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Are you one of those people who has the bad luck of having your gourmet dishes failing on you just when the appetizers have already been served and the guests are waiting for the main course with their wine glasses in hand? In fact, it often happens to the best of cooks that our lovingly prepared meal ditches us in the middle and dinner turns to disaster as you discover that your vegetables have turned soggy and you have added too much salt to the gravy. If you are faced with a similar situation the next time you cook dinner, despair not, because our quick fix solutions to fixing common cooking disasters will help you make the best out of such situations.

Too Much Salt in Gravy: It has often happened to me that as guests pour into the kitchen to exchange pleasantries and small talk, I end up sprinkling too much salt into whatever I am cooking. The quick fix to too much salt in a gravy is to quickly slice a potato and put the slices in the over salted gravy while it simmers. Take out the slices before you serve.  If your gravy can take a couple of tomatoes, then chop some up and add to the gravy. This generally ends up making gravy tastier, zingier and there are no traces of excess salt left in the dish.

Cake Sinks In The Middle: You take out your nicely baked cake to cool on the rack and after fifteen minutes, you find that your cooked lump of dough has a big dent in the middle. Definitely un-servable to dinner guests as is! However, you can still put it to a number of good uses to make lovely dessert. If you have some canned or fresh fruits ready, pierce the cake all over the top with a knife, soak with fresh fruit juice or syrup from the can, put all the fruits on the top to make an even top and pour on whipped cream or some fruit sauce for a fruity cake desert. You can also cut up the cake and serve in separate bowls as a trifle after topping with ice cream, fruits and flavored sauces.

Lumps in the Sauce: You might follow instructions to a T when making white sauce, but it can still turn out to be lumpy. While stirring it and breaking down lumps by a spoon might solve the problem in some cases, the best things to do is to either put it in the blender and give it a whiz or to pass it through a thick sieve. Your sauce will instantly get back the smooth and creamy consistency that you wanted in the first place.

Overcooked Vegetables: Mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables often have a tendency of turning into mush, especially when you have invited guests over. The best way of using the veggies to your advantage as a main course is to mash the over done vegetables properly, add fresh bread crumbs, some corn flour and salt to taste. Fashion this mix into patties or cutlets, dip into a beaten egg, cover with bread crumbs and fry to make crisp vegetable cutlets for your main course. Just make sure you add enough bread crumbs so that the mixture becomes solid enough to hold shape.

Different people at different times often think about joining cooking classes or joining a cooking school. Of course there are a number of reasons for which people often want to go down this road. While the ones who aim for cooking or culinary schools generally aspire to become professional chefs, the main crowd that gets into cooking classes comprises people who just want to learn a particular style of cooking or hone their cooking skills for personal reasons. Depending upon what your aims are, we will give you a brief rundown of the things that you need to consider before you go on and join a school to learn cooking.

Cooking Classes For Personal Reasons: Many of us are often faced with situations where we wish we were better cooks. Every time guests drop in or we throw a party, we pledge to ourselves that we would take cooking classes so as to prepare a better spread the next time. If you want to impress your friends and family with your cooking skills, or if you are planning to start cooking at home, or if you simply enjoy cooking as a hobby, then taking cooking classes can prove to be an enjoyable and worthwhile experience for you.

Most of these classes often run for very short periods like one to three months with just a few hours every week. You can join a class to meet new people, relax and enjoy the company of like minded people and to make new friends. These classes are not competitive at all, you can learn in an easy and casual atmosphere. It is a great way of getting out and learning something while enjoying yourself. And the best part is that you will learn how to cook a number of new recipes pro style. If you are not short of time and money, then these classes come highly recommended. In case managing any of these two things is a problem, then learn cooking tips, techniques and recipes online to save on both time and money.

Cooking Classes Or Culinary School For Professional Advancement: Some people consider joining cooking school in order to make a career as a chef. However, if you think that you are going to get a cooking program of your own or get a high paying job with a five star hotel the moment you pass out of school, then you need to think again. The first thing that you need to realize is that cooking school is not cheap. You might need to take out a loan to pay for your culinary degree. Combine this with the fact that starting salaries in the hospitality and restaurant business are not nearly high enough to make ends meet comfortably.

