I’m not really an expert (but then I’m not really an expert in any areas of cooking except roast potatoes), but I’m going to do my best to guide you through this minefield with some solid ideas for dishes and some tips to avoid the worst pitfalls.

Basic fish-cooking tips

• Seasoning – many cuts of many fish can be bland – especially if you are frying a fish with skin, make sure you season it properly (and don’t forget lemons and limes – they’re cliched with fish because they’re good!)
• Really really hot pan – this is true for almost all frying of meat and fish, but again – especially when you are frying a fish with skin, make sure you get your pan hot enough
• Don’t overcook – especially with fish like tuna that can be overcooked easily, make sure that you keep it succulent. I like griddling tuna: when cooking for myself, I like it to barely touch the smoking hot pan on each side. For those who request it more well-done, I still don’t like nuking it so for flat steaks I tend to griddle on one side until it is cooked halfway up the side and then flip and cook until you can no longer see any pink on the side
• Oven-cook for low maintenance – if you want something easy to cook that doesn’t need much of your time watching it, I like cooking fish in a foil parcel in the oven with some bits and pieces of veg, olive oil, lemon juice and maybe a bit of garlic. Easy – and low on washing up!

Step outside the box

• Spicy – fish curry, seasoning with paprika, spicy garnishes (e.g. spicy salsa) – all these things can make it more exciting, add some great flavours and make it a bit more manly. What’s not to like?
• Sushi – eating fish raw is one way to get around both the difficulties of cooking it well and the “isn’t fish a bit girly?” problem…
• Fisherman’s pie – not really a tip so much as a dish, but it qualifies for its own line simply because it is the kind of dish that many people worry they can’t cook, but you should make the effort because it’s a great dish. in the spirit of “No More Recipes”, the ‘recipe’ is: quickly fry some white fish, make some stock, add something creamy to the stock (I like soft goats’ cheese), fry some leeks and other veg you fancy in there, mash some potatoes and then stick ‘em on top of the stew in a casserole / baking dish and bake for a bit…! Gumbo and other stews are fun to experiment with too.

Shellfish

Cooking shellfish is generally easier than regular fish, in my experience – mainly because it’s so tasty that as long as you get good stuff, all you need to do is avoid screwing it up. This is especially true of grilled scallops – seriously – all you have to do is use a hot pan for a short time.

Needing a bit more cooking, but still in the easy and tasty category are rice and fish dishes such as prawn risotto, paella etc.

Photo courtesy of tuija

My perfect roast potato recipe includes elements I’ve unashamedly nicked from Gordon and Jamie. If you want more of their genius, I can highly recommend:

• Jamie’s very accessible “making you a better cook”
• If you’re after something more complicated, Gordon’s “recipes from a 3 star chef”
• For general reading, I enjoyed both of Gordon’s biog-style books: “humble pie” and “playing with fire”

Anyway, the recipe:

• Pick good potatoes. This is really important. Don’t go for general “white potatoes” – pick a variety. Maris Pipers are good. So are King Edwards. Experiment and you’ll find your preferences.
• Either peel ‘em or don’t. Try it both ways. You get a difference kind of roastie each way and both rock in my opinion.
• Chop them, but only into large chunks. There’s a place for tiny roast potatoes, but for now, big is easiest. I tend to chop your average size potato into 2 or 3 chunks.
• Par-boil by throwing in cold water with some salt and bringing to the boil. Don’t go much further than just bringing them to the boil.
• Drain and shake – you want to rough them up a little – either shake them in the colander or in the pan
• Fry them. This is a crucial step (you can even skip the par-boil if you are truly lazy, but don’t skip this). You want to fry them in your roasting dish (incidentally, Amazon have a sale on Le Creuset at the moment – get some while you can). The pinnacle of roast potatoes use goose fat, but if you don’t have that to hand, my preference is just to cover the bottom of the roasting dish with sunflower oil (which has different qualities at high temperature to olive oil), throw the potatoes in, shake ‘em around and then add some olive oil on top for flavour. Fry them over a high-ish hob adding salt and pepper. You aren’t trying to cook them through, but simply get a bit of colour and get them started – experiment to see how far you want to cook them. You will need to turn them carefully and often to avoid sticking.
• Throw them in the oven on a really high heat – this is often when you move the meat down so you can often keep the oven on the same temperature and shuffle things around if you’re cooking with gas
• Crucially don’t turn them from this point on. This gets you the dry crispiness you want and makes sure they are crunchy without over-cooking. Also, you don’t risk breaking them – you only have to get a spatula under them once to serve them. If they are getting a bit crispy without looking like they are cooking evenly, turn the temperature down a bit
• After about 45 minutes, when they look ready, serve them. The whole process will have taken a little over an hour to this point
• Mmmmmmmmm.

