Better Tips And Ideas For Cooking With Herbs And Spices

Cooking with herbs and spices can improve the taste of your meals. Many ingredients in your meals may taste rather dull without the added flavours of herbs and spices. For example, cooking rice by itself makes for a bland meal. Add Chinese Five Spice and you have a delicious meal. It takes little effort to create a meal to satisfy your taste buds.

Food is to be enjoyed and not endured, by cooking delicious meals just by adding natural flavours to your meals. For example, food cooked with a wise selection of herbs and spices on your Sunday roast, makes the meat much more delicious. People want to know my secret ingredients, when they taste my Sunday roast. I show them my herbs and spice racks and I say these are my secret ingredients.

Some of the herbs, I grow them in my organic garden. I grow basil, parsley and many other herbs. Whenever I need to enhance the flavour of a meal, I add freshly picked herbs from my garden. I use them in my salads, side dishes and main meals.

These are the tips you can use to improve the taste of your meals, when cooking with herbs and spices.

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Choosing The Better Sauce For Easy Pasta Recipes

There are many easy pasta recipes, but sometimes even harder recipes don't turn out because the pasta itself wasn't prepared properly. Cooking pasta in the correct way can sometimes take some small complications out of even more complex recipes.

For example, if pieces of your pasta are always sticking together, then you very likely didn't cook it in enough water, or didn't stir it when you first put it into the water. Knowing how to cook spaghetti and other types of pasta won't suddenly make a complex recipe easier, but it will help.

Beyond cooking, you may be surprised to discover that the shape and size of the different pastas are also factors in how meals turn out. Any good guide will provide explanations.

For example, pieces of the smaller types of pasta can get rather drowned if you have a sauce that's pretty chunky, whereas larger shaped pasta can hold its own. Heavier sauces are better for pieces with distinct shapes and also for the tubular types with grooves in them, as the shapes and grooves retain the sauce better.

One way to ensure easy pasta recipes is to remember that smaller or thinner types of pasta work best with more delicate sauces, while thicker, larger pieces can handle heavier sauces.

Easy pasta recipes will become even easier if you understand the basics that underlie the making of any pasta dish. It's quite simple when you know what the basics are, and indeed they may seem so obvious that it's easy to assume that everyone already knows them.

Certainly, many of the recipes assume that, but new cooks always need to learn even these simple steps at the beginning, and once that occurs, everything else becomes much easier.

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Kids Cooking Pasta With Easy Recipes

Do your kids know how to cook spaghetti or other kinds of pasta? Most kids enjoy things like macaroni and spaghetti, both for the slurp factor and the taste.

If you want your kids to learn how to cook, with an eye to the distant future when they'll be on their own, then you might interest them by choosing a few easy recipes for pasta. If they can have fun making them, you might maintain their interest long enough that they'll actually learn something.

Other easy recipes involve casseroles. Take the "Hot Dog Macaroni Bake" at http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Hot-Dog-Macaroni-Bake/Detail.aspx, for example. The ingredients are mostly packaged or canned, meaning there won't be much chopping.

Two packages of dry macaroni and cheese are made as normal, but then the kids stir in chunks of processed cheese, a package of sliced hot dogs, two cans of condensed tomato soup and one of condensed cream of celery, with a chopped onion and two cups of thawed frozen peas.

The concoction bakes in a casserole dish at 350 degrees for forty-five minutes. This is the sort of dish the kids can make for a crowd of their friends.

It may take a little creativity to discover or devise easy recipes that will get the kids making pasta with you. Macaroni is always a good standby, of course, and anything else you can do that's slithery and potentially messy will virtually always get their attention.

Pasta pomodoro may be somewhere in their distant future if they enjoy their experiences as kids. So if they are having a good time making pasta now, take heart even through they are slithery, messy recipes.

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Finding Websites With Pasta Recipes

If you're not that familiar with the different sorts of pasta dishes, then you may start doing web searches for recipes and suddenly feel like you're not going to get any help at all.

While you may be looking for a guide that will help you know what to do with the different types of pasta, what do you do with two million web results staring you in the eye? How are you going to find pasta recipes that you have the skill to make, and how are you going to learn more about pasta in general?

