Cooking With Stupid

I had a chance to do some fancy cooking this weekend. I'm not bragging, mind you, but I have learned to get around in the kitchen pretty well. I picked up some great tips over the years, and thought I would just pass some of them along today.

We should really be painting houses with tomato sauce. It lasts forever. If you should happen to splatter some on your favorite shirt or blouse, you should immediately take it off, roll it up and dunk it in the pot of sauce. It's not coming out.

Similarly, if you run out of cement when building your next brick house, you can easily substitute pancake batter. It will stay in place 100 years longer than conventional concrete.

Metal handles on metal skillets tend to get as hot as the rest of the pan. This is why we should use those pot holders that we occasionally get as Christmas gifts.

The more expensive the cut of meat, the faster it goes from "medium rare" to "burnt"

Chefs will tell you that it's perfectly ok to eat the little bones in Salmon. That is only because they are too lazy to take them all out

The more difficult your party menu is to prepare, the more staunchly your guests will refuse to leave the kitchen and get the hell out of the way. "Can I help?"

Rachel Ray frequently says "E-V-O-O" to save time when referring to Extra Virgin Olive Oil. But then she always says "Extra Virgin Olive Oil" in the same breath, so it's not really saving time, and she should stop that. Professional chefs don't care for Rachel because she cooks as well, if not better, than they do, but she didn't go through 100 years of culinary school.

People will tell you that they came up with their own version of a recipe, but that usually just means they didn't have all the ingredients for the original recipe and didn't want to run to the store

Souffles suck. No one really likes them, but they don't want to tell you because they know how hard you worked to make it.

If you want to know what happens when you mix all the ingredients for guacamole dip in an uncovered food processor, let me know. I'll email you

There are many varieties of cutting and chopping tools available now. They all come with manuals that warn of the dangers of misuse. They didn't make these up to fill a page or two in the manual.

So there you have it. I hope that at least one person likes this article, because I have lots more of these little pointers to share in the future. It's just that these burns make it hard to type...