You will definitely need a couple of years of experience on the floor before you get a well paying job. Also consider the fact that you will most probably spend the rest of your life sweating in warm kitchens, standing all day, taking directions and criticism from others and getting very few perks( unless you are actually employed by a five star). If you feel that you know everything there is to know about cooking as a job (opportunities, pays, perks, promotions, competition, costs etc), and you still want to go ahead, then you should definitely embark on the search for a good cooking school.

Gourmet cooking is definitely not as easy as regular cooking. The main reason behind this is that it involves a lot of preparation time, since every little thing that goes inside a gourmet recipe has to be just perfect. As regular cooks, you might never have mastered the techniques used for gourmet cooking, so we will provide you here with a list of the tips and tricks that you need to learn before you perfect your gourmet cooking style. Please keep in mind that our list of tips and tricks is simply indicative and not exhaustive at all!

• All gourmet cooking recipes require the best quality ingredients. So if you have been one of those people who thought that herbs grew in little plastic packets and jars and that vegetables come from freezers, then you will need some practice fast. If you are seriously into gourmet cooking, then start visiting the fresh produce areas of the supermarket to source your herbs and vegetables fresh. You will be able to get the best quality ingredients from farmers’ or fresh produce markets. Even if you cannot frequent such markets regularly, go there initially to at least find out how fresh, fresh is.

• You must have seen on television shows how the cooks always dice vegetables into equal cubes and julienne them as if they have used a tape measure to measure every cut and julienned vegetable piece. Alas, if you do not have practice, you might not be able to cut vegetables into such equal portions even if you use a tape measure. However, to start with, watch the cooks on TV when they chop. You will notice that to dice veggies into equal cubes, the chef will first cut out a 1cm thick strip of the vegetable, then slice lengthwise to get veg strips that are 1cm wide and 1 cm thick. Then he will chop these strips into equal parts that measure 1 cm on all sides. Definitely not tough but it will take time and practice to get such perfect results.

• Seafood is a crucial ingredient of many gourmet cooking recipes. But you might find yourself at a loss when a recipe calls for boneless prawns and salmons. After all, most regular supermarkets will not be stocking this, and no fresh produce mart will give these for sure. So you will have to learn to use tweezers or needle nosed pliers to pull the bones out of salmon fillets. In order to shell prawn, you will have to hold it tightly by the body and twist the head off. This will let you remove the whole shell easily.

• In order to be a proper gourmet cook, you will need to equip your kitchen with gourmet cooking tools and accessories. You will regularly keep coming across gourmet cooking recipes that call for basting roast meat with butter or fruits with egg whites. So you will need to equip yourself with brushes for this purpose. Similarly, you will need to stock up on a number of cookware pieces ranging from specialized spoons and knives to pans and cookers. Remember that having the right tools and cookware is crucial to the success of your gourmet cooking recipes.

All of us who like and enjoy cooking either consider ourselves gourmets in our own right or at least want to be gourmets after some years of experience. However, turning out nice noodles and pizza is not going to brand you a gourmet any time soon, neither is making instant soup. There are a number of things that anybody claiming to be a gourmet needs to do. For that matter, there are a number of cooking techniques that any good cook should be aware of. We list here a number of things that you will need to learn and know about before you find or perfect your gourmet cooking style.

Get Your Proportions Right: You will never see a great cook fiddling around with measuring spoons and cups. While you can definitely do this even if you are a gourmet cook, the main thing is to know about what will go in a recipe in what proportion. Knowledge of portion sizes for small and large gatherings and multi course menus is also important before you can be called a ‘great cook’.

Learn To Make Your Own Sauces And Stock: Gourmet cooks do not use instant stock cubes or bottled sauces. You can still be a pretty good cook if you use both these things, but getting to know how to make different types of stocks and sauces will let you play around with your recipes more. While making both vegetable and non-veg stock is easy, you can learn how to make some common sauces that you constantly use for your recipes.

Prepare Marinades: Get to know about some basic marinades and then tweak them to get a variety of different tastes and flavors. Remember to give your marinades at least 4 hours. The best food of course is one that has been marinated for at least 24 hours, but do not try this with fish.

