How to Make a (Yummy) Salad

Salads sometimes get a bad rep, and it’s true that’s it’s very easy to make a boring salad. (The one I grew up with was lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes and no dressing.) But as a light summer meal, or as a side dish, salads can be great.

Salads are so simple to make that I think it’s a shame not to learn how to make them interesting. So in this post I want to share with you some of the tricks I’ve learned.

1. Mix it up

There is nothing wrong with lettuce, cucumber, and tomatoes, but have you ever tried grating some apple into your salad? Do you like beetroot, mushrooms, or olives? What about adding in some vegetables that you’d normally cook, like peas or cabbage? The more variety in colour, texture and taste your salad has, the more fun it will be to eat.

2. Season it!

The biggest mistake I (and I suspect other people) always made with salads was not seasoning them. It’s amazing how much difference even a little sprinkle of salt can make. But don’t stop at salt – try adding herbs, chilli, lemon, ginger, garlic, vinegar; even soy sauce or honey! You can use just as wide a range of seasonings on a salad as you can in cooked foods.

3. Add some fat

Salads are full of fibre, slow-release carbohydrates, and vitamins, but they don’t tend to offer much in terms of fat or protein. This can mean that they don’t make you feel full for long. Adding some healthy fats to a salad is a great way to make it more satisfying. You could add an oil such as rapeseed or olive oil, nuts, seeds, cheese, or even avocado! Personally I like poppy or sesame seeds, because they also add a little crunch.

Salads can be a really fun, interesting food, so it’s well worth experimenting with them to find some that you like. I’d love to hear about your favourite creations in the comments!

How to Chop Lettuce

Sorry to keep you waiting everyone! Let’s get back to cooking some refreshing summer dishes!

Lettuce is an ingredient that it took me a while to learn to love. I used to only like lettuce in one specific sandwich, but now I enjoy it in a range of dishes.

I say ‘lettuce’, but there are actually a whole range of lettuces – my favourites are iceberg and little gem. Different varieties of lettuce can look quite different, but they all share the same basic structure: larger leaves on the outside, getting smaller and smaller until you reach the stem in the middle. This means you can use the same technique to cut them all!

If you’re using a whole lettuce, the easiest way to cut most of them is to just cut slices about 1cm thick.  Start from the top, and work your way down to the stem. Because of all the layers, you’ll get beautifully shredded lettuce. (If you’ve got a big, round lettuce like iceberg, first chop it in half from top to bottom, then place it on its cut side to slice.)

However, once you’ve cut a lettuce like this, it won’t keep for long. So if you only want a little lettuce, start by peeling off the leaves you want by hand. To make slicing easier, pile them up, and then slice as before.

For some dishes, you don’t even need to chop your lettuce! I like whole lettuce leaves in sandwiches because they fall out less easily.

And finally, there’s nothing worse than a limp lettuce leaf, so let me share with you a secret technique! If you chop a thin layer off the bottom of the stalk, and place it in a glass or bowl with a little water, it will suck up the water and crisp back up again!

How to Cook Quinoa

Quinoa is a small, round seed that can be eaten like rice or couscous. It’s full of protein and fiber, and it even comes in a range of different colours!

Being packed with protein and fiber makes quinoa very filling, so a small cupful (200-250ml) of dry quinoa makes easily enough for four people. And if you’re already familiar with cooking rice (link), cooking quinoa is pretty straightforward.

Start by washing the quinoa.  You can add equal amounts of quinoa and water to your saucepan, mix, and drain off the water or, my preferred method, put the quinoa in a metal sieve, and rinse it under running water.

Put the quinoa in a saucepan and add water. Quinoa needs a lot of water – three times as much water as quinoa! Use a measuring jug, or just the same cup you used to measure your quinoa. However, for really good quinoa, I would recommend cooking it in stock rather than plain water – it makes a huge different to both the texture and flavour!

