A food blogger friend once advised me to take down a picture I’d posted. Her philosophy is that food bloggers should only post pictures of beautiful and tasty food. I listened to her and removed the photo.

But today I decided that this is a rule made to be broken. After all, you folks don’t come here for “food porn” or elaborate recipes—you come to learn how real people can cook healthy and tasty meals with a minimum of effort.

So on this site, I share my failures as well. We can learn from our mistakes. Just don’t ask me to link to them all in one place.

The food I served over the recent holidays came out great. I made kreplach, couscous, lasagna and many other favorites. But just two days after the end of the holidays, last Friday night, I made one of my most unsuccessful meals in many years.

Because I don’t want to lose your respect completely I won’t go into details, but it involved burnt rice and undercooked chicken. And a very disgusting pot.

Sometimes, you put a lot of time into preparing a dish only to have it go wrong at the last minute. In this case, it took several instances of bad judgment throughout the day to screw up so colossally. I made all of the usual mistakes—trying something new on a hectic day, not following instructions carefully, being rushed, willfully ignoring experience and instincts, and more. Fortunately I had no guests and there was plenty of other food.

It took me over an hour to clean the pot afterward. I found this metal spatula useful in getting off all of the junk. This picture was taken near the end of the process, believe it or not. Oy. I’m lucky that the pot (my Fagor pressure cooker) wasn’t damaged.

So what was your worst cooking disaster? Or perhaps you enjoyed your worst meal courtesy of someone else? Please share–it’ll make me feel better.

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This is my third post on summer cooking. See also Cool Summer Cooking Tips and Healthy and Tasty Summer Salads.

Most of us have been programmed to enjoy hot soup. Yet there are a few soups that most of us eat cold, and summer is the right time for them. Cold soups that come to mind are:

• Fruit soups. Kate provided a simple no-cook strawberry and pear soup (recipe below) Fruit soup is similar to a compote, and is easy to cook up in the microwave.
• Gazpacho. This uncooked soup, which can also be made from leftover salad, usually calls for canned tomato juice. I like this Spanish Gazpacho by Liz Steinberg, because fresh tomatoes are among the few ingredients. Bonus: How to Use Up Leftover Gazpacho.
• Summer Beet Borsht or Beet Soup with Ginger and Cumin are classically served cold.
• Vichyssoise is also normally served cold, and made with potatoes and leeks. Here’s a recipe from All Recipes, Classic Vichyssoise. If you follow a kosher or vegetarian diet you’ll want to substitute vegetable broth.

But you know what? Vegetables can be the base of an excellent cold soup. Paula offers Gingered Red Pepper and Tomato Soup. Zucchini or winter squash soups, like Pumpkin Soup with White Wine and Rosemary, would also taste good cold.

Kate’s No-Cook Strawberry-Pear Soup:

Ingredients:

• 4 cups hulled and sliced strawberries
  1/2 cup water
  2 ripe pears, cored and cut into medium dice
  3/4-1 cup apple juice
  2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice (or more to taste)
  1/4 cup white sugar

Instructions:

Using an immersion or regular blender, puree strawberries with water, diced pears, and apple juice. Add lemon juice and sugar to taste; how much sugar is necessary will depend on the berries themselves.

I’ll bet some of your favorite hot soups will taste just as good cold, especially with some yogurt or herb garnish. Experiment, because you never know until you try.

What cold soups can you recommend? Please share links or recipes in the comments.

You may also enjoy:

Cool Summer Cooking Tips

Healthy and Tasty Summer Salads

Keep Hot Foods Hot and Cold Foods Cold

Image: Muffet

As a challenge, I decided to see if I could prepare two Shabbat (sabbath) meals in an hour, not including cooking time.

My menu:

• Roast chicken with garlic, lemon juice, and oregano
• Potatoes in the pressure cooker
• Roast vegetables: Turnip, onion, garlic, beet, sweet potato, yellow pepper, rosemary.
• Cholent (a stew in the crockpot)
• Techina (sesame paste dressing).
• Cake, challah and soup from the freezer. I try to separate baking from cooking when I can, because they use different ingredients and tools.
• Salad, made by my kids closer to the meals.

The Friday night and Saturday mid-day meals are more or less the same, except that I planned to serve soup Friday night and cholent at lunch.

Cooking efficiently requires advanced preparation. I had washed the celery the day before, and defrosted the chicken in the refrigerator. Now I put the the chicken in the sink and set the lemons on the  counter, so they would be at room temperature. Foods at room temperature are easier to work with, and some say warm lemons yield more juice.