Many websites with pasta recipes allow people to rate and comment on them after they've made them. One such site where the list consists of recipes submitted by users is http://allrecipes.com/Recipes/Pasta/Main.aspx.

At http://www.epicurious.com/tools/searchresults?search=pasta&x=0&y=0, the pasta dishes are those that have been featured in the Bon Appetit magazine over the years. But in both cases, users can comment and rate the recipes, make suggestions and describe how the dish turned out for them.

The time will come when you are so adept with your pasta recipes that you can visit any site and will know how to make whatever you see there. But when you're just starting out with the various pasta and noodle dishes, your best bet may be the type of website that allows comments on the recipes.

Reading through those, you'll get a lot of tips about cooking pasta properly, and you'll also get a good idea of which recipes might be better left till you're more experienced.

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Quick And Easy Pasta Dishes With Simple Ingredients

Even if you're starting your pasta adventures with some easy pasta dishes, it never hurts to learn or brush up on the basics. Even if you think you know everything about healthy cooking and the various pasta dishes and sauces, you could learn something new that will make your meals even better.

You might try exploring the "How to Cook Pasta" page at http://allrecipes.com/Info/How-To/Grains-and-Pasta/How-to-Cook-Pasta/Main.aspx. It goes into many details, from the basic pasta types to making and cooking your own fresh pasta.

Some websites try to accommodate people who need to begin with easy pasta dishes, while others do less of this. The website www.epicurious.com assumes a little more expertise from its readers; at least, it doesn't bring up many pasta recipes in its "Beginner Cooking" section.

The site http://en.chatelaine.com/english/food/article.jsp?content=20070823_122330_6760, on the other hand, brings up twenty one recipes in the "easy pasta" category. It divides these into Meat, Seafood, and Vegetarian recipes, so there is something there for everyone.

In the Vegetarian category, there's a dish as light as their Tomato and Spinach Pasta Toss, but even the Hot Italian Turkey Sausage and Pasta Toss, in the meat section, has only a few ingredients, and is easily prepared.

Easy pasta dishes are often fairly quick as well because they don't have a lot of ingredients or involve many complex steps in their preparation. So you will always be able to turn to a quick, easy pasta dish if you're in a hurry or need to make something to impress someone quickly.

When you get the basics down, and add some of these easy recipes to your repertoire, you'll always have something to fall back on.

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Taking Special Care When Cooking With An Angel Hair Pasta Dishes Recipe

If you need a guide to pasta cooking, then you almost certainly will need one for cooking angel hair pasta. The thing that makes this type of pasta touchier than others is simply that it's so thin and fine.

It's in the same family as spaghetti, spaghettini and vermicelli, but it's the finest pasta of all, so it usually requires slightly more delicate treatment. When you find an angel hair pasta dishes recipe website that will remind you of these finer points, bookmark it right away.

Many angel hair pasta dishes recipe websites seem to assume that everyone knows how to deal with this pasta, but it takes some work to use properly. During cooking, it needs stirring at the beginning so it won't stick, but this worry can also be helped by putting olive oil into the boiling water before putting in the pasta.

If you're hoping to use this pasta with heavy Italian made sauces, rich with meat chunks, you should probably think twice. This thin type of pasta can easily be overwhelmed by heavy sauces, as it works best with something very light.

When you're visiting angel hair pasta dishes recipe sites, pay close attention to the instructions, but also keep these extra cooking tips in mind.

Some larger types of pasta may be interchangeable and may handle almost anything you can throw at them, but angel hair pasta is best suited only for certain types of dishes and sauces, and requires rather careful handling. You need to take special care when using it to create your pasta meals.

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Matching Pasta Sauce With Your Pasta

In most cases, unless you've really cooked the underlying pasta badly, the pasta sauce you choose to put with it will be what makes or breaks your meal.

But sometimes it works in reverse as well, where the thing that determines how well the sauce works will actually be the size and shape of the pasta you're using.

