Cooking With Herbs And Spices Recipes Cooking Food International Guide
Cooking With Herbs And Spices Creates Better Tasting Meals
By Jennifer Bowers
Cooking with herbs and spices can improve the taste of your meals.
Many ingredients in your meals may taste rather dull without the
added flavours of herbs and spices. For example, cooking rice
by itself makes for a bland meal. Add Chinese Five Spice and you
have a delicious meal. It takes little effort to create a meal
and satisfy your taste buds.
Food is to be enjoyed and not endured, by cooking delicious meals
just by adding natural flavours to your meals. For example, food
cooked with a wise selection of herbs and spices on your Sunday
roast, makes the meat much more delicious. People want to know
my secret ingredients, when they taste my Sunday roast. I show
them my herbs and spice racks and I say these are my secret ingredients.
Growing Herbs In Your Garden
Some of the herbs, I grow them in my organic garden. I grow basil,
parsley and many other herbs. Whenever I need to enhance the flavour
of a meal, I add freshly picked herbs from my garden. I use them
in my salads, side dishes and main meals.
It does not take too much time and effort to review your options
and sprinkle your meals with natural flavours, when cooking with
herbs and spices.
The Lost Art Of Cooking A Delicious Meal
With busy schedules and an abundance of ready-made dishes, it’s
an unfortunate fact that the art of cooking is fast becoming a
lost art, particularly in the U.S. If both Mom and Dad are working,
there may be little time to spend creating dishes from scratch.
As a result, plenty of kids go off to college not knowing a spatula
from a tong, how to bake a pie or make a roast with gravy. This
makes for dull meals indeed. At the same time, there are a few
cuisines (which shall remain unnamed) that use very little in
the way of seasoning, producing some albeit nutritious, but bland
tasting dishes.
The Secret To Creating Delicious Meals
Knowing the basics of cooking with herbs and spices provides
any cook with the secrets to dishing up some memorable meals,
no matter how elementary your cooking skills may be. Let’s see
how basic mastery of cooking with herbs and spices can change
your life. Food is, after all, one of life’s main pleasures.
Just to pique your appetite, so to speak, let’s look at a few
everyday foods that are greatly enhanced with a few herbs or spices.
A plain dish of applesauce becomes oh so much better with a spoonful
of cinnamon and sugar mixed filling, but becomes a gourmet standout
when roasted with sprigs of fresh rosemary.
Combining Your Spices With The Right Food
Steamed rice, with a dab of butter, is an acceptable side dish,
but see what happens when you sprinkle that rice with Chinese
Five Spice! In short, knowing your way with cooking with herbs
and spices is your ticket to gourmet stardom.
The spice aisle at the supermarket is organized alphabetically,
to make it easy for you to find a given herb or spice. What you
need to learn is how to group those herbs and spices to match
them up with the foods they best enhance. The savory herbs go
best with meats and most produce, while sweet spices make sweet
foods taste better.
Enhancing The Taste Of Your Meats
The famous combination of parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
is invariably successful with beef. Sweet herbs, such as tarragon
and dill, are good with mild tasting meats, such as shrimp and
most fish fillets. Sweet basil and tomatoes are a match made in
heaven.
As you progress in your adventures in cooking with herbs and
spices, you’ll discover that there are many surprises and exceptions.
For example, tarragon is a herb many cooks reserve strictly for
use with fish.
Cooking With Fish And Game Meat
Tarragon can be tricky to use with other foods, not for the faint-hearted
cook; however, it’s absolutely perfect with strongly flavored
game dishes, such as venison, elk and buffalo. Here’s another
surprisingly delightful combination: roast beef with cinnamon
gravy, a medieval favorite.
You can see that cooking with herbs and spices doesn’t require
extensive culinary skills, but just a little imagination and a
willingness to experiment. To learn more, make your next stop
the bookstore.
There are many excellent books filled with herb and spice mixtures
that you can try out on your very next meal. There’s simply no
excuse for boring meals.
Improving The Flavour Of Your Meals
The next time your family tells you they do not like the bland
tasting food they are eating, you know its time to add more flavours
to your meals with herbs and spices. For example, when you are
cooking your meats on the griller, you can add some basil and
parsley on the meat, to enhance the flavour. Meat by itself, especially
chicken, tastes rather dull. This is why you need to add some
herbs, to improve the taste and make the meal much more enjoyable.
The same goes for turkey. You need to add basil and butter on
the skin of the turkey, to enhance the taste. I always add some
black pepper after the meat is cooked and is ready to be placed
on the dinner table.
If you tried eating the turkey without herbs and spices, you
may be tasting rather dull meat. These are the tips you can use
to improve the taste of your meals, when cooking with herbs and
spices.
About the Author:
Jennifer Bowers has written articles on cooking, kitchen tools, food, cookies, coffee and party ideas including
Cooking,
Food Cooking,
Bakeware,
Cuisinart,
Kitchen Electrics,
Kitchen Storage,
Stainless Steel Cookware,
Decaffeinated Coffee,
Ideas For Birthday Parties.
Keep a lookout for more of her articles on this website.
Did You Know?
Why would anyone go to a culinary school?
Most people go to a culinary school so that
they can become involved in the restaurant business. They have
a passion for food and want to be able to cook these intricate
meals and specialty dishes.
Perhaps they have always wanted to own
their own restaurant and love to cook but do not know how to manage
the business side of the restaurant. There are many, many reasons
why people go into a culinary school.
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