Mimi Goodies – Cooking healthy

Chew On This: Food News You Can Use
Sundays are soup days. There’s nothing better than a pot of tasty soup simmering on the stove for all to leisurely enjoy on a Sunday afternoon.

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Macromom shares her secret for the perfect pot of rice. Check out other great recipes at www.macromom.ca Thank you to Stephanie and daniel for their video and music skills! xo

Jack Scalfani makes classic chicken noodle soup. Be sure to subscribe. it’s free. Here is the recipe that Jack did: * 16 cups canned low-salt chicken broth * 1 3 1/2-pound chicken, cut into 8 pieces * 1/2 cup chopped onion * 2 carrots, peeled, thinly sliced * 2 celery stalks, sliced * 16 ounces dried wide egg noodles * 1/2 cup finely chopped fresh parsley Combine chicken broth and chicken in heavy large pot. Bring to boil. Reduce heat; cover partially and simmer until chicken is cooked through, about 20 minutes. Using tongs, transfer chicken to large bowl. Cool chicken and broth slightly. Discard skin and bones from chicken. Cut chicken meat into bite-size pieces and reserve. Spoon fat off top of chicken broth. Return broth to simmer. Add onion, carrots and celery. Simmer until vegetables soften, about 8 minutes. (Can be prepared 1 day ahead. Cover chicken meat and broth separately and refrigerate. Bring broth to boil before continuing.) Cook your noodles separately (very important), about 5 minutes. Season soup to taste with salt and pepper.

This video recipe will show you how to make one FLAVORFUL pot of southern black eyed peas! The chicken broth, onions, & garlic infuses into these beans and makes them downright addictive. If you normally don’t like black eyed peas then try this recipe…who knows…it may become a staple side dish on your table. GET RECIPE: divascancook.blogspot.com

Ever notice that some people seem to know exactly what they are doing in the kitchen and have great cooking recipes? They place a pot on the stove, grab a few ingredients, stir it up, taste the spices, and they’re done; a perfectly seasoned pot of vegetable soup was created with seemingly no effort. Contrast that with the way you feel in the kitchen. You spend time looking for the perfect cooking recipe. You gather all of the ingredients and cooking equipment, or so you think, you can check it out from www.cheese-cake-recipes.com and get started. Halfway through, you realize that you forgot to buy parsley, or lemons, or some other ingredient and don’t have the necessary cooking gear. So you run to the store. By the time you follow the instructions, dinner time is over and the rest of your family gave up and decided to order a pizza. It doesn’t have to be like this. Cooking is not hard. It is also not simple. But the majority of us make it a lot more complicated than it really is. A great way to start cooking a meal and make it easy is to follow a good cooking recipe and buy and prepare the ingredients ahead of time. In general, there are several basics steps for cooking.

Most people who have been cooking for a while follow them without realizing it. The goal is to get to the point where these steps are automatic. If you want to follow a recipe, you can look online or in your favorite magazine or cookbook to find what you are looking for. If you’ve been cooking for a while, you may eventually find that you do not need to follow a cooking recipe for everything you do. In this case, all you would need to do is simply decide to prepare a dish you already know well. Either way, both of these things are part of step one. Great ways to find cooking recipes include looking through your favorite cookbook to see if anything inspires you, looking in women’s magazines, cooking magazines, and fitness magazines for some ideas and inspiration or to ask a friend or family member to write down their signature cooking recipes. A lot of chefs also look around their house for inspiration. Check in the pantry, your fruit basket, freezer, and produce bin for ingredients you would like to build a meal around. Then, either use the ingredients to inspire you or find a recipe that includes them. The internet has also proven to be a great resource for finding cooking recipes. Visit your favorite popular websites to find the recipes you need, or you can do a general internet search go to www.chef-123.com. Once you find the right recipe, purchase all of the ingredients you need and gather them when you are ready to prepare the recipe.

It is a good idea to find all of the ingredients and have them in front of you. That way, if you’ve forgotten to buy something, or you realize you do not have a key ingredient, you will not be in the middle of a crucial step when you figure it out. In addition to simply finding the ingredients, top chefs understand that you should prepare all of the ingredients before you start assembling the recipe. That means you will do all of the initial preparations such as chop and measure out the ingredients before you get started. This may feel as if it is taking you a long time, but once the ingredients are all in front of you, assembling the recipe will be a breeze. Cooking doesn’t have to be difficult and shouldn’t be. Simply, follow these steps to create fantastic meals using great cooking recipes.