There are certain pastas that work better with certain sauces, and some that will be swallowed up. It will help if you can find a guide to pasta that will show you which types of pasta and which sauces fit best together.

Finding a specific type of pasta sauce isn't always easy, even after you've matched the type of pasta you're using with the sort of sauce that should accompany it.

But a website like www.epicurious.com/tools/searchresults?search=pasta+sauce will allow you to search for pasta dishes with sauces, and once you're at that search page, you can refine the search even further.

For example, if you've got special dietary considerations, it lets you choose things like "Low Fat," "Healthy," "Vegan," and so on. You can also specify the main ingredient of your dish and which course it's for, and even choose from different ethnic cuisines.

When someone thinks "pasta sauce," usually the first thing they think of is something Italian, with lots of tomatoes. That stands to reason, since pasta itself has been so closely associated with Italy for so long.

Therefore, a great many of the recipes on these websites will be for Italian made sauces. Even so, not all of them will be meat-heavy and thick with tomatoes. You'll find many light and creamy sauces as well, or those made with several cheeses.

Whatever type of meal you wish to serve with the type of pasta you have on hand, you will find just the right sauce for it with a little research.

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Regional Variations Of Italian Recipes

Did you know that some people believe pasta was first invented in China? Whether it was or not, Italian recipes for pasta go back a long, long time, so obviously if they didn't invent this food, they adopted it as soon as traders introduced it to them.

They really ran with the concept too, which is why we associate so many pasta recipes with Italy. Countless fish and meat recipes for pasta, as well as their sauces, will forever be associated with Italy in most people's minds.

The Italian Made website (http://www.italianmade.com/regions/home.cfm), discusses both Italian recipes as well as the wines associated with different regions of Italy.

It talks about the variations of local cultures in the north, and how they produced a wide variety of culinary influences, while the south produced mostly what is known as the "Mediterranean diet," using ingredients that flourished in the bright sun.

An example of the latter is the "Bucantini with Sardines" pasta dish, which adds raisins, pine nuts and saffron, while a northern recipe might be "Pansuuti con la Salsa di Noci," with pasta envelopes stuffed with ricotta cheese, with walnut sauce.

People may not be aware that tomatoes didn't appear in Europe until well after the initial explorations of the western hemisphere, so Italian recipes didn't feature tomatoes until the early 1800s. Even after tomatoes appeared in Europe, it took a long time before people believed they were really edible.

But the foods that were already prominent in Italy were rich in other delicious ingredients. When you choose vegetable recipes for your pasta, with cheese sauces and without tomatoes, you may well be choosing foods that reflect an earlier era in the country, when Germanic or even Byzantine or Arab influences were most prevalent.

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Completing Your Meal With A Simple Fruit Salad

Simple fruit salad can be included as a dessert to complete a delicious meal. There are times when you can eat a fruit salad by itself, as a light, low calorie meal. For example, you may have a had a long lunch and you do not want a normal dinner, you can eat a delicious fruit salad instead.

If you are looking for ways to maintain your diet and do not want to eat large meals all the time, then a fruit salad may be your better option. You can make a fruit salad with your choice of fruit, or you can buy a fruit salad from the salad bar at many restaurants and food outlets.

Making your own fruit salad, allows you to make your own choice of fruit. If you have plenty of fruit growing in your yard, including apples, pears, strawberries and oranges, then you can make a simple fruit salad with freshly picked fruit and will taste much better than many of the fruit salads you buy in a salad bar.

If you do not have space to grow fruit trees and strawberry bushes in your yard, you can buy fruit from a food store to make your own fruit salads. Organic fruit have the better taste and are often more fresh as they cannot survive too long in the store.

Including a fruit salad with your meals can help maintain your diet, by controlling the appetizers you add to your salad. Many people like to add a salad dressing to a salad with vegetables, to improve the flavour.

Salad dressings are often high in calories. Alternatively you can use a low calorie salad dressing or avoid adding a salad dressing, by adding vinegar or olive oil as an appetizer to your vegetable salads.

These are some of the many ideas you can use to create a simple fruit salad.