If you want to be more adventurous once you’ve nailed the basics, you can experiment with throwing all kinds of things in late in the process (20-25 minutes before serving). I’ve had fun with:

• Cherry tomatoes
• Goat’s cheese
• Rosemary
• Garlic (whole cloves)

I was probably more excited about the prospect of cooking a roast on a work night than I should have been. I was also excited about writing it up for No More Recipes – I wanted to talk about cooking roast chicken without a recipe.

There are loads of places that talk about cooking at exactly this temperature for exactly that long. I don’t cook it like that.

Here’s the entirety of my roast chicken cooking process:

• Get a chicken (take out the giblets – I’ve forgotten that before – it’s a mistake!)
• Turn the oven on high (I used gas mark 9)
• Olive oil, sea salt, pepper, lemon juice over the top of the chicken in an open roasting dish
• Stick the squeezed-out lemon and some crushed garlic inside the chicken
• Throw the chicken in the oven while beginning the potato-roasting process
• When the potatoes go in, I move the chicken down to the bottom of the oven which means I don’t have to change the temperature of the oven and can do the roasties nice and crispy
• Baste it every so often and when everything’s cooked (juices running clear from the chicken) put it to one side to rest. Expect 1-1.5 hours for the whole thing up to this point – there’s enough leeway in the rest of the process to allow for variances in temperature / size of bird etc.
• Make a gravy from the juices. Stick the roasting pan on the hob and add a bit of flour (I use spelt flour), some water (from boiling veg if possible), some Dijon mustard. I have no idea how much of any of these things I add – have a play and see what works for you. Other fun ingredients include: some kind of alcohol for the deglazing (wine, sherry, masala…), stock if you’ve got it made yet (see below), herbs and spices etc. Knock yourself out
• Serve it!

Making a chicken stock

Making a chicken stock is one of those things that sounds like it might be ‘real cooking’ with recipes to follow etc. but it’s actually one of the very easiest things to do (and one of the hardest things to get wrong). The basic principle is boiling left over bits for ages in loads of water alongside anything with a bit of flavour. Then strain and keep the clear stock. You can freeze it and keep for ages – great for making risotto in particular.

Here are some things I like to throw in as well as the chicken carcas and giblets:

• Olive oil
• Good quality salt
• Whole peppercorns
• Bay leaf
• Any other herbs I can lay my hands on
• Chopped up chillies or dried chilli (if you fancy a bit of heat to the stock)
• Whole garlic cloves

One other tip to add a bit of extra flavour is to start the whole process with oil and giblets before adding the water and everything else. Just browning it all a little before adding everything else makes for a great start for the stock.

In the world of cooking, however, the pro chef is just like you and I, it’s just that he’s learnt a few tricks along the way and he’s spent time working out how to make food look good.

What? I didn’t say it’s a good theory.

If it’s true, though, then the average pro chef’s career hangs in the balance of a bit of deciding where to place the lettuce and a bunch of tricks. Think he’s gonna share those tricks? Not on your nelly.

