Secrets 3

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The Secrets to Designing & Planning Your Meals . . .

Hello there!  Are you enjoying your food so far this week?  Well, after you're done reading this, you will be preparing even better meals than before.

After broadening your knowledge of Ingredients and fine tuning your skills at selecting Quality foods (remember "High I.Q." ?), you are ready for the third step to Great cooking:

C. DESIGNING & PLANNING – Now comes the fun part of Designing and Planning your meals.  The first consideration is who you are cooking for and what are their likes and dislikes. Do take some time to ask your family, friends, or guests about their eating preferences, especially if they require special diets for health reasons, or are allergic to certain foods. From this mini survey, you can plan a meal that will delight everyone.

You can now begin to narrow down your choices; consider if you want to do appetizers and/or soup, what are the best choice for your main courses, and if you wish to make desert? Design a simple meal or an elaborate feast: it's all up to you. Use your knowledge of ingredients to decide on what blend of ingredients will achieve the unique flavors you want. Also consider how the ingredients will look together, and how you can make your dishes visually appealing. At the beginning, you may feel more comfortable sticking to traditional flavors and cooking tried and tested recipes. But as you gain confidence after Xperimenting with traditional foods by altering their taste to suit your preferences better, then its time to be bold and creative; try to design something totally new once in a while.

It is also fairly easy for you to design meals to take into account differing preferences among your guests; simply separate your ingredients and add or withhold them into individual portions of your dishes. A simple example is when you make salad . . . if you like onions, add them to your portion, if you dislike peppers then exclude them from your plate; similarly, add or exclude ingredients when you make up each customized portion for each of your guests. You can still cater to differing preferences when preparing a dish to be shared. Let’s say you decide to bake fish with coriander topping. The majority of your guest like coriander, but you know of one person that has earlier indicated that he finds the flavor disagreeable. So instead of depriving most of your guest, you go ahead and prepare the dish. To also enable your other guest to enjoy the fish, you substitute the coriander with spring onions on a small piece of the baked fish. Now everyone can partake in the wonderful dish that you have prepared. The dish still looks great when served as the spring onions do not alter the appearance very much.

In the Design & Planning phase, you may wish to consider the cooking style as well, since the way food is cooked will make a difference in the outcome in terms of taste and texture. This leads us nicely to the next step on Page 4 .

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