Put the lid on your saucepan and bring to the boil. Once it’s reached boiling point, you can turn the pan down so that it’s just gently boiling. It then needs to be boiled for about twenty minutes, or until it’s soft and has absorbed all the water. Remember to turn the pan off once the water’s all gone!

 

Quinoa isn’t nearly as common as rice or pasta, but it’s a great way to add variety to your mealtimes!

How to Chop a Cherry Tomato

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re familiar with basic knife safety before starting this tutorial. (link)

While I love tinned tomatoes for cooking with, my favourite tomatoes for salads or finger food are sweet little cherry tomatoes.

Like onions, tomatoes have smooth, slippery skin that can make them a little tricky to chop. So it’s important to use a good, sharp knife, preferably with a serrated blade. If you’re using a smooth knife I would start each cut by piercing the tomato with the tip of your blade – a great place to do this is the little green spot at the top of the tomato, where it would connect to the vine.

You can eat cherry tomatoes whole (minus the vine), but I find most of them are just a tiny bit big for my mouth. So for finger food, I like to halve my cherry tomatoes.

To halve cherry tomatoes, hold your tomato steady with a thumb and finger, and cut straight down between them.

For mixed salads, though, I like to dice my tomatoes so all the flavours mix together. The easiest way to do this with cherry tomatoes is to cut them into eighths. Start by cutting them into halves just as above. Then, place each half on its cut face to cut into quarters.

Tomatoes are a great way to add pops of colour and flavour to plates of salad. And these sweet cherries are often popular with kids too!

How to Chop a Cucumber

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re familiar with basic knife safety before starting this tutorial. (link)

Although it’s mostly been hidden behind rain clouds today, the summer sun has arrived here in England! With hotter weather comes the desire for more refreshing foods like salads and sandwiches. One of my favourite ingredients for both is cucumber.

Cucumber has dark green skin, paler green flesh and translucent seeds in the middle. You can basically eat the whole thing but the end parts of the cucumber, which don’t have any seeds in, are often a bit bitter. (I usually chop off the ends and feed them to my guinea pigs!)

Depending on what you want to use your cucumber for, you may want to cut it into slices, sticks, or cubes.

Slices of cucumber are best for sandwiches, and they’re very straightforward to cut. Simply work from one end of the cucumber, cutting off slices as thin or as thick as you like! Although, if you are going to use them in sandwiches, I’d recommend slices thinner than ½ cm (¼ inch).

Sticks of cucumber are perfect for finger food. I especially like them with some fresh hummus. To cut a cucumber into sticks, start by chopping off a chunk of cucumber the same length as you want your sticks. (You may remember this method from my post on carrot sticks here.) Then just keep halving until your cucumber sticks are as thin as you like.

Cubes of cucumber are perfect for mixing into salads. You can also use slices, but I personally think cubes let you mix all the ingredients together better. You can cut cubes of cucumber from either slices or sticks, but my favourite is using a sort of grid pattern like we did for diced carrot (link). This is the fastest way of cutting cubes I’ve found.

Start with a chunk of cucumber like for sticks, and cut it into long, thick slices as in the picture below.

Cut each thick slice into sticks, then into cubes about 1cm (½ inch) square. Try and hold the sticks together for faster cutting.

And there you have it! How to chop a cucumber, for all your summer dishes!

How to Chop a Mushroom – into chunks or slices

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re familiar with basic knife safety before starting this tutorial. (link)

We have a bit of a love/hate relationships with mushrooms in our house. By which I mean, two of us love them, one is indifferent, and one of us hates them.

 

 

Mushrooms are a type of fungus, and there are actually a lot of different varieties. However, the ones you’ll see most often in supermarkets are closed-cup, chestnut, or button mushrooms.

These mushrooms have already had some of the prep done for you. All that’s left are the stalk and cap, so you can eat the whole thing!

 

 

 

You don’t even need to wash mushrooms; in fact it’s best to avoid getting them wet. Not only will it make them feel kind of slimy, it makes it very easy for mould to grow on mushrooms. (Mould growing on mushrooms has always amused me, a little fungus growing on a big fungus, but I digress.)

