When you can make a variety of sauces, you multiply the number of meals you can create. A grilled chicken breast is an entirely different dish with a white cheese sauce over it than a dark Cajun spicy sauce. It’s still a chicken breast, but now it’s two different meals.

Sauces are simple. They’re just a liquid plus a thickening agent. The liquid adds flavor, but the thickening agent gives body and texture. Roux is not the only way to thicken a liquid, but it is the most flavorful and reliable.

I’ll admit that great sauces can also be made with a cornstarch slurry, or by simple reduction. Those are two other ways to thicken liquid, but a well made roux adds flavor and texture that these two options do not.

Roux is the combination of fat and starch. You can experiment with a wide variety of fat starch combinations, but generally butter and flour are used. To make a standard roux, use equal proportions. For a thicker roux, add more flour. This will have more thickening power, but might not be as smooth in the end.

Making Roux for Great Sauces:

1) Melt butter in a small sauce pan. Be careful not to burn or separate the butter. The goal is to keep the butter yellow, and not see white milk solids floating on the top. This means you’ve broken the emulsion of fat/milk solids/water that butter is made of.

The best thing for melting butter is melted butter. As soon as some of the butter melts under the heat, remove the pan and surround the solid butter with the melted butter. Agitate the pan to add friction, and even return it to the flame for 5 seconds if you need more heat. But, try to keep it yellow.

2) Add flour - In small increments, add flour to the melted butter until you have something that looks like wallpaper paste. It’s not too runny, and it’s not like cookie dough. Whisk this together until it’s smooth.

3) Cook the flour - In order to avoid a pasty-tasting sauce, the proteins must be cooked out of the flour to create a proper roux. You’ll notice that the roux changes from beige/yellow to white as the proteins are cooked. The roux will get bubbly and give off a nutty smell. When your fat/flour mixture is entirely white, without starting to turn brown, it’s ready to thicken any liquid.

Great sauces await the roux you just made, and you can start right now or wait until later. However, there’s something important to remember.

When using roux to thicken liquids, the roux and liquid must be opposite ends of the temperature spectrum. If you’ve just created this thickening agent and it’s still hot, then a COLD liquid like broths or milk can be used to make a sauce.

If you have milk or broth simmering on the stove, it’s a COLD roux that is needed to thicken the hot liquid. A cold roux is the roux you made yesterday and stored in the refrigerator. You simply crumble the cooked and chilled butter/flour mixture into the simmering liquid and you have instant gravy!

Once you can make a great roux, then the entire world of liquids will dictate the type of sauce you can create. This one method can be used as an inspiration for endless great sauces in your own kitchen.

See the chef’s live cooking demonstration as he makes great sauces from roux.

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If you want to avoid destroying the color, texture, and nutrients in your vegetables, there are some simple adjustments you can make in your cooking. By controlling the heat and understanding the effect of acids and bases in cooking, you can make vegetables even children will eat!

Keep in mind that there’s a BIG difference between boil, simmer, and poach. Most people make the mistake of cooking everything at a violent, rapid boil. You shouldn’t use the highest amount of MOIST heat by boiling any more than you’d put everything in your oven at 500F to cook in a DRY method. You control the heat and get better results.

You can destroy the nutrients in vegetables by treating them too rough. Boil is 212F/100C, and has large, violent bubbles in the liquid. Items are bounced around and cooked at the highest MOIST temperature you can achieve. Nothing in the kitchen should be boiled.

Simmer is characterized by small bubbles in your cooking liquid, usually around the edges of the pan. Items in a proper simmer are cooked at 185F/85C to 200F/93C and move about softly in the environment. This is a much gentler way to cook, and most things in the kitchen should be simmered.

Poaching temperatures are even lower, from 165F/74C to 185F/85C and have no bubbles visible. The poaching liquid has a slight convection to it. Large items don’t move, smaller bits slowly float across the liquid in a leisurely fashion.

The first thing you can do to retain nutrients in vegetables is to cook them as softly as possible in a moist environment. This means poaching them, not subjecting them to a violent boil.

Acids and bases also act upon the color, texture, and nutritional value of vegetables during cooking. I’ve created a small science experiment to demonstrate this fact.

With three pots of water at a soft simmer, I’ll add vinegar (an acid) to one. The second pot gets baking soda (a base), and the third is left alone as a control baseline.