The chicken was still partially frozen so I decided to do that later.

Time for the vegetables: This is my kitchen table where I sit to work whenever I can. I decided to peel the beets, but just scrub the turnips (not pictured) and sweet potato. The colander is ready to take the vegetables to the sink for rinsing. When I sat down to work I realized I would also need a knife and cutting board. After I set the vegetables in the pan, I drizzled olive oil over them and ran to my roof patio to get some rosemary.

For the techina and chicken, I needed lemon juice and garlic. I chopped several cloves of garlic in the food processor, which was clean and dry on the counter. There’s nothing like finding your food processor full of cake batter residue  just when you are about to start a cooking session. I set  aside the garlic for the chicken in a small bowl. I added juice from half a lemon to the garlic remaining in the food processor. Then I added sesame past, cumin and enough water to make a thick dressing. I ran the machine, scraped out the dressing, and put in the refrigerator. That was the end of the food processor’s work for the day so I put the parts in the dishwasher with no worry.

Here is a picture of my cholent in the crockpot including onion, barley, celery, and turnip. Carrots, potatoes and a piece of chicken are added as they are prepared.

The chicken was still a little frozen, but I cleaned it and set it into the pan. I squeezed the rest of the lemons and added the garlic from the bowl, oregano and some water on the chicken. I covered it and left it to marinate while it finished defrosting, and roasted the vegetables. My oven is not quite big enough to do both at once. At any rate, I find chicken is crisper when roasted without vegetables.

I finished within the hour, including cleanup, a couple of phone calls, the trip for the rosemary and a scramble to find a knife. Misplacing items is one of my biggest barriers to efficiency. My husband scrubbed and quartered the potatoes, which took another ten minutes. Cleanup involved disposing of the peels on the newspaper, cleaning the knife, juicer, and cutting board, and wiping off the sink and counter.

I was able to work quickly because I had clean kitchen surfaces and no small children at home or other distractions.

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Cooking for 35 (My Son’s Bar Mitzvah)

Cooking Spreadsheet

The Bar Mitzvah Cooking Session

Some readers have family members that can’t eat certain foods because of allergies, intolerance, or medical conditions. But when they are just picky, it gets annoying. You are left with the choice of making what you want and having the child eat something else, or going along and winding up with a dish you don’t enjoy so much. I am not one to make my kids eat something, but I respect those who do as long as their methods are not overly harsh.

In my house, it’s nuts. (Yes, that sentence can be read two ways.) A couple of my children object to nuts in cooked or baked goods. I love nuts, but rarely cook with them because of this. I know I should the the kids used to them gradually but I haven’t yet. In the meantime I comfort myself that nuts, while nutritious, are expensive.

What foods do you avoid cooking, because of your family’s preferences?

This post contains details of how I cooked the meals for my son’s bar mitzvah. This system can work whether you are cooking a large number of meals for one or two people, or one meal for a lot.

The most time-consuming parts of most cooking jobs are shopping, preparing vegetables, and washing up. So make sure to allow enough time for these.

My husband went to the market Tuesday evening to buy potatoes, herbs, carrots, onions, celery, eggs, salad vegetables, and lemons. I already had bought the non-perishable items.

On mid-day Wednesday,  I bought ground meat and fish, and cubes of meat for the stew. Usually we cut up chickens ourselves, but I paid extra for the luxury of having everything cleaned and ground up. I picked up my husband from work and we went to a neighborhood with cheaper prices than where I live. When I got home, the meat and fish went to the coldest part of the refrigerator. After I rested, I prepared the marinade and added the cleaned chicken, putting them back into the refrigerator to roast on Thursday.

On Wednesday afternoon, I counted up the number of vegetables needed for each item. My kids and I went to work washing and peeling everything but the potatoes. I sorted them into recipes and put them back in the refrigerator. For example, I had one bag or container for the fish ingredients containing 5 carrots and 5 onions for the meatloaf. (See the cooking spreadsheet for an example, but a pen and paper are fine!)

I started cooking early Thursday morning. I set out the pans and utensils I needed, lay out newspaper, and set my food processor in the middle. I set the fish stock to boil. Then I took the bag containing the correct number of carrots and onions, processed them and placed them in a large bowl. I added the eggs, flour, and spices. Finally I removed the ground fish from the refrigerator and mixed everything together. Then I formed the gefilte fish balls,added them to the stock, waited for it to boil again, and set the timer.

