Healthy Home Restaurant

While this may sound trivial, mentally and physically setting aside an area of counter-top to prep your foods before you cook is critical to make cooking less of a hassle. Just as if you’d want all your lawn & garden tools in one place or your office supplies organized on your desk at work, the same applies in the kitchen. Here are some handy tips:

1. Select a spot close to the stove so that whatever you prepare or chop can go right in the pan/oven. To get real fancy, Google “kitchen triangle” – a layout known by cooks for decades as the optimal positioning of the fridge, stove, and sink.
2. Keep your knives, cutting boards, spices and trash can within arm’s reach of your work space. You create a lot of trash while cooking (wrapping, containers, peels, rough cuts of meat), so a handy trash can saves a LOT of time and effort in clean up.
3. Make sure your area is well lit. Good lighting not only helps you measure better but visually brings your ingredients and food to life. You can pick up a plug-in undermount kitchen work light from Home Depot for under $30 that is easy to install.

Remember – try not to clutter up this workspace with junk mail or family stuff. When you launch into your cooking tasks, a clean counter is much more inviting and relaxing – not to mention a time saver.

Most restaurants have a set list of “standard” entrees that never change. Periodically they have “specials” or new items that showcase a seasonal ingredient or, as in most cases, provides the restaurant with the highest profit margins. Having a set of standard entrees for your home restaurant can make shopping and preparing much easier. However, even making ONE meal in a hectic weekly schedule will take a modest amount of dedicated planning to ensure the most enjoyable experience and most tasty outcome.

Choosing what to make

We’re flooded with food choices that we end up surrendering to the “same old stuff”. Which is why it is important to purposely limit your choices by the following:

• Cuisine – pick a part of the world and find recipes. If you need strange spices that you aren’t sure if you’d like, visit gourmet grocers like Whole Foods and head to the bulk spice section. You can buy as much or as little as you want.
• Seasonality – knowing what is in season locally can ensure the freshest ingredients and limits your choices.
• Dietary restrictions – vegetarians, vegans, or gluten intolerance will focus your choices.
• Complexity – are you one who needs very specific instructions or are completely fine with throwing stuff in a pot and seeing what happens?

When to make what

Start with the busiest day of the week first. This can be “left over night” or “crock pot night”or “heat up that chili we froze when we made a ton of it a couple weeks ago”. Investing in a good freezer and aiming to make dishes that can be easily frozen will help with these busy nights.

For less busy days, select dishes that can be assembled quickly on the stove rather the oven. Usually Asian dishes, many Middle Eastern entrees, and Indian curries can be all made with one pot. Seafood, like fresh fish, cook up quickly.

For days you have the most time, make dishes that require lots of slow simmering or baking. These dishes usually lend themselves to awesome freezing. Lasagna, enchiladas, chili, etc are perfect examples.

Prep as much as possible

In a restaurant, prep work is the most time consuming chore usually given to the recent culinary school grads. Chopping vegetables, cleaning up chunks of meat, making sauces, etc are all considered “prep”. Just like restaurants, you can prep as much as possible to make the actual “cooking” of your meals more like an assembly line. Here are great things to prep:

• Chopped veggies – works best for hearty veggies like carrots, potatoes, squashes, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower. You can store these in zip top bags or plastic ware. It’s best to keep each veggie separated when you store. Storing bags of chopped onion or garlic isn’t recommended. The strong odors will stink up your fridge, and the onions will end up tasteless when you end up using them.
• Sauces – red or green enchilada sauce, marinades, stir fry sauces, pasta sauces – all can be made ahead of time, stored in the fridge in tight containers, even frozen and thawed to make a frozen/fresh hybrid meal.
• Side dishes – rice pilafs, couscous, pasta salad, steamed veggies, hummus, soups – all can be stored in the fridge or frozen.

Stock up on pantry essentials

As you start developing your standard home restaurant menu, you’ll begin to see patterns in the things you buy from the store. This comes in handy when stocking your pantry. In the Murthy kitchen, we go through tons of canned tomatoes, canned coconut milk, garbanzo and black beans, rice, and several other items. Whenever we’re at the store shopping for our weekly meals, we always pick up these essentials – especially if there’s a sale. No harm in buying more since they’ll last long and we know we use them. Many times a recipe online has caught our attention and we already had 90% of the ingredients in our pantry.

Just like in the garage or office, nothing is more frustrating than critical tools that suck. If your mower’s blade isn’t sharp, if your pen is out of ink, if your laptop is slow, we waste no time correcting the problem. Same applies with the kitchen. Strangely, we may already have many of these tools, and in fact we probably have way more than we need. Here are some “bare necessities” from the Murthy household, though our full kitchen list may be posted in a future post:

1. Knives
   1. 6 to 8 inch chef’s knife – good for meats, tough vegetables, chopping, slicing. This is your go-to knife for roughly 80% of your work.
   2. Paring knife – for more delicate work such as cutting around unwanted parts of small vegetables like artichokes or potatoes, picking seeds out of lemons, cutting into packaging.
   3. Serrated bread knife – not just for bread, these knives work in a pinch on tomatoes if your chef knife is dull. Also for slicing cooked meat like pork loin or filet.
2. Stainless steel bench scraper – this is the ultimate kitchen multi-tasker. Use it to divide dough into pieces, smash garlic, scoop up chopped veggies while keeping your hands clean, break up blocks of ice, you name it.
3. Knife sharpener – a dull knife is not only a pain but is also more dangerous. We put more pressure on dull knives to make it cut. If that knife slipped, the wound would be deeper. That metal stick you get with knife sets is not a sharpener. For under $10 you can get a carbide metal sharpener from Amazon. Or you can spend upwards of $200 for an electric one.
4. Crock pot – ‘nuf said.
5. +3 cutting boards – one for meats, one for veggies, and another for anything else (trivet, serving plate, lid for a pot). Ensure yours is nonporous, anti-microbial, is dishwasher safe, and is highly rated by user reviews. The Murthy’s swear by the ones made by Epicurean.
6. Stainless steel cookware
   1. 8 qt stock pot
   2. 12” braising pan
   3. 10” sautee or “omelet” pan
   4. 3-4 qt sauce pan
7. Non-stick cookware
   1. 8-10” sautee pan
   2. 3-4 qt sauce pan
8. +8 ramekins or small bowls – Use these to prep and layout all your ingredients first before dumping them in the pot. This is known in the culinary world as “mise en place” or “everything in its place”. Notice how celebrity chefs have all their ingredients in small bowls as they cook. This isn’t just for show. It’s a trick to making cooking “assembly” easier.
9. Everything else – if you use it frequently, buy multiples. For example, we have 2 sets of measuring spoons, and could do with one more set.