The best thing about slow cooking is the way that you can throw a delicious meal together with just a few ingredients from the store cupboard.

Your slow cooker will pay for itself easily. The hours you save when you are cooking your meal makes it priceless. But, if you plan to make slow cooking part of your usual meal times, then it pays to have a few basics to keep in your cupboards to make meal planning easy.

Beans – Beans are a very economical source of protein that cook very well in slow cookers . Beans have their own individual flavor which can be enhanced by the herbs or spices you use when cooking them. Beans make a great meal base when you cook them with meat or be the main ingredient if you are a vegetarian looking to create a quick dish. Whether borlotti, lentil, haricot, or black-eyed, beans can be the start of some fantastic slow cooker dishes.

Fibrous Vegetables – For starters, these means good old spuds and the average kitchen has at least a few potatoes lurking around in the vegetable rack.They are a very versatile food. Mash them, fry them, stew them, or chuck them in the crockpot.

Potatoes add density to soups, stews and meat-free meals. Potatoes and other fibrous veggies like carrots, turnips and swedes, take a while to cook, so they can be added to the slow cooker with meat and can cook all day.

Fresh Herbs – Using herbs can dramatically change the flavour of almost any meal you make. Herbs can also be bought dried, but they release a much better flavor if they are added to the crockpot fresh.

You can even grow your own fresh herbs on your kitchen window ledge. You just need a nice sunny spot, some compost, and remember to water them regularly. Home grown herbs can even be dried to extend their life, making them easy to keep around without worrying too much about wasting them.

Don’t forget to add your herbs near the end of the crockpot cooking cycle so their flavor fills the cooked meal and isn’t lost during the cooking time.

Want to choose the best slow cooker, then visit Jayne Fairclough’s site on how to choose from amongst the slow cooker reviews for the crock pot best suited to your needs.

Tags : Cooking, crock pots, food, product reviews, Recipes, slow cookers

In these times of superior awareness of the shortages in the world and the recent economic problems in the whole world, but particularly in the wealthy Western countries, which are the powerhouses of most Third World countries’ progress, people are more aware of waste. It is a sin again to throw away food, like it was 50 years ago.

This can only be a good thing although it is a disgrace that it took an international financial crisis to make us recall the lesson. These days, waste of any kind is greeted with public censure and so it is at home too. Most people spend a very high proportion of their outgoings on food and so anyone who wants to cut back, has to first look to this quarter to make a saving.

However, saving does not inevitably mean ‘not buying’, it can and should mean ‘not throwing away’. In other words, prepare your food and do not let your food go off. Preparation and storage are the major words. With that thought in mind, here are a few of my tips for preparing and storing food correctly.

Bread – tons of bread is thrown away every day, because it has gone stale or mouldy and yet it is totally unnecessary. Keep your bread in the deep freezer and not in the bread bin. A whole loaf will slice frozen with the proper knife and sliced bread will come away slice by slice. There is no requirement to defrost as it only takes a minute or two at room temperature.

Bananas – most people know that banana skins turn black if kept in the fridge, but most people do not know that bananas can be frozen solid. Yes, the skins will still go black, but the fruit will be undamaged.

Cake – to stop cake from going stale, store it in a tin with an apple. The moisture in the apple will stop the cake from going hard.

Watercress – to keep watercress from wilting, store it upside down in water, that is stalks up.

Salt – salt often gets damp, particularly if stored in a steamy kitchen without sufficient ventilation, but you do not have to worry about that if you put two or three grains of rice in the salt cellar. They will soak up the moisture before the salt.

Cereal – stop cereal from going soft by resealing the bag with a few clothes pegs. Your cereal will last weeks more.

Jam – boiling jam produces a scum which has to be skimmed off and thrown away. This wastes jam, goodness and flavour. However, if you whisk a knob of butter into the mixture at the last minute the scum will not appear, saving time and goodness.

Funnel – you always seem to need a funnel when you do not have one. Then you vow to get a funnel for the next time. Do not bother. Just cut the top nine inches off a plastic bottle of cola. It makes an ideal throw-away funnel. Some of the larger bottles even have a handle on them which is even better.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with researching the programmable crock pot. If you have an interest in cooking or crock pots, please go over to our website now at Large Crock Pots

Tags : business, Cooking, crock pots, fitness, food, gourmet, health, hobbies, kitchen, nutrition, other, Recipes, recreation, reviews, uncategorized

The summer months are wonderful for being outdoors and barbecuing meals. It could be the warmth of the weather that gets people out of the house to grill delectable foods that can’t be prepared when it is wintertime. It may also be that friends and loved ones are more likely to gather during the summer months to enjoy the comradery.

