Recognizable? Those cooking facts you have to look up every time
Just like everyone has those go-to recipes that keep making the rotation – sometimes I eat pesto pasta every week and you won’t hear me complain – there are also those basic cooking facts I simply can’t seem to remember. Do you have that too, or should I be worried about my memory?
How hot should the oven be?
Somehow I can never remember how hot to set the oven when I want to roast potatoes or vegetables. I’ve now put a Post-it note in the book Koken met Karin with the information. Want to know? 175 degrees, 20 minutes. Right? Better check.
How much couscous?
I make couscous about once a week, and every week I look it up: how much couscous per person, and how much water? It doesn’t say on the packet. Making couscous by feel is not going to work – couscous soup or enough for a gigantic pot. I’ve now written it on the bag with a marker; maybe that will help.
Rice cooker
Cooking rice in a rice cooker is a gift from heaven. Seriously, buy one: perfect grains, neither dry nor sticky. As long as you can remember how much rice and how much water to put in it. Every time I end up Googling it on my phone to find out again.
1-2-3 dough
That was an easy mnemonic at culinary school: for shortbread cookies, you simply make a basic 1-2-3 dough. That means 1 part sugar, twice as much butter and 3 parts flour. And an egg. Or was it the other way around? In short, I have to look it up every time.
Making caramel
Are you supposed to stir the sugar while it caramelizes, or not? Better watch a video before I make caramel sauce for the thousandth time.
Hot water or not?
Which vegetables do you start in cold water, and which go into hot water? I keep leafing through my mother’s old Margriet cookbook to find out, until I learned a handy rule: everything that grows above ground goes into boiling water; anything that grows underground (so potatoes, beets and carrots) wants to go into the pan with cold water.
Pasta per person
Once again, I’ve cooked enough pasta for a small Italian village, while there are only two of us eating. Not only is it a waste to throw away, the sauce-cheese-pasta ratio is completely off too. A pasta measurer is the solution, or the scales: 75 grams uncooked per person is really enough, even if you eat like a construction worker after a long day.
