- Preheat your pans with olive oil over the burner to get better browning and speed up cooking time.
- Crumple your parchment paper before lining a pan to get it to fit better.
- Blend your entire container of cottage cheese upon purchasing so it's always ready to use.
- Prewash and bag all of your fruits and vegetables when you get home from the store, saving cooking time and making healthy eating more accessible.
- Season your salad bases to up the flavor. Store the salad in the strainer of the salad spinner, inside the large bowl. Discard any released water.
- Start checking your baked goods with a food thermometer instead of a toothpick. Lighter things like cakes and bread should be around 205F, and denser baked goods like brownies should be around 190F.
- Cook chicken breasts until they just reach 160F. With carry over cooking and resting, they will be save to eat and still juicy. See Meat Temperature Guide.
- When cutting bell peppers, hold them upside-down, and filet off the sides, leaving the seeds and stems.
- Sharpen your knife often, especially when chopping onions. A dull knife leads to crying.
- When peeling garlic, lightly crush with your knife, and add the cloves to a mason jar. Vigorously shake, and the skins should come right off.
- When sauteing vegetables, add your salt at the beginning instead of the end to help draw our water and speed up cooking time.
- Always use 3 bowls when separating egg yolks from the whites. Crack into the first bowl, put the yolk in the second, and pour the white into the third. Nothing is worse than piercing a yolk into a bowl of clean egg whites, wasting a bunch of eggs.
- Cutting chicken is easier if they're only about 75% defrosted. Too hard and the knife can't go through. Too soft and they're mushy and hard to slice. The same applies to frozen brussel sprouts.
- Cut your brussel sprouts in half, and roast cut side down for optimal browning.
- Experiment! Nothing has ever been done until the first time it's been done.
- The solution to under seasoning is more seasoning. The solution to over seasoning is more food.
- All onions are pretty similar. White, yellow, red, sweet, whatever. Use whatever you have on hand.
- Don't be a slave to tradition. Cook what you want based on what you have.
- Food scale! Food scale! Use a food scale!.
- Pine nuts are expensive. Use whatever nuts you have for pesto. So is basil; using spinach is a-okay. See some of my pesto recipes, like Oil Free Pesto, Avocado Pesto, and Creamy Pesto Dip.
- Draining and rinsing canned beans is not required. If you need water and salt anyway, may as well just dump in the whole can.
- Always brighten up your dishes when reheating them in the microwave. This means adding something acidic, like vinegar, hot sauce, lemon/lime juice, mustard, or sauerkraut after taking it out of the microwave.
- Maple syrup, honey, sugar free syrup, date syrup, etc. are all virtually interchangeable when baking. They'll lead to slightly different flavors, but can all be swapped at a 1:1 ratio by weight and volume.
- Coconut flour absorbs about 4x more moisture compared to other flours. So start with about 1/4 cup for ever cup of flour when swapping to coconut flour. See Water Absorption of Different Flours.
- Whey dissolves in water, making it good for shakes. Casein clumps in water, making it a better flour replacement. Don't try to substitute one for the other. See Water Absorption of Different Flours.
- All canned beans are interchangeable. Black, chickpea, pinto, kidney, navy, etc. Just use whatever is in your pantry.
- When cooking ground meat on the stove, preheat the pan with oil. The meat should sizzle when put in. Flatten to a thin, wide pancake, and let sit for a few minutes to optimize browning before flipping it and breaking up the meat.
- If you don't care about extensively draining and rinsing, you can drain liquids from cans through a gap when opening instead of dirtying a strainer.
- Speed up pasta cooking time by only using a minimal amount of water: just enough to cover it. This also concentrates the starchy pasta water, helping to emulsify sauces.
- Quinoa cooks identically to rice (same water to rice to salt ratio), but in half the time (about 15 minutes). Red lentils are even shorter; they only take about 6 minutes. For reference, brown rice takes about 30 minutes.
- Generally, use 400F for meat and vegetables and 350F for baked goods.
- Overnight oats actually only need about 2 hours to soften if you're in a rush, but they're still better after a full night in the fridge.
- You don't need to buy expensive oat flour. Just blend rolled or quick oats in a food processor or blender until you have a flour. Check out Making Homemade Flours.