Green vegetables poached in acid will become very drab and turn an olive or army green. However, green vegetables poached in baking soda will become a vibrant, bright green.

Not only will the drab green bean poached in acid have its color dulled, but it is now very flexible. It can be bent without breaking. The green item poached in baking soda has a crisp “crack” to it when broken.

Acids will dull the color and texture of green vegetables.

However, the direct opposite is true of most other colored vegetables. Carrots poached in vinegar will retain their color and texture; while the same item poached in a base liquid turns very mushy. The same is true of white vegetables, like onions and potatoes.

So, what does this mean to the household cook? It explains why potatoes cooked for Potato Salad should be cooked in an acidic liquid. It will keep them white and keep you from having mashed potato salad. They’ll hold their shape.

Have you ever cooked green beans and tomatoes together? Or, perhaps okra, turnip greens, or spinach cooked with tomatoes? Did you notice that the green item looks limp and drab? You now know the underlying science behind it. Acids destroy the color and texture of green vegetables.

When I’m finished with this experiment, I notice one last thing. The poaching liquid that I added vinegar to is clear. It still looks like water. However, the baking soda bath is a slight green/orange color.

Since acids firm textures of vegetables, they also prevent the leaching of nutrients and color into the cooking liquid.

You can retain the color, texture, and nutrients in vegetables by being mindful of your cooking process. Don’t subject your delicate ingredients to a high-heat violent boil. Vegetables should be poached or steamed. And, if you want to keep them looking bright and tasting crisp, use a bit of vinegar during cooking on all colors but green. For them, use a touch of baking soda.

See Chef Todd’s experiment Keep Nutrients in Vegetables in a live demonstration.

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I saw a TV commercial that offered a 26 knife set. It came with 12 steak knives. Again, when has anyone had to cook steak for 12 people in there home? Rarely, I’d say.

You don’t need an entire set of knives to be a great cook at home. Nor do you have to spend a lot of money on cooking knives. You need only 4 basic knives in your kitchen:

1) Chefs Knife - The chef’s knife will complete 80% of the cutting tasks in your kitchen and will eliminate every chopper/dicer device sold on TV. It has no moving parts, it wipes clean easily, and with the proper technique, is the safest instrument in your kitchen.

The chefs knife has a tapered blade, wider at the heal and thinner at the tip. Rather than slam the knife against the cutting board repeatedly to chop items, the best was is with a “tip-fulcrum” method. This is where the tip of the knife stays on the cutting board and rocks back in forth with the heal doing the cutting.

2) Serrated Slicing Knife - This is a long knife with a serrated edge or “teeth”. You might call this a “bread knife”, and it can certainly be used for bread. This knife is used for items that the downward weight of the chefs knife would crush, like tomatoes or slices of bread.

The slicing knife is best used with one long stroke. Just because it has teeth doesn’t mean you should use it as a saw. One slice makes an more certain and attractive cut.

3) Boning Knife - This is a 5 to 7 inch knife with a thin blade and a sharp tip. It’s used ONLY for raw items. This is the knife for removing the fat from chicken breast or the silverskin from cuts of meat.

The boning knife should be the sharpest of all your cooking knives and used in a single, smooth stroke to avoid giving raw products a “hacked-up” look.

4) Paring Knife - A 3 to 5 inch small knife that’s used for peeling, skinning, or close-up carving of vegetables. It’s the only knife used with the sharp blade held toward your face. Items are pushed past the blade with the thumb of your knife hand.

Imagine cutting the green caps off strawberries. You’d set the knife against the crown of the berry and push the fruit under the blade to remove the cap.

If you are impressed with cooking knives that cut cans or shoes, you really need to get a better night’s sleep. If you are looking for the proper tools to take your cooking from fair to fantastic, then just the 4 basic knives I’ve mentioned will have you well on your way without spending a lot of money.

See Chef Todd’s cooking knives video as he demonstrates live!

“Burn Your Recipes” and Cook Like a Chef at Home with my cooking DVDs!

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Neither will you learn to cook from a cookbook. Written recipes won’t teach you to cook any more than sheet music teaches you how to play piano.

However, with 5 basic skills, you can empower yourself past the advertising and written rules to cook the way you want, with what you want.

