Some Cooking Tips From Me, A Guy Who Learned How To Boil Water A Week Ago
I’ve always had an interest in two things: cooking and helping others. However, I have never indulged my interest in either one of those things. Whenever someone texts me and asks for help, I pretend I’m asleep and don’t respond. And whenever I do respond, I simply tell them, “Sorry, I was asleep.”
With cooking, a similar thing would happen where whenever I was hungry and needed to cook, I would just go to sleep instead because sleep is a meal you don’t need a recipe for. Because of this easy work-around, I never really tried to cook. That is, until a week ago.
One week ago today, I learned how to boil water on a stove. I was absolutely blindsided by this marvelous cooking technique that had escaped my grasp for so many years. Ever since that moment, I have been learning more and more about cooking, and I’m excited to share all I’ve learned with newcomers to cooking, as well as experienced cheves.
The Plural of “Chef” is “Chefs,” Not “Cheves”
The most recent little tidbit I learned was actually discovered while I was writing this piece. In my opinion, it’s pretty cool that you can just continue to learn, despite already learning so much about cooking. It really makes me wonder how much knowledge the veteran chefs have.
You Just Have to Preheat the Oven, Not the Whole Room
An early mistake I would make was misunderstanding the concept of preheating. Whenever fixing a more difficult frozen meal like a frozen pizza or a french bread pizza or Pizza Rolls, I would read that I had to preheat the oven to ~400°F. Understandably, I would interpret this as preheating the room itself and would turn my thermostat all the way up to ~400°F. I have since learned that the oven actually has a built-in preheating feature, so you don’t need to preheat your whole home!
Admittedly, the burns all over my body do make it hard to hit the preheat button on my oven, but my sheer passion and desire to become a better cook fuel me.
Fruit Snacks Are Not Fruit
When I was a child, my favorite fruit was snacks. I had no reason to believe fruit snacks weren’t fruit. After all, it is literally in the name — fruit snacks. Plus, more often than not, fruit snacks actually resemble fruit. But you cannot buy into the lies of these deceitful, tasty atrocities. They are not fruit at all. They are something much worse than fruit; they are liars. Do I still often eat the little treats that purposely misled me for so long? Absolutely. Do I list them as a fruit on my personal food pyramid? Not anymore.
Milk Can Actually Expire
Many advanced recipes — such as cereal — require milk, which I mistakenly referred to as “cow juice” until roughly two months ago. I only drink ice water with crushed ice because I love the little crunches, so I would wait for my milk to reach a similar consistency. Do not do this.
Since finding out the date on the gallon of milk was an expiration date, I have felt significantly less sick and saved a lot more money from not going to the hospital as often. I do still wish I could drink my chunky milk because I truly did love it. But I must live with my temptation and learn to make it subside because my chunky milk is essentially my forbidden fruit.
Also, milk is not a fruit either. So chunky milk is my forbidden milk, not my forbidden fruit.
It is Not Illegal to Eat Lunchables for Dinner
I haven’t confirmed this one yet using personal experience, but I did just get done reading the book the holds every federal law and every state law. Nowhere in the book did I see any mention of eating a Lunchable for dinner, which seems heinous and vile but is apparently not a crime. I never even considered it before because I figured it was a crime punishable by death, but now that I’m pretty sure it’s not, I might actually try it!
In fact, I think I’m gonna eat a Lunchable for dinner tonight! I can’t wait. I would love to give you guys some more good tips I’ve learned about cooking, but someone is currently knocking on my front door, demanding I come out with my hands up. Probably just some pranksters havin’ a laugh! But I’ll check it out.