Video Entry: Basic Skills: How to Chop Carrots

Bumm-ba-DUUUM!!!! The first UCC video is now live! Woo! Excitement, fan fare and less spelling errors! Yes friends it's the moment you've all been waiting for. I have gotten off my fat, albeit cute, ass and put together the first of many instructional videos on how to cook.

I'm starting you off slowly with a chopping demonstration. Carrots! Next, onions! Tomorrow, celery and the world! Ok, so I got a little aggressive with the exclamation points. Hey, I'm excited. What can I say? ON WITH THE SHOW!

Stocking the cupboard: Teaching Old Mother Hubbard how it's done.

A friend of mine, the reason this site was spawned, recently went shopping and wanted some advice. Normally I would have gone with her, but I'm tired this weekend. When I go shopping for basics I try to think about shelf life, ease of use, likely hood of use and storage space.

Making Bread Crumbs: When bread is hard enough to kill

We've all gone through this. You buy a beautiful long baguette with the best intentions of using it. You leave it in it's store packaging on the counter over night and the next day it feels like a red wood trunk.

You've got stale!

Your first instinct is to go, "Mother @#$%!" and throw it out. STOP! Calm down. Have some dip. This can be fixed.

Sauteed Onions: Meat's Best Friend

You know there is a difference in degree of sauteed onions. Clarified, caramelized and incinerated. If you're the kind of person who likes their food burned beyond all recognition, then sod off, because we do real cooking here. I don't pander to the “put as much hot sauce on as you can to melt your lower intestine” crowd and I certainly won't tolerate any “I like my crap burned to an unidentifiable crisp” group.

Garlic: This Bulb by Any Other Name Still Stinks

And how. Cook up these babies and you'll be reeking for a few days, but damn it's delicious. This segment will teach you how to make roasted garlic. After it's roasted you can mash it up and spread it on toasted baguettes, chop it up into a salad or throw whole cloves onto cooked pasta. Just don't come to my house with that dragon breath of yours. Ew.

Pasta: Olive Garden Can Kiss My Ass

Alright people. Enough crimes have been committed in the name of pasta and it's time we ended this blood bath. I want you to repeat after me:

• Pasta is my friend.
• Pasta is my friend.
• Pasta should NEVER be cooked for more than EIGHT MINUTES!

If you like pasta that is so mushy it's almost back to its basic form, then you are a bad person and should just open a can of Chef Boy-ar-dee, you heathen. You will RESPECT the pasta! And thus follows my commandments:

1. Thou shall not over cook the pasta until it can be sucked through a straw.
2. Thou shall not snap the spaghetti/linguine/angel hair in half. This makes you a moron and Italians will LAUGH AT YOU.
3. Thou shall not put Velveeta on any pasta. It's not sacrilegious, it just has no flavor and thus no point it adding it.
4. Thou shall not oil thy boiling water unless you want your sauce to slide right off the spaghetti.
5. And the most important: Thou shall NOT CALL IT NOODLES! That's Chinese food you arrogant twit and if you want Chinese, than make dumplings or lo mien but when you're in MY damn kitchen you'll call it PASTA and LIKE it!
   

Now on to the instructions.


Step 1: Choose your pasta.
Very important! If you use dry pasta or fresh pasta there is a big difference in timing. Fresh pasta, which you can identify as not being in a box on the supermarket shelf, but lovingly shaped, surrounded by semolina and handed to you in a white box by a little old lady, needs only 3 - 5 minutes to be done, sometimes less. Dry pasta takes no more than 8 minutes from a rolling boil. Why only 8 minutes when the box says 10? Because after you dump it into a colander into the sink, it doesn't magically become room temperature. It needs to cool down and while it's venting heat it's still cooking, albeit much more slowly. This part of the tour we'll deal with dry pasta since that's what most people handle.

Step 2: Choose your shape.
8 minutes is the default for anything that looks like spaghetti. Pastas have fancy names and shapes but guess what, regardless of what my husband thinks, it all tastes the same. However, the textures are different and what may work well with a fettuccine sauce, may not mesh too well with a primavera setting. Rigatoni, Ziti, and any other tube shaped pasta may take more or less time than 8 minutes. Ravioli and those little pastas like Farfalle (bow ties) or the elbows, take less time because they are smaller. Figure out what you want and lets go.

Step 3: The Rolling Boil
See aren't you glad I taught you how to boil water first? It makes things so much easier. If you skipped that part of the lesson then go back and read it instead of faffing about. I don't repeat myself, not even for my loved ones, and I'm not starting now. After you get your water to a rolling boil add your pasta, without breaking it, and give it a bit of a stir. You'll see it soften up pretty quickly. If the water gets to frothy and starts to threaten to boil over, turn the heat down a bit but make sure you have enough of a hard boil to get the job done.
And for the love of god, time the pasta. You don't want to go to all this trouble to get cat food.

Step 4: No Drain, No Pain?
Ok, that was bad. Don't worry I got a sound thrashing from hubby and brother dear for that one. I hope common sense told you that you should really have a colander (bowl with holes in it) to drain this bad boy into. No? Well you know now. If you don't have one then slowly pour out the water into the sink. Try not to tip the pasta into the sink, unless you just cleaned it (WITH BLEACH!) and don't mind it being in there. Did I mention the sink should be clean AND empty? .....
Moving on.

Step 5: Top Me Off – The Sauce and You
Wine goes in a glass next to the plate of pasta (optional). On the pasta you can pretty much put anything. I'll have a session on tomato sauce later and link it back here. Sometimes when I'm lazy or just damn tired I'll grab a jar of sauce and pop it open. It's good enough and if you experiment with different kinds of jarred sauces you'll find a set that works for you.

CAUTION WARNING PLEASE READ THIS NEXT SEGMENT IF YOU WANT TO LIVE

This is a tale of woe and 'oh for the love of god', because I don't want anyone to go through what I did. I got a jar of fettuccine sauce. The top popped when I opened it so I thought nothing of it, but when it was heated it didn't look right. Very clumpy. Thinking nothing of it, I ate it....the whole jar. For three days I was puking up my guts and wishing I had been strangled by my own umbilical chord. READ DATES OF JARRED ANYTHING! Unless it's cured in salt or blessed by a rabbi (this it not me being cute – I'm serious) check the dates and throw it out if it has lingered too long, open or closed. Having your guts turn inside out and do the hokey-pokey is not worth the 3 bucks you wasted on chucking the toxic swill.

Soft or Hard: The Incredible (most of the time) Edible Egg

This is a quick and easy way to have a low fat breakfast or a quick snack. Or if you're like me, this is how you start Easter Eggs.

A friend of mine once told me she boiled two eggs for 16 minutes because she wasn't sure if they were cooked all the way through. Those eggs could survive a nuclear war! Eggs are not fickle creatures. They only need a few minutes at a rolling boil to be happy.

The Basics: Boiling Water

Yes, you NEED to know this. Why? Because not knowing a rolling boil from a shimmer or a simmer can make or break your dinner. Always start with cold water. You may think using hot water will make things faster, and it will, but you'll be ingesting all kinds of sediment that has been lying around it the hot water tanks. Think about it people, most of you live in NYC and trust me, you have enough toxins to wade through during the day without eating "mystery minerals."