The food processor has had only onions and carrots in it,  so I could move right on to the meatloaf without rinsing it off. (Anything that touches raw fish or meat must be treated with caution.) If I get interrupted I can place the processor in the refrigerator to prevent bacteria from growing, or rinse it off briefly. Then I took the vegetables I set aside for the meatloaf, processed them and placed them in a clean bowl. My extra-large food processor is not big enough to do the final mixing. I added the other ingredients and the ground meat, placed the loaves in prepared pans, and put them in the oven. I set another timer (or use your cellphone).

When the meatloaf was done I transferred the marinated chicken into pans and put them in the oven.

I scrubbed and quartered the potatoes, then placed them in a large pressure cooker. The frozen string beans went in a steamer in my other pressure cooker. The bulgur for lunch went into a third pot, with onions, and the stew in a fourth. The stew was a mistake. I should have done it on Friday as it took too much space in the refrigerator. I had planned to make techina dressing but decided that no one would miss it.

You can read more about my bar mitzvah planning:

Preparing for Large Cooking Projects

Food Storage Problems

More Thoughts on Spoilage

Bar Mitzvah Menu Planning

Bar Mitzvah Menu for 35

Thoughts on Excess Food

Estimating Quantities

Quick Update on Bar Mitzvah Cooking

When I have a lot of cooking like I do today, I often prepare a chart to add up how many of each vegetable I need to prepare. Today, the day before the two-day holiday of Rosh Hashanah, I got the idea of making it into a spreadsheet, and Leora suggested I blog about it.

I was able to embed it right into this post using Google Docs. (If you can’t see it, click here.)

The top row shows each vegetable (or fruit, in the case of lemons). Subsequent rows show the name of the dish on the left, and the number of each vegetable needed. Vegetable totals are calculated in the bottom row

You should also see updates as (if) I make them. The stir-fry and some of the rice was tonight’s dinner. Cholent is the sabbath stew. I think I will be skipping the potato kugel, and the baking was done a few days ago.

I guess my mother isn’t the only one who likes to make charts.

It’s Tuesday, the day for Time-Saving Tips and Techniques at CookingManager.com.

Today I share techniques to get a jump start on cooking, with just a few minutes of investment. Allow chemical processes to do the work until you can give the recipe more attention.

1. Soak beans. Soaking cuts cooking time and lessens flatulence. To prepare dried beans sort through them for stones, then rinse well.  Place the beans in a bowl and cover with water. The beans will expand, so you need a large bowl and about two inches of water above the level of the beans. Soak overnight.If you need to soak them longer do so in the refrigerator, replacing the water once a day. Beans can spoil so don’t soak them indefinitely. Always discard the soaking water, which can be used for plants. Note: Smaller beans and lentils don’t need pre-soaking, just a good washing.
2. Marinate meat and fish. A marinade tenderizes meat and adds flavor. Marinating also helps keeps meat or fish fresh, allowing you to cook it closer to the meal without worry of spoilage. Soak meat, fish or vegetables in marinade, using a closed container in the refrigerator. To prevent bacteria from growing ensure that your marinade has an acidic base like lemon juice or vinegar.Thirty minutes to two hours is long enough to incorporate the taste of the marinade in most foods. Marinating longer doesn’t improve food and may make it mushy. I regularly marinate overnight, but I leave you to experiment. Note: Never use leftover marinade for another dish. If you boil it for a few minutes you can add it to another recipe.
3. Defrost food in the refrigerator. For safe and tasty results, always defrost raw and cooked foods gently in the refrigerator. This saves energy because the frozen food helps keep refrigerated food cool. Don’t use the microwave for defrosting.
4. Set up a bread sponge. If you are planning to make bread in the next day or two, you can set up a sponge. A sponge contains all of the wet ingredients or just the water, yeast, and about two-thirds of the flour.Mix it and cover it—kneading will come later. The batter should be loose and fairly wet. A large, clean garbage bag tied loosely around the bowl works well as a cover.

   Leave the sponge on the counter or  put it in the refrigerator, depending on the climate, type of yeast and your schedule.  After a few hours, or the next morning, add the rest of the ingredients and continue with the recipe. A refrigerated sponge will need time to warm up before you work with it. Then you let the dough rise and move on to shaping the loaves; no second rising is required.

   Tip: When using instant yeast, skip the “proofing” stage. Instant yeast can go right into the flour.

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