I consider the Food Network to be the MTV of food. MTV used to play music, now they’re entertainment about music. Food TV is entertainment about food; they don’t teach anyone HOW to cook.

Neither should there be any crying in cooking, unless you’re chopping onions. On Food TV reality shows, contestants CRY when their dishes come out. They’re crying because they could be ELIMINATED from the kitchen! What pressure!

Cooking is not crying. Cooking is not a competition. Cooking is an art form that everyone can interpret for themselves. You don’t have to cook like a celebrity chef, or imitate Martha Stewart to provide wholesome, nutritious, soul-satisfying food for your family.

If I ran The Food Network, I’d concentrate on 5 basic elements that will free all cooks from written recipes. Then again, if I did that I’d probably destroy Food TV itself. I’d be out of a job quickly when all the advertisers left because viewers were actually in their kitchens…cooking!

First, don’t trust recipes. They have inherent variables and flaws that make them impossible to duplicate. You are allowed to change recipes for your desire. Use them for inspiration if you’d like, but cook with the ingredients and in a fashion to your liking, not the authors.

Second, practice your knife skills. To use fresh ingredients in cooking, you’ll have to do some prep. Farmers market ingredients don’t come already cut-up in little glass dishes like on Food TV.

Third, understand the transfer of heat. A few basics in HOW cooking works, rather than WHAT you’ll be cooking will empower you to cook everything! The differences between direct and indirect heat, dry and moist cooking will make you a skilled home cook.

Fourth, stock your pantry. Have condiments and ingredients ready to become instant flavor profiles. Sautéing a chicken breast on the stove top can become an ethnic dish from Mexico if you add Salsa to the pan. It can be from Asia with some Soy Sauce, or India with jarred Masala.

Lastly, sauce-making is the key. If you can make a smooth, flavorful sauce, you can create an endless number of dishes. A great sauce will save a poorly cooked piece of meat, but the worst sauce will certainly ruin the best prepared items.

Write it down? Why would you ever have to write it down? When you use these five simple skills in combination, you can create a new dish every night. Just think of the extra cabinet space you now have where all the cookbooks used to be!

Why duplicate when you can create? Food TV wants you to keep watching Food TV, not actually learn HOW to cook. That’s my job.

See Chef Todd’s Video that explains Why Food TV doesn’t want you to learn to cook.

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I had a Polish Grandfather, so we made Pierogi. But if he were Italian, the method for making Ravioli would be the same. If he were Latin, I might be making Empanadas. If he were Indian, they’d be Samosas. If he were Greek, I’d be preparing Spanakopita. Just the filling changes for an item in which every world culture stuffs meat, potatoes, cheeses or vegetables into an unleavened dough.

In fact, I consider Pierogi “Slavic Ravioli”, because instead of ricotta cheese, pierogi are stuffed with mashed potatoes, onions, sour cream and cheeses. It’s a traditional Polish dish that’s served with sour cream or apple sauce on the side. I prefer the sour cream, but the apple sauce does give a very nice sweet/savory contrast in your mouth.

The process is quite simple and fun. Once you’ve made a basic dough, the act of filling them can be a family project. Kids love to stuff the dumplings and seal them around the edges.

Dough Formula:

Pinch of Salt
2 cups of All Purpose Flour
1 Egg
½ cup sour cream
¼ cup softened butter

1) Mix these ingredients together with the dough hook on your electric mixer to a smooth dough. The dough must rest for an hour in the refrigerator afterward.

Filling Formula:

2 Pounds of potatoes, peeled and quartered
4 ounces diced onion
2 Tbsp butter
1 cup shredded Cheddar and Jack Cheese
Salt and Pepper to Taste

1) Simmer the potatoes until they are crushable under a fork.
2) Whip all the ingredients together and chill for later filling.
3) Roll out the dough into thin sheets and cut rounds with a cookie or biscuit cutter.
4) Wash each round of dough with egg to that they seal correctly.
5) Portion filling onto each round and pinch to seal all edges.

Now that we’ve created pierogi with just a few simple ingredients, it makes me think of the same procedure my Grandfather would complete to make the very same potato pillows. It’s the simplicity of this Polish treat that makes them so appealing. It’s the world-wide appeal of a stuffed dough that makes them so versatile.