 

 

 

If your mushrooms are getting a little old, however, you may want to peel them. It’s actually easiest to do this with your fingers! Start by pulling the stalk off the mushroom. You can then reach into the middle of the mushroom and get hold of the edge of the skin, close to where the stalk was. Then, gently pull it off.

 

 

 

To chop your mushrooms, it’s easiest to start with them lying on their caps. For chunks, you can just quarter them.

If you’d rather have sliced mushrooms, start by chopping them in half. Then place the mushroom on its cut side as you slice it. I like slices about half a centimetre (1/4 inch) thick.

Mushrooms can be eaten raw or cooked, but an overcooked mushroom is rubbery and chewy. To fry mushrooms, simply heat them in a frying pan for anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes! It really depends on how well-done you like your mushroom.

How to Pan-Fry Chicken

Chicken is a popular (and tasty!) source of protein, but it’s one you have to be a little bit careful cooking because of the risk of salmonella. Luckily, chicken undergoes a very helpful change in colour and texture from raw to cooked.

Like fish (which I wrote about baking here), raw chicken is translucent, or kind of see-through, and has a kind of jelly-like texture. Once cooked, the colour fades from pink to a kind of off-white (though this does depend on the part of the chicken). The texture also changes, becoming firmer and more stringy.

If you’re going to be handling raw chicken, make sure to wash your hands (and utensils) with soap and water afterwards. Don’t wash the chicken though – this can actually spread harmful bacteria. You can find out more on food safety in my post here.

Pan-frying chicken is a great way to cook it quickly, and you can even cook it from frozen!

To start, add a little oil to your pan, and put it on a medium heat. You don’t need a lot of oil to fry chicken, just enough to coat the bottom of the pan. We like to use a silicone brush to get a nice, thin layer.

Once you’ve added your chicken, putting a lid on your pan will help it to heat up quicker. It can also help to keep moisture in. (You can even add a little water if you want – this can help distribute the heat more evenly, as well as stopping the pan from overheating and burning your chicken! A little water is especially helpful if you’re cooking from frozen.)

Now chicken usually comes in quite large chunks – breasts or thighs for example. This means the heat reaches the outside of the chicken much quicker than it does the middle. This can lead to the outside being overcooked while the inside is undercooked. To avoid this, I like to chop my chicken into cubes a couple of centimetres (a little under an inch) on each side. You can even do this while the chicken cooks, as long as you don’t have a non-stick pan! Doing it in the pan also helps you to check whether the chicken is cooked right through to the middle.

It takes about 20 minutes to pan-fry chicken, but it does of course depend on how high you turn up the heat!

Pan-fried chicken is great for salads or sandwiches as well as hot dishes, but if you’re looking for a hot chicken recipe, why not try adding it to my curry (link) or stir-fry (link)?

How to Make a White Sauce

A white sauce is a sauce made using milk. It has a mild, creamy flavour that complements a range of ingredients, including mushrooms, chicken and fish.

The first thing to decide when making a white sauce is what kind of milk you want to use. If you’re using dairy, using skimmed milk will give you a very thin sauce, so I would recommend at least semi-skimmed. If you’re using a non-dairy milk, you need one with more fat and protein than sugar. This means that soy and nut milks will work, but things like coconut milk won’t. And, if possible, use an unsweetened milk.

The next thing to decide is how to flavour your sauce. I like to start a white sauce by gently frying some diced onion (cutting tutorial here) or crushed garlic in a little oil before I add the milk. You can also add a stock cube directly to the milk as you heat it – try and match the flavour of the stock to the ingredients you plan to put in the sauce. You could also add a little grated or cream cheese for richness, nutmeg for a little spice,  or some dried parsley.

Finally, you’ll need to thicken your sauce. There are two main techniques you can use here.

