Consider yourself organized, or aspire to be? Lifehacker provides some creative tips on how to make your cooking simpler with “Kitchen Timesavers That Speed Up Dinner.” The best idea for me? Stick a conversion chart on the inside of one of your cupboards.
I have some cookbooks from my travels – and gee – why does everyone else cook with a metric system except for the US?! I’ve realized that I procrastinate from cooking wonderful (and easy) dishes from Spain and Cuba because I can’t be bothered with searching another book for the conversions!
The article also mentions some tips on seeding tomatoes, mincing garlic, and prepping your ingredients beforehand (mise en place). I knew the last concept but appreciated their mention that you didn’t have to spend money to buy extra little finger bowls for this. Reuse some cough syrup or Nyquil lids!
My friends who are the best cooks happen to never follow recipes anymore, and seem to be incredibly efficient and organized in life outside the kitchen. Maybe I should take some more life lessons from them for 2008.
Bah! I have more than enough recipes in my meager collection of American cookbooks to last me a lifetime. I have a book called “1001 Cookie Recipes” and I have only prepared 65 of them so far. If there’s anything else I think I need, I look it up on allrecipes.com.
BTW, allrecipes.com can help you with measurement conversions.
Be advised that measurement conversions aren’t the only difficulty you will face with non-American recipes. There is also the small matter of ingredient conversion. This is an obvious issue with a non-English recipe. However, I once bought an English-language cookbook where the ingredients weren’t familiar at all. A British colleague advised that the ingredient names were all British variants. That also explained why all the ingredients were measured in 2-3 ways (turn the oven on to X degrees Fahrenheit, Y degrees Celsius, or gas level Z).
One more thing– you might not necessarily have the tools for international baking. I once visited a friend in Germany and we baked cookies together. We 2 computer hackers conquered the challenges of converting my basic chocolate chip cookie recipe to work in Germany. Did you know they measure dry ingredients by weight (x grams of flour) vs volume (y cups of flour)?
Hey, wait… Cuban recipe? Does the embargo against Cuba allow that?
🙂
Hmm, the State Dept. doesn’t seem to have anything to say on the matter. Just keep those Cuban cigars well stashed, GrubGirl.