How do you cook pierogi? I’d like you to tell me. Please leave a comment below with how you’d complete the final preparation step. Would you simmer them like pasta? Would you steam them like dumplings? Would you bake them like enchiladas? Would you sauté them like tortellini?

Pierogi are so much fun to make, are wonderfully delicious, and give you a wide variety of ways to prepare them for any meal of the day.

See Chef Todd Make Pierogi in less than 4 minutes

That’s just the point, I don’t use recipes. Bourbon Chicken could be White Wine Chicken or Tequila Chicken using the same basic cooking method. Knowing how to saute allows you to create simple and quick dishes using the ingredients you desire. All you have to do is duplicate the basic procedure:

1) Pan Hot First – Perhaps the biggest mistake home cooks make. They don’t heat the pan first. Sprinkle a little water on the pan from your fingertips. If the water sizzles, it’s hot enough to cook

2) Add Fat – You’re not deep-frying nor pan-frying, please don’t fill the pan half way with oil. The fat in a saute method is meant to transfer the heat, so just enough to cover the bottom of the pan.

3) Fat Hot – Heat the fat until a point just before it’s going to smoke. You can tell this because it changes from being perfectly smooth and glassy in the pan to getting ripples as it starts to heat.

4) Protein Product – This is where you add chicken, beef, shrimp, fish, pork, tofu, sausage, or anything you can make up. It doesn’t matter what this protein product is, that’s why the method is so flexible.

5) Cook 75/25 – Cook the protein product 75 percent on the first side and 25 percent on the second. If you flip it too early, you lose the visual indicators of whether it’s cooking or not.

6) Aromatics – Remove the protein product to a plate and add onions, carrots, celery, garlic, peppers or any other vegetable you’d like. They’ll build flavors along with the left over bits from the protein product.

7) Deglaze With A Cold Liquid – Any cold liquid will drop the temperature of the pan quickly and dramatically, releasing the fond from the bottom of the pan and changing the heat to a moist cooking method.

8 ) Return the Protein Product – If you’d like to finish cooking the protein product in a moist fashion along with the deglazing liquid, it will help retain moisture and combine flavors.

9) Reduce or Thicken – You’ve got a flavorful pan sauce working, but it won’t stick to food. You need to either let it reduce by evaporation, add something that’s thicker than the sauce like goat cheese or tomato paste, or thicken with roux or slurry to make a great sauce.

I chose to use this method to create Bourbon Chicken. You could just as easily use the same procedure to make Tequila Beef or Red Wine Shrimp. Actually, I could mention at least 10 new dishes you can create from the simple 9 step process of basic saute.

See Bourbon Chicken prepared in a live cooking demonstration

Why A Produce Box?
Growing your own fresh vegetables can be fun and rewarding. I think it’s a big pain in the neck. The second best thing is going to your local farmers market to buy fresh fruits and vegetables that are grown in your community by your local farmer. However, I’ve discovered the next best thing to THAT! It’s a produce box that is delivered to my front door each week.

My Produce Box is an excellent example of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) that is now becoming very popular, and may now be available in your area.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)
CSA is a way for the farmer to cooperate directly with his customers, as we all agree to purchase whatever is freshest and best from his farm this week. Each week’s box will contain different items based on the local conditions, not the national conditions and price futures; you work directly with the farm and farmer.

This is of great benefit to you, the farmer, your community, the earth, farm workers, and your local economy. Certainly there are many other benefits too, but the main reason I enjoy supporting my local farmers is that they supply the best TASTING ingredients. It’s something that many people aren’t aware of as they continually dull their palates with international flavorless food.

Even lettuce has a distinct flavor. People snicker when I say that, but it’s true. When you consider that all agriculture products take on the characteristics of the sun, soil, and water of where they’re grown you can believe that lettuces can be as different as wines.

Cook Simply
Besides having the best ingredients with the most nutritional quality and flavor, I love my weekly produce box because of the serendipity of opening the box. I don’t know what surprises I’ll find, but I’m always up to the challenge of being ready to cook whatever is in the box. I don’t try to over-complicate the basic fruits and vegetables within. I want to retain as much flavor and nutrition as possible, and this means I cook simply and easily using the best ingredients.

It’s NOT More Expensive
The most common misconception about your local farmers market or CSA is that fresh ingredients are more expensive. Yes, they’re more expensive calorie-for-calorie than a microwavable meal with a mile-long ingredient list. But we’re not comparing garbage to apples.