But I am

Here are the best tricks I have found from years of reading cookery books and scavenging for the bits and pieces of inside information that the pros drop accidentally:

1. Get into your garlic like a pro: courtesy of Jamie Oliver, the best way to peel a clove of garlic is to place it on your chopping board and give it a smack or two with the flat side of your big knife (give it a try to work out how hard to hit – you’re aiming for somewhere between ineffectual caress and obliterated mess – what the hell, garlic is cheap). You’ll find that you can just chop the end off and the skin will fall away from the clove. Amazing.
2. Poached eggs can be par-poached in advance: par-poached. I think I may have just made up a word. Still, you get the idea – can’t remember where I got this one from – you slightly-under-poach the egg (telling when an egg is poached is a topic for another day) and then dunk it straight from the pan into some iced water. It’ll keep there in the fridge till you need it – assuming it’s, you know, sometime soon – when you simply stick it back in gently boiling water till warm
3. Take the edge off something you made too spicy: if you added a bit too much ginger or chilli, add a squeeze of lemon juice to tone down the spiciness. Saved my arse at a dinner party once. The spicy tiger prawn soup woulda pretty much killed people without the last minute save.
4. Seasoning, seasoning, seasoning: this one actually is shared quite a bit, but if you want your food to taste pro, season it properly. The biggest single difference (apart from presentation) between restaurant food and home-cooked food is the amount of salt, pepper, spices, herbs (yes, and butter!) that is added during cooking. For those special occasions particularly, break out the seasoning.
5. Don’t be afraid of hot: pro kitchens are hot places – hot ovens, hot stoves. Especially when you are frying, you probably aren’t getting the pan hot enough.
6. Wet your hands to make fat easy to clean off: if you are going to be getting fat / oil on your hands (e.g. when working with minced meat by hand) wet your hands first and you’ll find your hands loads easier to clean. This is technically a chemistry tip rather than a cooking tip – if you didn’t know that oil and water don’t mix, remember not to throw water on an oil / fat fire!
7. Didn’t I already tell you to get a proper knife?: get one already

So that isn’t really enough to get either me or you cooking like a pro – I want to learn some more tricks so please do share in the comments…

For some more day-to-day cooking tricks, I quite liked some of the answers over in this Yahoo! Answers thread and the writing style in the intro to this post.

I have now started this cooking blog and yet I still screw up things like toast. All I wanted to do was stick the toaster back on for 30 seconds or so to get it nice and “toasty” but of course I forgot about it and it was only the smell of burnt toast that got me running over to turn it off.

If you, like me, burn things when you’re cooking them, you might be interested in my list of foods it’s OK to burn. You’ll notice that I have interpreted the challenge in a number of ways in order to have an interesting list. Bite me. Can you think of any more?

1. Creme Brulée. My first cheat is a food that has “burnt” in its name (albeit in a foreign language)
2. Bones. When you’re making dark stock, one method is to start by throwing the bones into a pan over a reasonably high heat with no oil / butter etc. Shake ‘em around and get them to start caramelising before adding water, seasoning etc.
3. Steak. We all know that there is only one true way of cooking steak, but interesting variations (to get it even rarer) involve blow-torching the outside before cooking. Technically, of course, you don’t want to burn the steak, but anything with a blow-torch has to count, right?
4. Chestnuts. OK, it’s only really the outside that get burnt. But still.
5. Blackened fish. There are loads of recipes called “blackened” when it comes to fish (e.g. blackened tuna). Technically, you are burning the cajun seasoning, but again, I’m going to take it… There’s also a recipe from Jamie Oliver that involves wrapping a fish in newspaper where the newspaper gets burnt
6. Flambé. Brandy, pastis, Christmas puddings, lamb steaks. There are many fun ways of setting your food on fire…
7. BBQ / flame-grill. Think flame-grill, think burgers and steaks, but normal BBQ can involve bits of charcoal too – think the shells on prawns
8. Caramelised onions. I think “caramelised” is really just a euphemism for “burnt” so I’m gonna count it. I have a fun dish that involves basically burning onions and garlic and then frying chicken in the oil. Sounds crazy, and it’s hard to get right, but it’s nice when you get the sweetness just right.

