If you appreciate good food, something with just the right amount of sweet, sour or salty tang, something with just the right after-taste, then you may have aspired, at one time or another, to learn how to master the art of cooking exceptionally well. While you may not have done anything practical to achieve this lofty goal of becoming a gourmet, resigning yourself to stumbling upon those lucky moments when someone had cooked you an exquisite meal, in the back of your mind you may still have wondered what it would have been like to have acquired an unusual level of culinary skill.
After all, if you had learned how to create delicious meals for yourself, you would be able to whip up something wonderful for your family, your friends, and yourself whenever you felt the urge to celebrate life. Now, settling all that aside here’s the good news: you can make anything “gourmet” if you have the right ingredients. How? Try these 5 quick tips:
1. Improve the joy you get from ice cream, desserts, and coffee beverages.
All you need to transform a wonderful ice cream, dessert, or cup of coffee from nice to wonderful is a little secret sauce–specifically, dark chocolate sauce. By drizzling, dabbing, or squeezing just the right amount of chocolate onto your dreamy concoction, you will add a velvety, smoother texture and an exceptional flavor.
You may also want to experiment with trying this delectable sauce on snacks like peanut butter on rice cakes or your bowl of fruits.
2. Add creamed coconut to your chocolate protein smoothie after your exercise session.
If you enjoy a cool, refreshing smoothie to up your protein intake immediately after an exhausting run or strenuous workout in the gym, then try adding two tablespoons of creamed cream. This is basically a blend of coconut water and the fleshy part of the coconut. It’s completely natural.
From the culinary perspective, it makes your drink taste richer, creamier, more delicious. And, from the nutritional perspective, it’s packed with value. You’ll be getting healthy fats, rich in Omega 3, as well as plenty of fiber. In addition, you’ll be getting important vitamins like B, C, and E, and essential minerals like selenium, iron, calcium, sodium, phosphorus, and magnesium. The B vitamins will give you an energetic boost, and both vitamins C and E are exceptional antioxidants. Vitamin C helps build and tissue repair while E will protect your cells from the damage caused by free radicals. Meanwhile, the minerals are called “essential” because your body can’t produce them on its own, and you need these minerals to strengthen your immune system to prevent disease and infections.
3. Transform ordinary foods into gourmet meals just by selecting the best ingredients.
This idea is a little subtler because it’s not about adding anything to a meal, but about selecting what goes into a meal. Let’s take the humble hot dog as an example. This American favorite, consumed in billions during celebratory national holidays like Memorial Day and Labor Day has become a classic. So, how do you improve on something people already love? How much more flavor can you add to hot dogs besides ketchup, mustard, sauerkraut? The trick isn’t to focus on toppings but on buying gourmet hot dogs. Without doing anything special, other than making a better selection at your local supermarket, you can make hot dogs even tastier.
4. Get the temperature and timing right.
Every type of meal requires it to be cooked at the right temperature for the right duration. It’s a simple enough concept, but we often get it wrong because it’s so obvious that we miss it. All you have to do to change this habit of guesstimating is to do a quick Google search to figure out the right temperature and cooking times for your favorite meals. That little piece of numerical information will greatly improve how you prepare your meals.
5. Add more of the right blend of spices to any meal.
Even if you’ve prepared a meal perfectly, it doesn’t mean that it tastes good. You need one more step: the right blend of spices. How do you make your meats, your poultry, your roasts, your vegetables, your sauces, your soups, and your salads taste better? Add the right spices. The challenge is figuring out what spices to add, or rather what blend of spices to add. One simple hack is to stop buying spices individually but focus on buying blends, premade packages where the herbs and the spices have been perfectly proportioned for the type of food you’re planning on eating. While you will do well just buying something off the shelf, you’ll do even better if you can get a real chef to prepare customized blends for you.
Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest differences. Try these five easy-to-implement tips to make all your favorite meals even more delightful.
