When you cook green beans this holiday season, will you open a can of condensed soup and let the beans bake for hours? Most people do. Baking vegetables over a long period of time reduces their nutrient value.
Plus, if you are trying to have a stress-free holiday cooking experience, you’re probably preparing the casserole a day in advance. That large casserole dish takes up a lot of room in your refrigerator. And, since it’s flat, there are usually items piled on top of it, further ruining its appeal.
There’s a better way to retain the nutrients when you cook green beans, save refrigerator space, and make it much easier on yourself come the big holiday meal.
Steaming is the best method to “par-cook” vegetables before preparing them in other ways. ManPans Cookware was kind enough to furnish a free set of pans for me to play with, and I especially like the steamer insert for their wok.
The steamer insert allows me to cook green beans until they’re slightly soft, but not completely done. I’ll “shock” the beans by submerging them in ice water, stopping the cooking immediately. These vegetables are now partially cooked, but retain more nutrition than baking them in a fatty sauce.
Since we’ve cooked such nice beans, it seems a shame to cover them with canned soup. I can call upon some basic cooking methods and create a roux to thicken simmering milk. The cold roux is added to the hot milk in small increments until the liquid thickens to the consistency I’d like.
Then, I can add cheddar cheese for Broccoli in Cheese Sauce, or add diced mushrooms and create my own quick white sauce with mushrooms that didn’t come from a can.
Combining my partially cooked green beans with the mushroom white sauce in a plastic zipper bag allows me to simply warm it up in boiling water when the holiday meal comes.
The best way to cook string beans, save refrigerator space, and give yourself time to actually enjoy your holiday meal this year is to consider steaming and shocking vegetables first.
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Cook Green Beans video to by clicking here. Chef Todd Mohr has freed thousands of people from the frustration of written recipes with his
online cooking classes. The Chef’s cooking DVD series “Burn Your Recipes” empowers people to cook with basic methods and the ingredients they desire.
I am thrilled to be an E-zine Expert Author and have a number of articles published on a variety of cooking topics (and write new ones all the time!) Page down to see the entire list and click the ones that are helpful to you.
Before I became Chef Todd Mohr, I was Todd Mohr - a guy who liked to cook. A lot of people, including me, even thought I was a pretty good cook. For starters, I had my five meals, well, recipes, I suppose, that I could make well. Being a creative person, I also used some of the techniques from my tried and true \"recipes\" to experiment a bit with new dishes. Some were good and some not so good, and I usually never knew what the difference was.
Through a series of events, I decided to change careers in 1996 and pursue my passion for cooking, so I enrolled in Baltimore International Culinary College. 18 months later, I emerged: Chef Todd Mohr.
The greatest thing I learned in culinary school was the \"how\" and the \"why\" that had been missing from my cooking all those years. My recipes only gave me the \"what\" - which left so much out! The greatest thing I gained in the years after culinary school, was the practical experience from working in kitchens and experimenting at home. Being observant, I learned even more \"hows\" and \"whys\" in addition to \"whats\" along my culinary journey. This experience and experimentation, more than anything else, is what turned Todd Mohr into Chef Todd Mohr.
My experience includes kitchen experience - all the way up to Executive Chef, as well as college teaching experience, starting and operating a successful catering company and then finally, the culmination of all of my passion: opening The Cooking School in Cary NC in 2007.
From The Cooking School, came \"Cooking Coarse\", my daily video blog that quickly gained a loyal You Tube following due to the uniqueness of the instruction offered. It was through feedback received from \"Cooking Coarse\" viewers that I decided to launch WebCookingClasses.com and provide this information to the world.
When I started getting emails that my videos had changed people\'s lives, I knew I was on to something and that was when WebCookingClasses.com was born.
This is my passion - I am excited to share it with you!
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