The classic technique to thicken a sauce is called a roux. A roux starts by frying a spoonful of wheat flour in a little butter or oil. You have to be careful at this stage that the flour is cooked, or the resulting sauce will taste floury. You also have to be careful to avoid lumps – one way to do this is to add the flour to onions, rather than directly into the pan. After a few minutes of frying, you can add your milk. To avoid lumps (again), you need to add it very slowly at first, and keep stirring!

It can be quite easy to get a roux wrong, so the thickening method I prefer is cornflour. Simply mix together one spoonful of cornflour with one spoonful of cold water or milk. Then, add the cornflour mix to your sauce. The great thing about this method is that it can be done last-minute, there’s no floury aftertaste, it’s a lot easier to avoid lumps, and it’s even gluten-free!

Whichever method you use, a white sauce is really versatile. You can use it with all kinds of fish, in pasta dishes like lasagna, or in a chicken and mushroom pie…

One final thing though – if you have leftover white sauce you may find that it sets when chilled, especially if you used cornflour as a thickening agent. This is perfectly normal and doesn’t mean the sauce has gone off; it will go right back to liquid when you heat it up again.

How to Grate Anything (except your fingers)

A grater is a very useful piece of kitchen equipment; so much so that it made it into my top 20 (link)! It’s a great (or should that be ‘grate’) tool for quickly chopping ingredients very finely.

A grater is essentially a metal plate with sharpened holes in it. You can get a variety of shapes and sizes, but my favourite is a box grater because it has multiple sizes of holes in the one tool. Also, your grated ingredients (mostly) collect neatly underneath.

To use a grater, hold it steady in one hand. (Usually your non-dominant hand.) Hold your ingredients in your other hand, and apply gentle pressure as you rub your ingredients up and down the grater. Just keep your fingers out of the way – while graters aren’t as sharp as knives, they can still break your skin.

I think perhaps the most common ingredient to grate is cheese. Grated cheese is perfect for on top of pasta dishes, mashed potato, or in sandwiches. You can buy grated cheese, but it’s often much cheaper to grate your own, and it’s a good ingredient to practice grating. If you have, for example, a large block of cheese, you can grate quite quickly, especially if you’re not using all of it. However, the closer your fingers are to the grater, the more slowly you need to grate.

I also like to add grated vegetables (and even fruits like apple) to enrich sauces for dishes like pasta and curry. (All the flavours meld together in a blend of deliciousness!) The easiest vegetables to grate are those that are quite sturdy, particularly root vegetables like our old friend the carrot.

When grating a carrot you’ll want to chop the bottom (or ‘tail’) end off, and cut out any blemishes as usual. However, if you leave the top end on for now, you can use it as a ‘handle’ as you grate, to help keep your fingers safely out of the way. Other vegetables that come with their own ‘handles’ include parsnips and courgettes. With rounder root vegetables like sweet potatoes, you may find they need chopping into smaller chunks before they’ll fit on the grater.

There are many more ingredients you can grate, including chocolate and even some spices! But the best thing about a grater is that once you know how to grate one thing, you can grate most of the rest of them too! It’s a really useful kitchen skill.

How to Chop a Bell Pepper – diced bell pepper

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re familiar with basic knife safety before starting this tutorial. (link)

We used strips of bell pepper (cutting tutorial here) in February for stir-fry (recipe here), but bell peppers are also perfect for adding a little extra sweetness and richness to tomato-based sauces.

Just like before, start chopping your bell pepper by cutting it in half. Steady your knife in one of the pepper’s grooves, and cut straight down.

Cut each half in half again, and remove the pith and seeds.

Cut each quarter into strips like before, but try to hold them together for now. Then, as you cut in the other direction, you’ll have diced bell pepper in no time!

Diced bell pepper can be fried in 15 minutes, or less if you like it crunchy. It’s great added to omelettes, but I like it best mixed with a load of other diced vegetables, whether cooked in a sauce or mixed into a salad.

Remember to use up peppers once you’ve cut them so they don’t go off!