“Dear Lord, we thank you for this food, and we ask you to bless it — especially tonight because Daddy cooked it. Amen.”
All right, so perhaps I’m not quite as good of a cook as my wife. You have to understand, though, back in the old days, when I was single, there really wasn’t much of a demand for me to do any cooking.
My main foods at that time were cereal, peanut butter, pizza, and burritos. Not all together, of course — well maybe in certain combinations — but generally I ate them separately.
Now, suddenly, I’m married with four kids and…
Well, I guess that didn’t exactly happen suddenly, but…
Anyway, my wife and I both work, but since I work at home I’m often the one that does the cooking.
I had to do some learning in the beginning. I remember my wife used to come into the kitchen while I was cooking and say, “Smells like you scorched the food.”
About the first ten times this happened, I just sort of ignored her. Eventually, however, I got curious.
“What do you mean by ’scorching’?” I asked.
“Scorching is when the food on the bottom of the pan sticks and burns to an inedible crisp,” she answered coldly. It seemed to me she was implying that it was a bad thing, too.
“It makes the whole pot full taste burned,” she continued with a look of disgust on her face. To which I replied, “What? You can prevent that?”
After that, I started taking a few lessons from her on how to cook. She taught me about stirring the food while it’s in the pot, not cooking everything on high, greasing pans before putting food in them, blowing the foam off of the pot when the macaroni starts boiling over, and other advanced techniques. Eventually, I started getting pretty good at a few things so I decided to try something a little more complicated.
I tried making bread.
Now, I’m really good at making biscuits. In fact, they are one of my specialties, but they’re not quite as complicated as making bread.
First, there was this whole idea of “kneading” the bread. My wife came up to me just after I’d broken my second wooden spoon while trying to stir more flour into an already thick lump of dough.
“No, no, no!” she cried, obviously distressed over the death of the spoon. “You are supposed to KNEAD the bread!”
“Of course I NEED the bread!” I replied. “Why do you think I’m making it?”
However, it’s the whole idea of letting it “raise” that has proven to be the most difficult for me to master. You wouldn’t think it would be all that hard. I mean, all that is required is to simply let the dough sit around by itself for a while. And in fact, that’s really not the problem. It’s the coming back on time later that I find so challenging.
The last time I tried to make bread I set it aside to let it raise, just like I was supposed to do, and went about my business.
Some time later, I just happened to be walking through the kitchen when I noticed this giant balloon sitting in a bread pan with a towel thrown over the top of it.
“What have the kids done now?” I thought to myself as I lifted the towel. “Oh yeah! I’m making bread today,” I concluded.
I hadn’t noticed that the recipe was called “Balloon Bread”, but apparently that’s what it was. So, I threw it in the oven and proceeded to cook it. A giant loaf of bread for all my hungry kids to feed on for a few days sounded good to me.
Some time later, I just happened to be walking through the kitchen past the oven when I thought to myself, “Why is it so hot over here? What have the kids been messing with now?”
Amazingly, it wasn’t burned, too badly anyway. You see, once in a while I just happen to come along at roughly the right time. In the end, though, I wasn’t all that impressed with the Balloon Bread recipe. To be honest, it tasted more like sour air than bread. I don’t really remember pumping it full of carbon dioxide myself, but I’d swear that was what was in there. Hmmm, carbonated bread. What will they think of next?
One day, however, I decided to put forth a tremendous effort into my bread making. I worked hard, set timers so I’d remember what I was doing, and everything. Plus, I scrapped the Carbonated Balloon Bread recipe, and went with one from another cook book.

Chef Freddy Brooker demonstrates the multi-functional Doufeu pot. By creating two different temperatures to build up condensation (self-braising technique) within the pot, this casserole is ideal for braising, stewing and tenderizing tough cuts of meat. The versatile pot cooks on top of the stove as well as in the oven, and is attractive enough to go from oven to table. Interview at the 2009 International Home and Housewares Show by Georgia Downard.

• A sign of true love and friendship, these charming flowers make a great gift for someone special in your life
• The small, delicate flowers are a traditional gardening favorite for ground cover and are beautiful in pots
• Assembled in the USA, these kits come with a hand tied bow and gift tag, packaged in greenPots (original rice hull pot)
• What a great hostess gift or Mother’s Day present!
• Decorative Plant

Product Description
A complete kit to grow a beautiful forget-me-not windowsill or patio garden at home…. More >>

Forget-me-not Gardening Kit

we have a 1 yr old and I’m trying to only give her organic things (especially when it comes to dairy, meat, poultry)….organic is pretty expensive so i try to buy just for her. today i cooked the organic chicken in a pot with the regular chicken. just wondering if that’s okay or if the juices from the regular chicken (with a punch of hormones…etc) would get into the organic chicken and make it not so organic. this is a silly question but hopefully someone knows the answer! thanks in advance!!!

If you are a beginner who is just trying out new recipes every day in the kitchen, then you must be getting flummoxed now and then when a recipe simply does not perform the way it should or when you actually forget to carry out certain important steps in spite of going through the recipe twice or more. It is true that cooking recipes can often be complicated, but long cooking recipes are generally detailed and simple, provided you get the hang of handling them. Some tips and tricks that will help you handle all kinds of cooking recipes and turn cooking into a successful and enjoyable affair for you are listed here.

Start With Simple Recipes: You might argue that this is besides the point when all you want to know is handle long recipes, but you need to remember that just like in every other discipline, with cooking too, we need to go one step at a time. Jumping too high up will often have you landing flat on your face. So if you just started cooking tomorrow, then do not start making lasagna that requires three homemade sauces, four cheeses and two types of meat. Start with plain old pasta! As you get the hang of smaller, simpler recipes, you will easily be able to handle long and complicated ones naturally within some time.

Go Through The Recipes A Number Of Times: Just reading through a recipe once, specially a new one is a recipe for disaster! In order to get a recipe right, you will actually need to go through it at least two to three times in order to understand the steps properly. And of course, you will also need to keep going through it time and again while cooking.

Assemble All The Ingredients Before You Start: You might have seen your parents assembling their ingredients after they put the pot on the stove, but even though it looks really easy to do, it can be tough for a newbie. If you do not want to mess up your recipe, go through the list of ingredients and assemble them before you start cooking. If you are using vegetables or meats, make sure that they are chopped in the right way and that the meat is washed and duly prepared to be tossed into the pan before you put the pan on the fire.

Use The Right Proportions: We often see chefs on TV and in real life tossing in ingredients by the fistful only to deliver gourmet delicacies within minutes and the carefully listed proportions in a recipe start feeling redundant. Trust me, they are not. Most beginners have a long way to go before they can start doing this, because experienced cooks do not “ignore” the proportions given in a recipe, but rather they know how much a fistful is due to years of experience. So whenever you try out a recipe, try and do justice to it by using all the ingredients in the exact amounts provided. Of course you can scale it all if you are cooking for a larger or smaller number of people, but following proportions is mandatory if you want your recipes to turn out well.