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Aug. 13, 2007 Most Americans don't know how to cook and accordingly, that's why many of them are overweight. Instead of preparing a delicious home made meal, they stop off after work and pick up a barrel of greasy fried chicken, a box of oily meat-laden pizza, or a dried out hamburger covered in a whorish sauce and to go along with it a gargantuan order of French Fries and a fattening milk shake. When properly prepared and eaten in moderation, there's nothing wrong with these foods, but a constant diet of these high calorie items is postitively life threatening as proven by Morgan Spurlock in his documentary, Supersize Me, when his health took a tail spin after eating at Mcdonalds for thirty straight days. Food is necessary for life. Because Americans don't eat a healthy diet, it proves they really don't know how to live. With this article I begin a periodic series demonstrating how to cook basic meals that taste good and are a welcome change from the fast food hell American has become. At the age of 45 I'm really, really tired of even looking at fried chicken and pizza and not a single fast food chain knows how to correctly make a hamburger. The basic principles I'll demonstrate will hopefully encourage people to cook at home and avoid the dangerous obesity traps that've suckered them in since they were children. The first technique I'll describe is etouffee`--a fancy French term for smothered. Steak etouffee` is a must-know dish for any beginning cook. Take cheap round steaks (about two pounds worth). Pound them with a meat mallet and season with salt and pepper. Heat up a pan with a little oil and when bubbly sear each steak on both sides. Don't crowd the pan, you can do them one at a time. When the steak is brown on both sides, put it on a platter. After all the steaks are done and resting on the platter, put three or four chopped onions in the pan, sprinkle them with salt, and let them sizzle a while. Then dump the platter of steaks, juice and all, in the pan with the onions. Stir it up, maybe add just a little bit of water, cover, and turn the heat down to medium low. Simmer for two hours. It makes a wonderful beefy gravy I'd like to carry around in a plastic bag in my pocket. You can do the same thing with firm-bodied fillets of fish such as grouper, and maybe your family will give you a standing ovation like mine did. When using fish or seafood the etouffee` technique is different from the above recipe. Chop two onions and a bell pepper and sautee them until they're soft in a couple of tablespoons of cooking oil. Meanwhile, dredge the pieces of fish in flour, salt, and pepper. Remove the vegetables to a platter and pan fry the fish in the same oil for about four minutes a side or until the fish flakes. Then add the seasoning vegetables back to the pan and stir it up. It's ready to eat, the fresh fish flavor permeated with the sweet aroma of onions and peppers. You can even smother vegetables. Slice potatoes thin as for home fries and place them in a pan with melted butter. Season with salt and pepper and cover with a chopped onion. Put a lid on the pan. After ten minutes take the lid off and turn the potatoes over making sure the brown residue is scapred off and mixed in. Leave the lid off and continue cooking until the spuds are done. Makes a welcome change from french fries drenched in ketchup. ------------ About the author Mark Gelbart: My book, Talk Radio, is a black comedy about a radio talk show host who gets kidnapped and psychologically tortured by a loser. http://www.authorsden.com/marksgelbart Email: agelbart@aol.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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