If your local farmer just needs to pick the ingredient and deliver it to the farmers market or to your door in the case of a produce box, it can’t possibly be as expensive as internationally shipped produce. My farmer doesn’t have the cost of spraying his produce with wax. He doesn’t absorb the cost of the airline trip. My local farmer has much more pride in his work than the corporate produce distributor.

Fresh Ingredients Cook Better
It’s a fact. A fresher item is easier to cook than one that is falsely ripe. Tomatoes that are picked at a green color and then gassed to make them red for the long cross-country trip to your market are harder to cook than your local farm-fresh variety that was allowed to ripen on the vine.

If you want to cook simply and easily, have the freshest ingredients with the most nutritional value, and support your local community, explore the options of having fresh produce delivered to your door from your local farmer. You’ll enjoy food more.

See the video where Chef Todd receives his mystery produce box.

You don’t need to be a chef to know good ingredients, you don’t even have to know how to cook to care where your food comes from. If you can tell the difference between the fresh taste and texture of a raw carrot from your local farmer and the one that was flown from half way around the world, you know the impact of fresh, local foods on your palate.

The nutrients and flavors are better in fresher ingredients, it’s obvious whether you cook or not. However, if you can skillfully apply basic cooking methods to the seasonal ingredients, then you really have the most nutritious and best tasting meals you can be proud of and your cooking will be more healthy.

I want to spend this summer examining where our food comes from, who is growing our food, and how they’re growing it. You might begin to care about where your food comes from for any of the many reasons that exist: The cost of bad food, better quality foods, ecology and local farming, the flavor of ingredients, the better nutrition, or world-wide labor practices, the use of pesticides, organically grown food, non-irradiated, low carbon footprint...WHATEVER the reason, you should start asking where your food comes from and how it impacts not only your health and nutrition, but the entire world’s.

The first step in my investigation is to find a local CSA or Community Supported Agriculture association. I visited Eastern Carolina Organics and had a conversation with their director to ask some basic questions about how I can get started in finding the freshest, most wholesome ingredients in my area.

Eastern Carolina Organics is an organization dedicated to making local, family farmed and organic foods more available to the general population. They support local farmers with education and distribution channels for their products. Here was the first answer I was looking for. They’re able to direct me to alternatives over my local mega-grocery store that imports food from all over the world.

Remember, fresh cooking and healthy ideas start with healthy ingredients and you don't have to be cooking gourmet dishes to care or tell the difference. Ask your grocer or local CSA and they will answer questions about how to identify local ingredients over international ingredients, as well as the many benefits to buying local produce. In other words ask yourself, “Why should I care where my food comes from?” You’ll find there are many reasons, all of great benefit to you and your community.

See Chef Todd’s conversation with his local CSA about fresh cooking.

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Most cookbooks concentrate on the list of ingredients and forget to tell you HOW to cook. When you can repeat one cooking method, then the ingredients don’t matter.

Certainly there are other very important skills to have in the kitchen, such as using your knives for cutting vegetables, and how to make sauces, but HOW you transfer heat to food makes the biggest difference of all.

Saute’ is a conductive cooking process. This means that the heat is directly transferred to the food via the sauté pan. As opposed to cooking with hot air in an oven, which is convective cooking, conductive is quicker and easier to control.

It’s easy to learn how to sauté, because the steps are always the same regardless of what you’re cooking. Mastering this one method will have you creating dinner without recipes in no time.

