My argument is no. Here’s what you gotta do. Suppose you want to make a meal of mashed potatoes, steak, and salad.
Mashed potatoes
- Rinse and clean the outside of the potatoes.
- Cut into smaller pieces, e.g. discs 1 inch thick.
- Boil the potatoes in salty water (add a lot of salt here). Do this for 14 minutes. You want to boil water beforehand and drop potatoes into already boiling water.
- Take the potatoes out / drain the water. If you want, remove the skin now (or you can peel the potatoes beforehand).
- Add lots of butter. Repeat after me: the secret is butter. If a restaurant makes amazing mashed potatoes, it’s probably because they added a lot of butter.
- Mash. Easier if you have a masher thingamabob.
- Optionally… add pepper, spices (e.g. garlic), etc.
It’s not so complicated. Remember to add butter.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/4491354934/
Save time by making a big batch at once. Store what you don’t eat in the fridge.
Steak
Thou shalt buy good quality meat. Buying good ingredients will make your cooking taste a lot better. At supermarkets, beef of different quality may be sold at the same price. Sometimes higher quality beef gets mixed in. Stick to buying that meat. Also check out the Halal and Kosher sections.
Look for marbling. If there is a lot of fat mixed in with the muscle, that is a good sign. Fat is delicious.
Other factors can affect the taste of beef, such as whether it was grass-fed or grain-fed, whether the animal was stressed when it was killed (this affects the rigor mortis process), dry aging, etc. You can get really high quality meat by going to high-end supermarkets or specialty butchers.
When cooking the steak, use butter instead of oil. Butter makes almost all foods taste better. You can also add salt, pepper, garlic, seasoning, etc.
Cooking the steak to a particular doneness is a skill. You poke the steak as you cook it (e.g. in a pan). When it is raw on the inside, the steak will feel very soft. When it is overcooked, it will feel rubbery. Rare and medium rare is somewhere in between. If you haven’t got the hang of it yet, you can always take the steak out early and cut into it to check its doneness.
After cooking the steak, you may want to leave it alone for a few minutes (you let the meat “rest”). When it is cooler, it will bleed less juices when you cut it.
Salad
Use salad mix. Add dressing (optional).
Yes… I am too lazy to wash and cut salad. But you can do that if you want. If you want more interesting salads, go to allrecipes.com and look for good salad recipes.
Key points
Save time by making large batches at once. But don’t do this for food that doesn’t taste as good after it has been refrigerated (e.g. steak).
Two big reasons why restaurant food tastes good is because [1] the chefs source good ingredients and [2] butter is the secret.