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Reducing Your Weight With A Low Calorie Diet

Low calorie diet can help you lose those extra pounds, just in time for the summer. The winter fat needs to be taken off, and can no longer be hidden under a heavy layer of clothes.

When you are stepping outside in a summer shirt, people are looking at the excess weight you gained over winter. You need to find ways to make the pounds fly away.

One option is to reduce the amount of calories you are consuming, as excess calories the body does not need are stored away as fat. Your aim is to eat just enough food, so your body can start burning stored fat resources.

A low calorie diet allows you to eat your food, but with low calorie ingredients. For example, if you like eating your salad with a salad dressing, then you can either replace the salad dressing with a low calorie salad dressing, or leave out the salad dressing altogether. Depending on the salad I like to make, I use a small amount of olive oil or vinegar to increase the flavour in my salads.

When looking for low calorie ingredients for your cooking, you should look for low calorie alternatives to replace your normal cooking ingredients. For example, salad dressing on your salads is normally high in calories, but you can purchase a low calorie salad dressing. Same goes for sauces. Many of the common sauces are high in calories, look for low calorie sauces instead.

If you cannot find the low calorie ingredients at your favourite food store, you can run to a health food store and they will have a wider choice of low calorie ingredients for your cooking.

You can also look at the food you eat every day. Rather than eating a burger with fries for lunch, you can look for healthy alternatives that are not full of fat, salt and high calories. Many fast food outlets now have a salad bar and sell healthy alternatives, to meet the customer demand.

Another option is to make your own healthy sandwiches with low calorie ingredients, to help you succeed in your low calorie diet.

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How To Cook Quick And Easy Meals

How to cook with different types of ingredients, to make a delicious meal is one of the most asked questions. Depending on the type of meal you wish to cook, you will need specific instructions.

For example, if you are driving home from work and need to feed your family a hot and delicious meal, then you can purchase pre-cut ingredients like meat and vegetables, that will help reduce your preparation and cooking time.

Cutting down your meal preparation time, will help reduce your time slaving away in the kitchen, as the smaller pieces of meat and vegetables cook much quicker.

Rather than spending two hours preparing and cooking a meal, you can have a freshly cooked, hot and delicious ready to eat meal, within 30 minutes, just by purchasing pre-cut small pieces of meat and pre-cut vegetables.

If you do not like the tasteless fruit and vegetables sold at the food store, you can grow your own, in an organic garden. If you are restricted for space, you can grow your produce in containers, in available space around your home.

You can even grow your choice of favourite herbs in a window garden, ready for your cooking any time you need to increase the flavours in your meals.

Freshly picked herbs, fruit and vegetables taste the best, flooding your meals full of natural flavours. Using these tips and ideas will help you learn how to cook.

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Making Your Choice With Certified Organic Foods

Certified organic foods are available in many food stores, but the wider choice and variety of organic food products are in health food stores.

If you are looking for your favourite food product but want to seek an organic version and cannot locate it at your favourite food store, then run to the health food store and they should stock it. If it is not available, then you could place an order.

Almost every type of food and food product has an organic version. You can buy organic herbs, fruit, vegetables, meat and other organic food products. If you want to avoid the chemical pesticides and other chemicals used in growing food, then certified organic food is your better choice.

As more people are turning to healthy food options, to meet public demand, many food stores are stocking more certified organic foods.

You do not need to buy all your certified organic foods. You can grow herbs, fruit and vegetables in your organic garden. As long as you do not use chemical pesticides, chemical fertilizers and any other chemicals in your garden, then you have an organic garden.

There are organic fertilizers and organic compost you can buy from nurseries, that do not rely on chemicals to feed your growing plants with plenty of nutrients. While you are at the nursery, you can seek advice on how to keep pests out of your garden without using chemicals.

If the staff at the nursery cannot help you, you can search online for information about controlling pests in your garden without chemicals.

Once you start growing your produce, you will realise all the natural flavours you have been missing from the tasteless produce you have been buying from the food store.

Freshly picked tomatoes from your organic garden, taste much better in your salads, sauces and meals, than tomatoes that were picked weeks or months ago and transported with refrigerated transport to the food store.