But whatever the reason to enjoy grilling during the summertime, the reality is that one is either great or awful at barbecuing. Of course, the worst griller in the world may produce a quality piece of meat occasionally. So there must be another ingredient which is missing that creates that succulent end product, whether a rack of ribs or a chicken or a steak.

The essential element that will guarantee a wonderful grilled meal is a marinade, a special sauce, or a rub. There are a variety of rubs that can be prepared to enhance the flavor of any meat that you want to barbecue. Rubs can be herbal, sweet, or spicy, mild or fiery; you can impart the flavors you like to your barbecued foods and create a meal that is all your own.

While there is certainly, a lot to be said about the person in charge of the barbecue when it comes to how tasty a meal is, the barbecue marinade actually has a lot to do with how the meat turns out. People who grill across the country in competitions all use their own unique blend of herbs, spices and other ingredients in the formation of their barbecue sauce, and if they can do it – so can you.

Good barbecue marinades should all have some particular ingredients in common. Get creative and combine the flavors you love best until you have the marinade you want.

A classic barbecue sauce, rub, or marinade can really make ninety-percent of the taste of meat or poultry. Barbecue sauce is that add on to provide that special something, that missing component, that puts a food dish over the top, transforming it from a mere standard dish to a delicacy. Something else must be the missing ingredient that makes a piece of meat, whether it is a rack of ribs, a chicken or steak, turn out great in the end.

Simon Pearsen writes articles, review, and products reports on a variety of topics, including those on Meat Tenderizer Tools and the multi-purpose Electric Frying Pan.

Tags : Cooking, Cooking Tips, food, food and drink, kitchen, marinade, meat tenderizer, Recipes

Do you want to wow your friends at the next neighbourhood barbecue! But how much do we really know about the art of barbecuing?

1) Whole pigs were cooked and eaten by the crowds in the southern states at feasts before the Civil War.

2) Smoking was used as far as 6000 years ago in order to make meats safe to eat and store.

3) In Australia, a barbecue is commonly referred to as a barbie. The famous statement Ill slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you, which appeared in Australian tourism advertisements, is often used to refer to the country.

4) Today, the method most commonly used is in fact broiling not actual barbecuing: cooking at 475-700*F in much less time than barbecuing.

5) According to the Barbecue Statistics, half of all marshmallows consumed in the U.S. have been toasted over a grill.

6) For an easy way to check how much propane you have left, put your bathroom scale outside and weigh the gas tank.

7) The origin of the word barbecue is not clearly defined. Some people believe it came from the American-Indian word barbacoa for a wood on which foods were cooked.
To add a smokey flavour to your gas-grill-cooked foods or foods cooked inside the house, use liquid smoke. A condensation of actual smoke, this product can be easily added to your barbecue marinade or sauce.

9) Brisket, the extremely hard cut of meat taken from a cows chest, takes one to two hours per pound to barbecue. Thats an average 12 hours on the grill for a basic 8-pound piece!

10) Kansas City, Missouri and Lexington, North Carolina both claim to be the barbecue capitals of the world. Memphis, meanwhile, stakes a claim to being the pork barbecue capital.

Now youre set to impress! Want more cooking tips. Competition barbeque secrets revealed here!

Tags : Cooking Tips

A new set of cooking pans is possibly some of the best culinary crafting in the world. Providing a home style taste and an easy way to craft masterpieces in your own home, this type of cooking pans are decidedly versatile, requiring a little time learn how to use.

Cooking pans need to be handled slightly different from most other cooking equipment. Your pans will need some important steps before you cook you first meal. This is called seasoning and it ensures that your pans will last a lifetime.

Straight oiling. Using this method of preparing cooking pans, oil, fat is smothered into the cooking pans and then removed slightly. You will then use then pan to prepare intensely greasy food the first couple of times that you use them. Bacon, Sausage, and other similar food works great. You should repeat this at least 5 to 7 times before you cook anything else.

Once your new cooking pans have been seasoned, it’s ready to be used to cook virtually anything you can imagine. Most cooks use their cooking pans to do everything from frying chicken to baking corn bread and biscuits. These unique cooking pans are ideal for stove-top cooking and baking.

Now that you have cooked your masterpiece its is time to clean up. You will find that the style for cleaning seasoned cooking pans a bit unusual, Instead of tossing it into the dishwasher or scraping it your, you must use a much more delicate approach, to ensure that you never lose the seasoning.

The appropriate method for cleaning your seasoned pans requires you to take a good amount of boiling water, you are then to fill you pan with the water, let it sit for a bit and then empty it out, and presto you new cooking pan is clean, and it retained it seasoning.

Tags : Cooking