Saving Dinner Basics: How to Cook Even If You Don't Know How (Paperback)

by Leanne Ely (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Cooking 101

If you think that folding an egg has something to do with laundry, or that a wok is good exercise, you’ve come to the right place.

Nutritionist and family meal-planner extraordinaire, Leanne Ely knows her way around a stove and a pantry–and she provides everything you need to know, from mincing garlic and barbecuing beef to pulling off your first dinner party. Select chapters feature tasty recipes that can be prepared with the greatest of ease. You’ll find practical and trustworthy advice on

• equipping your kitchen: what you must have, what you don’t need
• stocking your cupboards, fridge, and freezer with the essentials
• selecting fresh produce and high-quality meats, poultry, and fish
• slicing, dicing, sautéing, simmering, and other prep techniques
• whipping up quick, scrumptious dishes with ingredients on hand
• ensuring that your main course and side dishes are ready at the same time
• preparing mouthwatering one-pot meals, from Lemon Tarragon Chicken to Easily the Best Casserole in the World
• baking fast and easy cookies, pies, cakes, and cobblers

Saving Dinner Basics also includes a handy glossary of common food terminology, a spice primer (it’s about time you discovered thyme!), and a troubleshooting guide for various cooking challenges. Let Leanne Ely help you turn your kitchen into what it was meant to be: the place where great meals begin.

Leanne Ely is considered the expert on family cooking and healthy eating. She is a syndicated newspaper columnist (The Dinner Diva), a certified nutritionist, and the host of SavingDinner.com. Leanne has a weekly “Food for Thought” column on the ever-popular FlyLady.net website, as well as her own e-zine, Healthy Foods. She is the author of Saving Dinner, Saving Dinner the Low-Carb Way and Saving Dinner for the Holidays. She lives in North Carolina with her two teenage children.

“Anyone who finds cooking a mystery needs Saving Dinner Basics.”
–Marla Cilley, The FlyLady, author of Sink Reflections

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE

EQUIPPING THE KITCHEN: TOOLS OF THE TRADE
It seems like the world is obsessed with the gizmos and gadgets that illustrate a cutting-edge kitchen, rather than interested in the more utilitarian (and admittedly less snazzy) kitchen that gets plenty of use. I remember years ago when I was catering that one of my clients had this amazing kitchen—a six-burner Wolf range, a fabulous Sub-Zero fridge, and all the latest and greatest tools a person could lust for. And yet, this poor woman would have to call her mother to figure out how to boil a pot of water. She was totally hopeless in the kitchen. She looked great, her kitchen looked great, but the bottom line? She was a wannabe cook and couldn’t find her way around that kitchen, even with an illustrated map.

Most people don’t want to live out their culinary lives with kitchen “sets”—they really want to cook and make things happen in the kitchen, like breakfast, lunch, and dinner and an occasional dessert, too. To get there, you’re going to need to make sure your kitchen is ready for real-life action, and not a photo shoot for a magazine. That means you are going to need tools and equipment, not gizmos and gadgets—there’s a big difference.

So let’s get to it, shall we? Get your kitchen tricked out with what you need, and leave the junk behind. I have lots of suggestions here: equipment and such that is essential, and a good description of how to set up your own kitchen. Once you’re really cooking (preferably with gas), then you can add some more goodies to your basic setup. You’ll figure out what you want to add as you go along—that’s how your kitchen reflects your own unique cooking personality. Maybe you’ve taken pasta making to a new level; it is completely appropriate for you to buy a pasta machine so you can make your own. This is what I mean by having kitchen tools and appliances that reflect your own unique cooking style. Just be careful! I’ve never met a kitchen store I didn’t find irresistible. It’s easy to fall madly in love with an expensive gadget and promise yourself that you will soon be making homemade ice cream or pasta. Inexpensive gadgets are much easier to justify (hey, it’s only five bucks), but these one-trick items can crowd your drawers and cupboards and make the essential necessary tools hard to find when you need them. Being discerning has saved me from chucking expensive (and inexpensive) nonessential equipment to the Goodwill.

If cooking is something you are still reticent about, let me appeal to your inner nurturer. Cooking is a soul-satisfying activity. Cooking a meal provides food and nurturing to those you love most in the world. Providing food and sustenance for your family (and doing it in a tasty and fun way) is a gratifying daily job that is more a joy than a drudgery—if you have the eyes to look at it that way. It starts with having the right tools, getting your pantry stocked, and then actually doing something in the kitchen with those tools and foods.

