15 Handy Kitchen Skills for Home Cooks

I am a graduate student who barely knows how to boil pasta correctly and slice an apple into bite-size pieces. For dinner, I often settle for under-cooked spaghetti noodles topped with Ragu or apple slices chopped into various shapes and sizes dipped in some Jiffy creamy peanut butter. If your dinner routine sounds remotely similar, I suggest reading this article, titled, �15 Handy Kitchen Skills For Home Cooks.� Trust me, these skills are indeed quite 'handy.' Being alone to cook for yourself in your kitchen will no longer frighten you once you master the art of these fifteen skills.

With mothers and fathers working more and more, children are often growing up on take-out and are not learning to peel potatoes, slice onions, or in my case�boil pasta, correctly. Home-cooked meals are being replaced with Chinese food, Subway sandwiches, McDonald's, and Taco Bell's crispy tacos. While this is not the case for all families, it is a sad truth for many in the United States. I recently flew down to visit my host family in Costa Rica, and I was shocked to see my nine-year-old niece dicing onions and making each slice exactly the same size. In contrast, the little girls I baby-sit in the United States are still learning to butter toast. If we want future children to no longer consume boxed Mac & Cheese, it is time we begin spreading the knowledge of common sense cooking. I do not mean teaching our children how to make gourmet meals. I am only suggesting we teach our kids the basic slicing, dicing, and searing skills to make simple, yet healthy, meals for themselves. Reading this article will hopefully help some of us learn these skills so we can pass them on to the next generation.

Before we can pass on skills to the next generation, we need to learn them ourselves first. With anything, one needs to practice to acquire a new talent. We all need to be okay with making mistake as well. While some of these skills may seem easy to an observer, not all of them are. Read the instructions carefully, be okay with failing, and try again. Some of the greatest tips in this article include learning how to sear meat, learning to make perfect hard-boiled eggs, and learning to refresh wilted produce. Another great tip is how to remove a piece of an eggshell that accidentally falls into a bowl while cracking eggs. I always use a spoon and gently try to grab the shell, but is seems to take forever. This tip to use one of the half shells is brilliant!

Some other tips I love include how to store greens and herbs, as well as how to perfectly slice dessert bars. Have you ever made brownies and sliced them to put on a plate to then realize that you sliced all of them into different sizes? This seems to happen to me no matter what is that I am trying to slice into the same dimensions. If you are finding yourself embarrassed by your various oddly shaped dessert bars, this article will give you insight into how to slice your bars just right.

It is time to enjoy your home and kitchen, and put your skills to work. Do not worry if these skills are difficult for you at first. We were all once new at something. It takes practice to be an expert. If you find these skills helpful, spread your knowledge and share with friends, neighbors, classmates, etc. You can learn fifteen new skills today that you didn't know yesterday. Read this article today!