The basic sauté procedure is this:
1) Pan Hot First – Always start with a hot sauté pan. The best way to judge the relative heat in the pan is to sprinkle a little water from the tips of your fingers. If the water immediately boils and evaporates, you know the pan is at least 212F/100C.
2) Add Fat – A small amount of fat is used for sauté. It’s not pan frying and it’s not deep frying. Only enough butter or oil is used to barely cover the bottom of the pan. The role of fat in sauté is less about flavor and more about transferring heat.
3) Fat Hot – You must heat this fat to a point JUST BEFORE it’s about to smoke. Once the oil reaches its smoke temperature, it will impart burnt flavors to your food. However, if you start cooking right before it smokes, you’re capturing the most heat. Most fats will change from being perfectly smooth in appearance to moving about the pan and looking streaky.
4) Protein Product – Whether you’re cooking chicken, beef, pork, shrimp, fish, or tofu, it’s all the same. Add your protein product to the hot fat in the pan to promote caramelization of sugars, the nice brown color.
5) Cook 75/25 - Cook the protein product ¾ of the way on the first side so that you can witness the changes that tell you when to turn it over. As proteins coagulate, they stiffen and shrink. A chicken breast will begin to turn white on the sides. When the white reaches 75% of the way up the side of the protein product, finish it on the other side and remove to a warm plate.
6) Aromatics – Now is the time to sauté onions, celery, carrots, peppers, garlic, or any other vegetable you’d like to incorporate in the dish. These items will also pick up the flavor of the “fond”, the brown bits of rendered fat and sugars left in the pan by the protein product.
7) Deglaze - Adding a cold liquid to the pan drops the temperature quickly and dramatically, releasing the fond from the bottom of the pan. This is not only the beginning of a flavorful sauce, but also changes the cooking process from dry to moist. The liquid can then be reduced through evaporation or thickened with roux or cornstarch slurry.
8 ) Return Protein Product - Since we’ve changed from dry to moist cooking, there is less chance of burning the protein product so it can be returned to the pan to steam with the other items. You’ll know when it’s fully cooked when it reaches the desired internal temperature on your thermometer.

If you know how to sauté, you can create a French dish on Monday, a Mexican dish on Tuesday, an Asian dish on Wednesday, and all with the single, simple cooking method. Basic sauté opens up a world of endless dinner ideas because the ingredients are within your control.

See Chef Todd in a LIVE cooking demonstration, “How To Saute”.

“Burn Your Recipes” and Cook Like a Chef at Home with my cooking DVDs!

The Complete cooking DVDcollection for cooking without recipes.

There are three basic ways to thicken liquids, but they all have to do with gelatinization of starches, the point at which starch molecules absorb liquids and swell. This is what thickens sauces.

The quickest and easiest way to thicken a flavorful liquid is something that Grandma has been doing for years. She makes a quick and easy gravy from turkey drippings with a cornstarch slurry.

A cornstarch slurry simply means dissolving some cornstarch in liquid. This can be the same liquid that’s the basis for your gravy, or a different flavor entirely.

This is especially useful in Asian stir-fry. Once you’re done cutting vegetables and you’ve cooked all your proteins and vegetables, and added some chicken or vegetable broth, a slurry with soy sauce is the perfect thickener that also adds flavor.

The quickest way how to make sauces is with this method, but cornstarch leaves a glassy taste, and every sauce is reminiscent of Asian cuisine. The most flavorful thickening agent for sauces is a roux.
This is the turkey gravy thickener that Grandma ignored. Roux is the combination of starch and fat. While it’s most often butter and flour, it can be any kind of fat and starch.

It’s very easy to make a roux, and after just a few tries you’ll be a pro. It’s simply melting butter in a sauce pan and whisking in flour until it resembles a thick paste. Then, cook the roux until it begins to bubble, turns whiter, and gives off a nutty smell.

Now you’ve cooked all the proteins out of the flour so you don’t get a pasty taste. This cooked roux can be used to thicken any liquid. This is my favorite way to make Macaroni and Cheese. Milk is added to roux until it’s the desired thickness before my favorite cheese is added.

If you can make a smooth roux consistently, you know how to make sauces of all different varieties. The only thing that changes is the liquid you’ve chosen to thicken. Any gravy or sauce is now at your finger tips.

But, what about in an emergency? What about those times that your sauce is still just too thin and won’t stick to your food? What did you do wrong, how can you fix it?

The third method for thickening liquids quickly and easily is called “Beurre Manie” in French culinary terms. It’s an un-cooked roux. Simply by squeezing flour into a pat or raw butter, you can make a raw roux to be added to hot liquids. This is not the preferred method, because the uncooked flour may leave a pasty taste.

When you concentrate on these three methods of thickening liquids; cornstarch slurry, roux, and beurre manie, you’ll know how to make sauces like the professional chefs do, without a recipe.

See Chef Todd’s live cooking demonstration video on How To Make Sauces.

Discover How to Turn the Ingredients Already In Your Kitchen
into FAST and Delicious Meals!

Introducing:
The Whip Up Dinner Everyday Cooking Guide

A No-Nonsense Guide to the quickest cooking methods!

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