A good friend of ours, Adam, just moved in to our apartment. Up until that point I have lived with my roommate, and the lead singer of my band, Tim, for 6 years. It was incredible living with him but you can probably imagine after six years of being in a band together and in close living quarters that it was time for us to live apart. Our new roommate, Adam, is a great dude and a brilliant film maker so expect to see some video content coming to Y-I-Eat-N soon enough… (Check out his stuff here)
Tonight I met his buddy, Sean, at the apartment and Sean seemed interested in food but claimed he could not cook at all. He said that he would love to learn how to cook but that he had no idea where to start and wondered if he did not have that innate passion within him if it would be possible to learn at all. Just the sheer fact that he wanted to learn was all I needed to hear. Upon asking me what cook books I recommended for a beginner, and after coming up short on an answer, we came up with an idea.
I am going to start a section on this blog to offer really basic cooking tips for someone just getting started. I will attempt to write recipes that are thoroughly detailed and try to hit on the things I usually look over as a cook, the simple stuff. Please feel free to write in with your basic cooking questions, tips, and thoughts. I am going to try to remember back to the old days when I was still not yet a virgin and I made simple food (did you read that last line right?). When I started cooking I pretty much cooked everything on the George Forman grill. The “Lean Mean Fat Grilling Machine.” Boy was that thing classic. It was little more than a panini press on a slant, and what better way to suck out all of the flavor and juices in your meat, overcook it, and dry it out?
As for what to start teaching someone, well, I have to start back with the first thing that I remember making. Eggs. Omlettees, scrambled eggs, eggs over easy, sunny side up, all that fun stuff, they are all so damn good! Not much better than an egg cooked properly. I am still working on the format but for now the instructions are in bold and I have added liner notes in italics. These are simple instructions, do not be turned off by the liner notes, they are simply things I have learned over the years that may help.
Scramble Eggs Recipe
Ingredients: 2-3 Eggs, Salt, Pepper, Butter and/or Oil, Milk/Water optional.
- Crack 2-3 eggs into a large enough bowl, one at a time (obviously, unless you are god!).
- Add a little salt and pepper. I would add around a half of a teaspoon, to a teaspoon of each, but play around with the amount of salt and pepper to figure out what works for you. There is no EXACT way to season something, everyone tastes a bit differently. We don’t look the same, so why would we assume to taste the same?
- Add a splash of milk or water if you’d like. This will thin it out a bit but also add a little extra moisture and will make them a bit fluffier. It also makes more egg as it adds to the mixture…
- Put a NON-stick pan over medium heat. Medium heat depends on your stove top so try to understand where yours is but it will generally be in the middle of whatever dial you are using. Some stoves actually say low, medium-low, medium, etc, while others have numbers. The reason you want to use a NON-stick pan is that eggs tend to stick to pans really easily and if you were trying to make something like an omelette you would have very little hope of ever flipping that thing over.
- Using a whisk or a fork beat the eggs. I break the yolks first by sticking a fork in them. This usually makes it easier to scramble them with the whites. The longer you beat them the fluffier they will get but make sure that the whites and the yolks form one united color before you put them in the pan.
- Once your pan has been heating for a few minutes on the stove you are ready to add your butter/oil. The reason that some people use both is that butter burns quickly and oil does not so the oil acts as a shield for the butter so it can cook longer. If you are using a NON-stick pan you do not need very much of either, perhaps about a half tablespoon of oil or butter. Once you drop in the oil/butter let it heat up in the pan for just a second while you mix it around to try and coat the bottom of the band.
- Pour in the eggs, let it sit for a moment until it starts to bubble and begins to solidify as one big open omelette (which we will learn another time).
- With a spatula fold the eggs over themselves, break them up, scramble them in whatever way you see fit. Some like their eggs a bit chunkier, others like them nice and scrambled up, it is really up to you.
- Cook the eggs through while moving them around in the pan to evenly cook all of the egg. Some people like to overcook their eggs but to be honest the heat from the eggs will continue to cook them on your plate so it is perfectly okay and delicious to take them off the pan and put them on your plate while they still look a bit wet. What I am getting at is that it is better to undercook them a tiny bit than to overcook them. But what you are generally doing when scrambling your eggs is that you are moving them around in the pan, breaking them up, and trying to cook all of the uncooked eggs before taking it off the heat and serving it on your plate. You will know they are done when there is only a little bit of wetness left in the eggs and they are a bright yellow.
- Tip: try adding other spices and flavors to your eggs. You can sprinkle in some shredded cheese to make cheesy scrambled eggs, mix in some garlic powder, or throw in some fresh tomatoes for an extra zip.
A good way to avoid over cooking scrambled eggs is to cook them the way the French do, which is to never let the eggs stop moving once you put them in the hot pan. If you continually move them then it is easier to control how much they cook.