Cooking with Gas, Literally

If you are fortunate enough to have a choice of what you’ll be cooking on (gas or electric), you’ll definitely want gas. Gas gives you better control of the heat; a gas stove heats almost instantaneously, cools down quickly, and is the first choice of professional chefs. Electric stovetops seem to do the exact opposite and frustrate pros and novices alike.

But what do you do if you’re stuck with electric? Here are some tips for coping:

1. Make sure the burner elements are working properly. They sometimes need replacing, so make sure yours are in top working mode.

2. Match the size of the pan to the element. Not only is it wasteful energy-wise to put an 8-inch pan on a 10-inch burner, but it also could produce a scorching result, not to mention the chance of burning yourself.

3. Keep the burners clean. When an electric stovetop is clean, it reflects the heat better and saves energy as well.

4. Flat-bottomed pans are the key to even cooking. The element must have full contact with the pan in order to produce decent results.

5. Turn the heat off way before the cooking time indicates, especially if you need to take it down from a rolling boil to a simmer. This will help you simmer your food without burning, because electric coils take longer to cool down than gas flames.

I want to start this section with a letter I received from a perplexed reader asking for some direction and help in setting up her kitchen. This letter will help you get a good visual on how to set up your own kitchen:

Dear Dinner Diva,

I have a new apartment and don’t know exactly how to set up my kitchen—where do I put everything? Where should everything go? I have plenty of below- and above-cupboard space—and a few drawers. I have a big stash of vitamins, too, that I don’t know what to do with.

I’ve gotten rid of my fast-food habit by cooking at home (and make my own fast-food by chopping everything up in advance so all I have to do is put it together when I want something to eat), but the kitchen isn’t efficient. Do you have any ideas on how I can do this?

Thanks in advance for any help,

Distraught in Detroit

Dear Distraught,

First off, I want to commend you for getting your act together by getting rid of the fast-food habit. Your “assembly-line” approach to doing your own, homemade fast-food is an inspiration, good for you! One word of caution is not to get too far ahead. By day four, your stuff is going to start looking pretty rank. You want to chop and store just enough for a couple of days, ideally.

You asked a great question that bewilders many a newbie with a first kitchen: where does everything go? On one hand, that’s difficult to say without seeing your kitchen; but on the other hand, there are some logical ways to discuss this without ever having to see it. You mentioned that you have plenty of below- and above-cupboard space. So let’s start there and see what we can do.

I like to put like with like. In other words, keep the baking stuff together, the pots and pans together, and the utensils together. Seems real basic, but you can’t imagine some of the kitchens I have worked in. They just didn’t make sense.

If you have a small bank of drawers, put your silverware in a plastic silverware tray with the different compartments for each utensil (very cheap at a discount store), and put that in the top drawer. You may want another plastic utility tray in the same drawer (if it will fit) for holding your serving utensils.

You can buy these plastic trays in two sizes—narrow or wide. They help keep things sorted rather than your having to dig through a drawer—really smart for keeping you from getting cut, too, because knives should never be thrown into a drawer without being contained and controlled in some fashion (in my opinion). This is what I’ve done with all my kitchen drawers. Use another drawer for other miscellaneous utensils like a potato peeler, a grater, can opener, etc. Again, use utility trays if you can.

I use another drawer for plastic wrap, foil (heavy-duty for roasting and regular), plastic bags (zipper type, all sizes, and freezer and regular weights), waxed paper, parchment paper (great for those who bake and those who don’t—parchment is a multitasking paper), and my rolling pin, believe it or not. Great place for it. I also have a drawer for just my towels and dishrags. I buy them in bulk from a restaurant-supply store, so I have white muslin towels and bar rags like you see in restaurants. They wear very well; when they are ugly I use them as rags, and when they wear out I dump them.

Choose a cupboard for your food pantry (unless, of course, you have a proper pantry). I put the canned stuff all on one shelf and again: like goes with like. If you have four cans of tuna, place them all together. Stack them even. Don’t have them scattered throughout the cupboard or you won’t know where anything is, especially when you need it. I do the same with dried goods, keeping the pastas together, as well as rice, oatmeal, and cereals. I also use small plastic baskets for envelopes of spice blends, bags of dried beans, and other miscellaneous and sundry items needing a place to live in my pantry that wouldn’t do well sitting by their lonesome on a shelf.