Many stores these days, have an organic food section where they sell certified organic foods.

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The Unpleasant Experience Of Food Contamination and Poisoning

Probably everyone has felt the effects of food contamination and poisoning at one time or another. It is a most unpleasant experience and can have a fairly large impact on your day.

In the most severe cases, individuals can become bedridden or may even require a visit to the hospital. People will be affected by this kind of contamination in different ways, depending on their body and on the type of tainted food that was consumed.

Rest is the most important thing that you can do for yourself if you have a mild case of food contamination and poisoning. Allowing your own immune system to build up again requires you to rest and drink fluids.

If the vomiting and diarrhea continues, it is important to seek medical attention. More severe cases may require hospitalization for at least one night in the emergency room to replace fluids and to get medication.

When choosing a restaurant in which to eat, it is wise to avoid certain types in order to prevent food contamination and poisoning. Fast food and cheaper restaurants may not have their cleanliness standards up to code.

Even though most restaurants now must enforce food safety standards for their employees, not all restaurants are clean and have routine inspections. Avoiding such restaurants and also not ordering seafood except in more expensive restaurants that do follow the food safety standards on a daily basis is important.

Prevention of food-borne illnesses is the key to staying healthy.

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Nine Food Cooking Tips For Hot Nutritious Meals

Food cooking tips can be used to improve your cooking skills, help set up your kitchen more effectively, so that you can cook more quickly and spend less time in the kitchen and more time with your family.

As people realise most take away, fast food is loaded with fat and carbs, more people choose to cook their own delicious hot meals. To cook a delicious meal with fresh ingredients, you need to have your kitchen prepared for quick and easy cooking.

One tip, is to have all your kitchen cookware and cooking utensils clean and ready to use. Make sure you have your pots, pans and utensils within easy reach, to start your cooking as quickly as possible, so that you do not need to waste time searching your kitchen.

Another tip, if your budget allows, is to always purchase quality equipment for your kitchen, as better quality equipment lasts longer and reduces your need to run to the store to replace worn out kitchen tools.

Here are some more tips you can use to make a quick and easy meal. These days, you can purchase pre-cut pieces, including thinner slices of meat like lamb and beef, the smaller pieces cook much quicker. Another alternative, is to buy unskinned chicken pieces. For a salad or vegetables to cook with your choice of meat, you can buy sliced vegetables from the salad bar.

Buying pre-cut pieces of meat and sliced vegetables, cuts down your preparation time in the kitchen. Many food stores are open till late. On your way home from work, you can stop at a food store and buy your pre-cut ingredients to cook a fresh meal, the quick and easy way.

When you have more time, like on a Sunday, then you can prepare your Sunday roast and take your time. But when you arrive home, after a long day at work, you do not need to spend two hours in the kitchen, preparing a hot, nutritious meal. Using pre-cut ingredients, you can create a quick hot meal within 30 minutes.

Taking advantage of all these food cooking tips, will help reduce your time in the kitchen and spend more time with your family.

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Plastics For Storage And Food Safety

For many years now people have stored food in plastic containers. Now with food safety being of great concern, the use of plastics for storage is being questioned.

With ongoing research and studies occurring more frequently about tainted food, the internet is a useful tool to find information in order to prevent food poisoning from E. coli and salmonella, or even to prevent possible illnesses that occur from the use of plastics.

Food safety on bottled water is also less defined. Because water is considered a reasonably powerful solvent, bottled water could also be at risk for having phthalates dissolved into the water.

There is much online news and discussion about this concern, and some people are adamant about never drinking from a bottled container of water. The longer water stays in a plastic container, and the more extreme the temperature changes it may have been exposed to, the higher the danger.

Most of the research that is currently being done on food safety is inclusive. Studies aren't double-blind experiments and of course double-blind experiments require human participants and that isn't always safe.

Who is doing the research is important to know and also who is funding the research, as studies can be manipulated to convince people that a product is safe.

Until more research is done on plastics and how they can affect people, it would be wise to choose to use steel or glass containers for food and water storage, and to avoid the use of plastic in the microwave.

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