Picture credit: fiskfisk on Flickr

• Chopping is one of those menial tasks that are delegated in ‘proper kitchens’, but can be one of the most fun parts, but only if you get a proper knife and a proper chopping board. It only sank in properly how important this is when I had to use a shit serrated knife on holiday and realised how much I missed my knife (does that make me sound like a psycho?)
• Learn how to sharpen your knife. Not only does it make everything more fun (see above) but the actual sharpening makes you feel like a real cook
• Use quality cookware. It can be expensive stuff, but it’s brilliant. You might want to get married and put it on your wedding gift list
• Use quality ingredients – if you know the butcher you bought the meat from and you know the quality of the stuff you’re using, you’re far more likely to take care with the cooking of it
• Have seasoning to hand – having proper salt on hand to pinch, a big black pepper mill and so forth make the finishing touches fun – which means you’ll do them – which means your food will taste better. Everyone’s a winner

Picture credit: noii on Flickr

Do be careful though: the closest I have ever come to killing myself in the kitchen was after a few beers with a good friend (who is also a far better cook than me). Drinks before and during cooking led to a wok being left on the heat with oil in it. Cue huge bang, 4′ high flames and a ruined pan. Luckily we had a ledge outside the window and managed to get the pan outside before we did ourselves any real harm.

Safer ways to use alcohol in cooking

Following that experience, I thought I’d share some safer ways to use alcohol in cooking. Starting with the easier / more obvious and progressing to some you hopefully haven’t thought of before:

Red wine

1. Obvious: recipes with alcohol in the name. Think: pears in red wine
2. Marinade: many a meat is improved by a little of the tenderising effect of alcohol. Try red wine with dark meat, sherry with lighter meat.
3. Subtle ingredient: if you have some wine that is a bit past it, it makes a great addition to big, strong, winter-warmer dishes. Add your old red wine to chillis, stews etc.

Beer

1. Bread: replace the liquid element of your favourite bread recipe with beer. I like using stout or old peculiar to get enough flavour in the finished article
2. Drinks that are almost food: if you subscribe to the “eating is cheating” school of drinking (I clearly don’t) then you might still want to get some sustenance – in which case Guinness is clearly your friend. Other foods that can be squeezed into this category are bloody mary (any drink requiring a recipe that complicated…) and liqueur coffee (practically a dessert)

Spirits and fortified wines

1. Flambé: most people’s experience of setting fire to foods comes either by accident or in lighting the Christmas pudding. Stop to think about it though and loads of options open up – a personal favourite is lamb flambéd in pastis – just fry the lamb steak and finish with a flash flambé
2. Serving: when I make chocolate mousse, I not only add a little brandy to the mixture, but also drizzle a little into the bowl before dolloping the mousse in to set (I tend to make individual bowl servings).
3. Deglaze: a great use for fortified wine (sherry, marsala etc.) is to ‘deglaze’ the roasting / frying pan before making a proper gravy (please don’t use stock cubes – real gravy is so much easier and better)
4. Adding food to drinks: I have a half-remembered anecdote in my head (I think probably from Anthony Bourdain’s “A Cook’s Tour” – a great book) about a Japanese drink that has tiny live fish added to it at the last moment – but I can’t find it just now. Other examples of this include adding cherries to cocktails, celery to bloody mary, Cadbury’s Creme Eggs to dirty pints…

Any more ideas of unusual ways to use alcohol in cooking? Let me know in the comments…

Image credit: Mark McLaughlin on Flickr

Don’t try this for your first dinner party (or indeed for the first time at any dinner party).

Actually, you know what? Do. What the hell. It’s not safe and 100% guaranteed, but it’s a heck of a lot more fun.