Originally Posted by
Hatchetman
Random thoughts from an ex-chef:
Try to let go of recipes and learn general principles instead. At its root cooking is a survival skill; you want to learn how to make stuff taste good with what you have, rather than what Fresh Fields will sell you. One of my favorite things is to walk into someone's kitchen I've never been in, go through all the cupboards, and whip something tasty out of whatever is there. First time I met my in-laws I went through their rather empty larder and turned 3 qts. of milk, some half and half, a partial bag of frozen peas, some flour, some canned salmon, butter, spice and such into a salmon soufflé. Made for a good first impression.
Exception to the above: when baking, follow the freaking recipe. I see entrees as an art form, baking is all chemistry. If you don't follow the recipe you'll create a monster.
Spend some time learning how to make stocks. Just about anything rotting in the 'fridge or that you scrape off your plate into the trash can be tossed in a stock pot. Teach yourself how to make beef, chicken, and fish based stocks. Once you have those down--they are easy--start working on sauces. If you know how to make a basic brown sauce, white sauce, use a butter and flour based roux, and a cornstarch roux, you can turn just about any critter into something tasty. It takes practice to figure out what works with what, but once you got stocks and sauces down there is very little you can't turn into a meal.
For the most part, low and slow is the way to go on meat. Exceptions are broiler items, but if it is going into a sauce, being marinated, smoked, BBQ'd, whatever, I like starting it at 250-275 and really taking my time. As it gets near done, blast it at 350-450 for color/exterior texture.
Learn food sanitation basics. Avoid cross contamination, i.e. using the French knife on raw chicken and then cutting lettuce with it. Drop a teaspoon full of bleach into a gallon of water and then wipe down everything that touches food with the solution: cutting boards, countertops, implements, etc. Do it often.
Understand safe internal serving/holding temps: Chicken to at least 165, old school pork the same, though if you trust your pork source I think 140 is good. Beef, an internal of 125 or so for rare to 180 or so for pretty freaking well done. Fish, 140 to 165, depending on source. Try to "hold" foods, i.e. store them for serving at 150 to 180, depending on food item (cooler for tender/flaky stuff like fish, warmer for pork in BBQ or something else still breaking down proteins while holding.) Get yourself a cheap probe type thermometer and stick it into your stuff to see what the temp is. Dip said thermo into your sanitizing solution between uses.
It takes a lot of work to allow food poisoning to occur: first you gotta introduce a pathogen to a food medium, then you gotta let it reproduce at a temp it is happy at, then you gotta fail to bring the food item to a temp that kills the pathogen, and so on. Interdict this process at any point and you have no worries. It's kinda like NDs: you gotta break all the rules all at once to make it happen. With that said, there are still some oddball ways of creating, say, anaerobic processes that allow botulism to flourish and such so err on the side of caution. Also note that my low and slow meat preferences is counter indicated if you don't trust the meat source. If that's the case, blast that snot out of it.
That's what leaps to mind, but feel free to throw any specific questions you have at me.