Cooking With Wine: A large number of classy recipes call for wine, alcohol or liqueur. You can also give your own recipes a unique taste and flavor by knowing which alcoholic drink to use with which food and how. Once you get the basics of wine and food pairing, you will be able to personalize almost every dish that you make.

Know Your Flavors: Gourmets always turn out food with the perfect combination of different spices and herbs. To attain gourmet status, you will actually need to learn about the right herbs and spices to use for different recipes along with the correct proportions. Different recipes for the same dish will often list different proportions of the same herb or spice. You will have to decide and determine the proportions that suit your style of gourmet cooking.

Presentation: You will never see Michelin starred cooks presenting you with a dish that does not look like a piece of art itself. While you cannot become a gourmet artist in a day, you should start experimenting with different types of garnishing, food colors and decoration styles so as to always serve food that is good looking and appealing.

Hosting a child’s birthday party is both a pleasant as well as an unpleasant experience. While you want throw that best bash for your little one and to see all the guests enjoy themselves to the hilt, you also know that this is going to be one of the most trying and tiring times for you. Keeping the fact that you will be responsible for the décor, the invites, the games, the gifts and baby sitting to hordes of kids, we provide you here with some cooking ideas for simple to make, easy to handle, children friendly foods for a kid’s birthday party.

Snacks and Finger Foods: Most small kids find it very tough to handle plates and eat properly, especially when there are so many other things that they can do. However, you cannot really send your child’s friends back home with an empty stomach either. The best way to cater for your little guests is to have a large number of finger foods that the kids can pick up and stuff while carrying on with their games. If your guests’ parents will not mind, then French fries in different shapes and sizes, wafers and sausages or chicken fingers, nuggets etc. make for filling and tasty snacks. Of course, supplement these high fat content finger foods with fruit and vegetable sticks served with a couple of nice dips, harmless popcorn and low fat crackers and pretzels.

Adult Food In Kid Sized Portions: Children generally love pizzas and burgers, but when they get adult sized slices or portions, they generally end up making a mess out of it. If you do not want children dropping off the insides of their burgers or the tops of their pizzas when eating, then cater for mini pizzas and mini burgers that each child will be able to handle independently. Apart from the fact that this will make for a cleaner party, you will also save a lot of food from being wasted since most children should be able to finish off these small portions easily. Another advantage is that mini pizzas and similar food is easier to serve since you just need to hand one each to each child instead of cutting slices or portioning large burgers.

Drinks: While most kids simply love soda, you might not be very loved by their parents if that is all you serve at your child’s birthday party. To make for a balanced drinks table, serve different flavored sodas along with juices, ginger ale and lemonade. Try not to serve drinks that leave strong stains like grape and pomegranate juice or pink and orange soda etc.

Cakes and Ice Cream: No kid’s birthday party is complete without a cake and an ice cream. While you will have to cut and serve the cake only in the middle of the party, serving ice cream to hordes of little children can get to be a troublesome task. One thing that you can do is to scoop out as many portions as you need way before time, roll the scoops in fruits, nuts, choco chips or sprinkles and set in the freezer on top of a waxed baking sheet. Once the scoops are solid, you can wrap it up in plastic bags to take out and serve on waffle cones or cups during the party.

Buying cookware for a kitchen is not a very tough or tricky task. You can in fact go into a store and pick up anything that you like. But if you want cookware that is really efficient, cost effective and long lasting, then you might need to put some thought in there. Cookware today comes in all kinds of shapes, sizes and materials. Apart from the regular materials that have been used to make cookware since ages, there are a number of new materials that keep entering and leaving the market. While at times, they turn out to be good, they might turn out to be really bad too. However, the text here will help you make the right choice when it comes to buying cookware.

