processor. If you like if fine, then just puree longer.

Refrigerate and eat when ready.

That’s it! Really easy. You can make this simple cranberry sauce recipe a day before. and adjust the sweetness with more or less sugar or honey!

Bon Apetit!

Once I get a chance, I’ll also get going to create some easy salmon recipes as well.

Trying to figure out how to cook turkey? How bout how to roast a turkey. We are definitely in the month where people from all over are planning their turkey cooking for Thanksgiving, so I thought it would be fun to kick off this site with a bit of turkey cooking tips on the thanksgiving turkey. This is a good guide for turkey cooking for beginners. Here is a easy turkey recipe guideline to follow.

There is alot of information out there about how to cook a turkey, and tons of people looking for turkey cooking tips and it can be confusing and hard to figure out what to do and who to trust.

The following is meant to be simple, easy and full proof. Im going to write it in bullet points so that it can be easy to follow.

1. Defrost the turkey in the refrigerator. Makes sure you start out 3-5 days in advance as it will take that long.

2. Do not stuff the turkey with stuffing. Bake the stuffing separately. It is safer and the turkey will cook faster.

3. 24 hours before baking, remove the turkey from the package, discard the innards, (save the neck and gizzards for gravy) towel off the turkey and dry it. Then leave it in the refreigerator so that the skin can get even dryer. Removing the moisture will allow the turkey to get a very even crust and golden color.

4. BUY A MEAT THERMOMETER! The little thing in the turkey that pops out is a piece of crap. It is so inaccurate, that you, if anything are ensured to have a nice dry turkey. When using the thermometer that you buy, make sure it is calibrated, and insert it in to the fleshy part of the turkey leg or breast, away from bone. You want a reading of 165 degrees.

5. When Roasting, Start with a very high temp, I like 450. I will roast it for 30 minutes at that temperature, then drop it to 350 for the duration of roasting. The high temp helps get the turkey nice and golden.

6. Throw a few carrot pieces, celery, onions, bayleaf, and parsley stems into the cavity when roasting, it will help add flavor.

7. When you are about to roast the turkey, slide pieces of butter underneath the breast skin, and rub butter or your favorite oil all over the skin, This will make things nice and brown when roasted.

8. Seasoning is so important. liberally season the cavity and skin with salt and fresh cracked pepper.

Basically, thats all there is to how to cook a turkey. These Turkey cooking tips will make your Thanksgiving Turkey the best this year. When you want to get adventurous, you can start to experiment with different spice rubs, aromatics in the thanksgiving turkey, then progress to frying the turkey or even smoking it. But if you are a new turkey beginner, this is a good place to start.

Afterall, when you are looking for how to cook a turkey, what you want is something that is nice and moist, with crisp skin. All you thanksgiving turkey beginners, give it a whirl.

Someone the other day asked if they needed or could do it in a crock pot trio and I told them all you need is an oven…And better yet, you don’t need rival crock pot replacement parts either!

Any questions on how to cook a turkey, leave a comment and I will get back to you asap!