On the bottom shelf of my pantry, I keep a bin for onions and another one for potatoes and sweet potatoes. Are you seeing the pattern? It makes good sense because all things are complementary to one another.

When it comes to the actual dishes and serving pieces, keep in mind that your dishware should be close to the silverware for easy table setting. I keep my mugs and glasses in one cupboard right above the coffeemaker: glasses on one shelf, mugs on another. Everyone knows that if you need something to hold a drink, you go to that particular cupboard. When I make my coffee in the morning, the cups are right where they should be—on the first shelf in the cupboard above the coffeemaker. The whole ebb and flow of the kitchen is to have it make sense. When it is set up that way, it will be easier to work in when you need to grab something in the middle of cooking or serving.

You mentioned that you have a lot of vitamins. So do I. The way I handle keeping them from being all over the place is to place them all together in a large basket. I use baskets for everything. They contain everything beautifully, and when it’s time to take your vitamins, you just pull the basket (or baskets) out, get your vitamins, put them back in the basket, and voilà! Easy as pie!
...

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (August 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345485432
• ISBN-13: 978-0345485434
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #52,756 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A nice addition to your collection... regardless of skill level..., September 22, 2006

By	D. DAMORE (Tampa, FL, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As a self-confessed foodie who loves to be in my kitchen, and a fan of Leanne's books and Menu Mailers, I actually bought this book for my oldest daughter who has just flown the nest. I had given her some of Leanne's other books when she first left as she was familiar with many of the recipes from me using them in our home, but even though she has spent time cooking with me, I thought it might be nice for to have a "how to" book to go along with her collection.

Can you just imagine my surprise that I have to order another one to give her now? Because I want to keep this one for myself!

I think it is a fabulous read, and full of some very nice information... and the recipes for using the new knowledge are great too. Granted I did know many of the things that Leanne goes over in the book because of my own experience on my own and with Leanne, it was really nice to know that I was doing most things "right", and how I could improve on those things that I was just sort of "winging"... if that makes sense. Basically, you really can teach an old dog new tricks when you make it easy and fun to learn!

The information for those who are just starting their cooking experience (and a delightful one it can be too when you have the right tools and info!) is very easy to understand, in Leanne's familiar no nonsense manner. It is obvious that it is written by someone who really does cook for a family in their own home kitchen. I really liked that Leanne gives honest opinions on what you really do need to know, without filling up the book with lots of stuff that only confuses even further. It's nice to know the cooking terms and what they mean, but even nicer to know which ones you may never use.

I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who is new to cooking for sure, and would even say that it is a nice reference book for those who do already know their way around a kitchen too. I really enjoyed it, and am glad to have it in my collection.

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's about time!, October 6, 2006

By	elviswoman (Dallas, TX United States) - See all my reviews

I consider myself to be mildly cooking impaired, but have been a long time subscriber to Leanne's various menu mailers and I have both her books "Saving Dinner" as well as "Saving Dinner the Low Carb Way". The grocery list/daily menu format of Leanne's other works have been a lifesaver to me. The format of Saving Dinner Basics is also excellent, easy to read and nicely organized.

I wish this book had been out there a few years back, it would have been immensely helpful to me as I started to try and learn about cooking and building my kitchen workspace.

Excellent suggestions about setting up your cooking space, what supplies you need and what's a waste, and a wide variety of topics covered such as food selection and preservation/storage.

Overall, I would highly recommend for the beginner as well as the domestically challenged. I found Leanne's ideas in this book to be very helpful.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Good Place to Start, July 18, 2007

By	whitewave - See all my reviews

This is a great basic starting place for those who don't know how to cook. It is also quite useful for those of us who know how to cook but may not have learned all the basics of preparing a meal. I love to cook and I am pretty good at creating my own meals out of ingredients I have on hand but there were many things I never learned how to do correctly. This book helped me to fill in the gaps that were missing from my cooking repertoire.

This book is great for those of us who are growing up in families that don't have time to teach us the basics of cooking. In today's convenience-driven society many lessons that were taught as a natural part of living have been forgotten. This is a great gift for someone just starting out on their own.

If you cook like Martha Stewart then this isn't the book for you. If you could use some lessons in learning how to set up a kitchen efficiently and learn how to chop food quickly then this is a great resource for your kitchen!