When buying cookware, it is best to stick to traditional materials until and unless you are in the mood to experiment with “xenon blasted titanium pans” or some such hyped up, costly and unheard of before product. Most cooking pans and pots are made from steel, copper, aluminum, cast iron or a permutation and combination of these. Among these metals, copper is the best conductor of heat, followed by aluminum, iron and steel. However, the problem with copper is that it is hard to maintain if you use it rarely, and that it reacts with a number of sour and acidic foods. The same is true of aluminum too, so both of these materials, while being the best choices for cooking food evenly and properly, should not be hoarded in large quantities. However, you can keep a couple of some copper or aluminum utensils for specialty cooking. You might have to restrict your number of copper utensils because of the high cost also.

Cast iron cookware is something that is cheap and conducts heat nicely, but will not come with any great suggestions or recommendations unless you are anemic and need to increase your intake of iron. If you fail to season your cast iron cooking pans and woks extremely well, you will find a lot of your food changing color due to the high iron content that it will get from your pan.

Stainless steel is the best choice if you are looking for a cooking pan or pot that is easy to maintain, non reactive and economical. Yes, stainless steel is value for money. It will last and keep well and it is a fairly good conductor of heat too. If you need large pots, pans and cookers, then stainless steel would be the best option.

If you want to listen to some personal opinion, then non stick cookware is the best for all kinds of cooking purposes. It is generally light and conducts heat nicely, making for evenly and perfectly cooked food. The best part of course is that the food does not stick to the pan and gets cooked pretty fast when compared to steel and iron pans. Many of these non-stick pots and pans are made out of aluminum and then coated with Teflon to make for lightweight pans that make cooking real fast. The only disadvantage is that if you are not careful with washing and stirring, you might land up with utensils where the non stick coating gets scratched or worn out easily.

The best kitchen would be one that has some of all kinds of cooking utensils in different shapes, sizes and materials. If you can afford it, then always go for the best of the range, because this kind of cookware will last and make you kitchen proud every time you look at it.

All parents want their kids to eat and drink healthy foods. However, this is not always possible, because most of the time, this is simply “not” what your kids want. Many mothers often try to control their children’s diet by packing extremely healthy lunch boxes for their kids, thinking that the kids will eat anything when they are really hungry in school. While this strategy is simple and easy, it often backfires, what with today’s kids being smarter than most of us grown ups.

You might end up finding that your healthy lunch is being traded for something ‘not so healthy’ by your street smart kid. If your child is one of the simple, innocent ones, then she might just be dumping the major portion of her lunch into the garbage bin. Packing lunches that are healthy while appealing to the taste buds of small children is not easy, but these cooking ideas and tips will hopefully make it easier for you.

• Ask your kids what they want. This is the first thing to do if you want to start cooking healthy lunches for small kids. Of course, you will not be surprised with the answers that you get—chocolates, cakes, fries, wafers, soda and every other thing that you actually do not want your kids to eat. However, once you know what they want, tell them why they should be eating what you will pack for them and how good it is going to be for them. Instead of telling them vegetables are good for health, tell them how they will be smarter, taller and stronger if they start eating what you pack. And of course, start including small portions of your kids’ favorite food too, maybe on alternate days, as a reward for eating healthy food the rest of the time.

• One of the easiest and healthiest ideas for cooking kids’ lunches is leaving it raw. Both fruit and vegetable salads are extremely nutritious, and you can make them kid friendly by cutting it out like fries or pick me up portions that can be eaten without a fork. Kids love finger food, and to further snazz up their salads, make sure it has enough colors in it. Use at least three fruits or veggies of different colors, and add one or two healthy dips. They will stay fresh till lunchtime and if they are colorful enough, your kid will eat it.

• Cereal will definitely need to be the major portion of your child’s lunch box, since this where all the energy is going to come from. However, packing whole wheat bread vegetable sandwiches is not going to make you the world’s favorite mom anytime soon.  To make sandwiches more appealing to your kids, you can try cutting them down in easy to eat pieces and decorate them. Making smiley jam or ketchup faces etc. will make them highly appealing for small children.

• One of the best cooking ideas for kids lunches are home made bars. Home made muesli and cereal bars can be made in a bunch whenever you have time and be added to your kid’s lunch box every day to provide for a major portion of his or her calorific requirements. Make sure that you use a balanced mix of cereals, nuts and dry fruits so as to cover as many nutrients as possible.