Cooking 101: Basic Skills to Win Your Man’s Heart

Cooking Your Way to Your Man’s Heart

Ladies, if men really want women who can cook, and you’re not one of them (yet), the least you can do is to learn up the basic terms so you can sound at least half-professional. Here’s the low down on some terms:

Beat

Beating is an intricately complex manoeuvre. You get a wooden spoon (or similar utensil) and mix ingredients together using a fast, circular (emphasis on circular) movement with a whisk or mixer. To make sure that you’re doing it at the right tempo, have Michael Jackson’s Beat It play in the background. Don’t make a mess now!

Blanch

Credit: catalogs.com

One of those words that the French have given us to make cooking a more regal experience. Heck, even saying the word makes you sound posh. To blanch, or to bleach, is to immerse fruits or nuts briefly in boiling water to remove skins or make easy to peel as it loosens the skin. Untrue to it’s name, however, blanching retains the food’s original colour. Also removes odour, but please do not try this with your man.

Braise

Credit: convivial.blogspot.com

There are two steps to braising: 1) Brown (which means cook till it’s brown, just in case you were wondering) meat or vegetables in small quantity of hot fat. 2) Cook your browned subject slowly in a small amount of liquid either in the oven or on top of the stove. Braising is an ideal way to prepare less-tender cuts of meat, firm-fleshed fish and vegetables. No guarantees that it will make your better half more tender, though.

Broil

Imagine grilling, turn it upside down, and you have broiling! The difference, if you haven’t already figured out, is the heat source; one’s from the bottom, the latter from above. Broiling is also done in an oven, while grilling can be taken outdoors. With all that in mind, you could probably imagine how the difference will affect your cooking. If you can’t, fret not, not many people will bother, as the methods are pretty much interchangeable anyway.

Devil

Now you know why there’s Hell’s Kitchen and not the other way round — those at peace do not need food to satiate a non-existent hunger. The cooking method attributed to the great tempter actually means to coat with a hot seasoning, such as mustard or a hot sauce. Eggs are “deviled” when the yolk is mixed with highly spiced seasonings. The next time you see devil’s food cake on display, be on guard.*

Pare

To pare is to cut away coverings of vegetables and fruits. So if you were to pare a pear, you would cut the top and bottom off, then proceed with cutting off the rest of the skin. Make sure you have a pair of good eyes while you pare the pear or all you’ll be left with is the pear, I mean, core.

Poach

Poaching is illegal, but not in your kitchen. Poaching is taking delicate foods like eggs, fruit and fish in hot, but not boiling, liquid. The idea is to make sure that the food retains it’s shape. If you’re tired of fried eggs, poach ‘em. Poaching can be a little tricky, but it’s not all that difficult. Gently does it. You can be gentle, can’t you?

Pureé

The grub that babies eat — that’s pureé. Pureé is basically mashed potatoes, or whatever you want, and not really achieved by mashing, although you could if you really wanted to. The simple way is this: chop your food up and dump them in a blender, then blend away until you find the right consistency. Having said that, blending chopped potatoes is definitely a bad idea.  Stick with mashing them, please?

Sauté

Basically, to sauté means to cook in a pan with a little fat. Franco-romantically, it means to jump. When the food in your pan starts doing somersaults, you know you’re on the right track to becoming a professional sauteur en hauteur. **

Whip

Credit: pastrypal.com

Essentially, rapid beating with a whisk. A whisk, because you want to get the air into the cream that you’re whipping, trapping air bubbles within the mixture, causing the cream to expand in volume. Before you begin, you might want to enlist the help of an electric mixer, or at least his help. Keep him satiated with a dessert topped with whipped cream after dinner. Get this going for a few weeks and you’re bound to have him with bulging biceps, and maybe a bulging tummy. But we can work around that.

There you have it, your list of terms that you can assimilate into your vocabulary when your in-laws come over for dinner. If what you make gives the impression that baby grub tastes like Jamie Oliver’s cooking, save yourself by talking your way out of it like a master chef who made a silly blunder, “Oh, the prawns did two somersaults, maybe I should have left it at one.”

*Devil’s food cake is not seasoned with devilish spices. Be at peace.

**French for high jumper.

Related Posts

1. A Savvy Guide: Car Skills
2. Get your basic right