Fixing Common Cooking Mistakes

1. Bread is too soft to slice: Freeze it and slice it frozen.


2. Bread Stale: Sprinkle it with a small amount of water, put it in foil, and bake in an oven at moderate heat for about ten minutes.


3. Cake Stuck to Pan: Let it sit until it is a little cooler, and then try again. If it's already cold, reheat for a minute or two.


4. Cheese tough or rubbery after cooking: Blend in a blender or food processor at low speed for a minute or two, then cook slowly.


5. Coffee or broth cloudy: add eggshells.


6. Coffee overcooked: Add a pinch of salt


7. Dough is lumpy: Add more liquid and pound the dough thoroughly.


8. Dough won't rise: Put the bowl of dough in a warmer place - in an oven, for instance, with a pilot light (do not turn the oven on). You could also mix a bit more yeast in ¼-cup warm water and knead into dough.


9. Dough won't shape: Let it rest for 15 minutes.


10. Eggs crack when cooking: Put in 1 teaspoonful of salt and a bit of lemon or vinegar into the water to keep whites from oozing out of the shell.


11. Egg whites won't whip: Add a bit of baking soda or salt.


12. Fudge hard: Add a tablespoon of milk and 2-3 tablespoonfuls of corn syrup and beat, then pour. Put in an airtight container for 24 hours.


13. Gelatin stuck in mold: Dip the mold in hot water, but not so the gelatin is touched by the water, for just a few seconds. Put the mold on a plate, turn it upside down and shake.


14. Gravy gray: Add red currant jelly, soy sauce, a bit of sherry, meat extract, or 1 teaspoon instant coffee.


15. Gravy lumpy: Beat it with eggbeater or wire whisk. Strain it.


16. Gravy salty: Make more. Sometimes adding a bit of brown sugar helps. Cook small pieces of potato into the gravy.


17. Ham salty: Soak slices in milk for 15 minutes to a half-hour. Wash off.


18. Icing sugared: Add a bit of vinegar and keep cooking.


19. Lemon hard: Heat it for 5 minutes in boiling water or for 15 seconds in a microwave on HIGH, then try juicing it.


20. Meat burned: Cut off burned parts, cube and sauce the rest. Serve over pasta.


21. Pasta stuck together: Put back in boiling water with a tablespoon or so of oil in it.


22. Pie dough burning on edge: Cover edge with aluminum foil.


23. Popcorn won't pop: Soak corn in water for 5 minutes, dry off and try again. For very recalcitrant corn, freeze overnight and pop while frozen.


24. Rice burned: Get it off the flame, then put a piece of bread on top of it, cover for 5 minutes.


25. Scummy stock: Add leek tops and tomato peels, which absorb the scum.


26. Soup too salty: Slice in potato, simmer until potato turns translucent, then lift potato out.


27. Stew meat tough: if you haven't had the time to let the stew continue cooking under gentle heat, add a few tomatoes or a teaspoon of sugar to tenderize it.


28. Vegetable old: To pep them up, add a pinch or two of sugar and a little salt to the cooking water.


29. Vegetables overcooked: Puree them. Or make a cream soup of them Or put them in an oven-safe dish, cover them with bread crumbs and grated Parmesan cheese, and broil for a couple of minutes.


30. Vegetables too salty: Pour the water out, rinse them off, and return them to the stove in new water. If you are already done, wash in hot water.


31. Whipping cream won't whip: chill everything (bowl, cream, beaters) and try again. If that fails, add an unbeaten egg white or 3-4 drops of lemon juice and whip as hard as you can.

Soul Food Recipes - 3 Embarrassing Cooking Mistakes and How to Fix Them

Soul food recipes can help make your life easier in the kitchen. They help you avoid the trial and error frustrations our great-grandmother's had to go through. She often test dishes for months or years to get a it right. Because of today's recipes we can take advantage of others work and effort and enjoy the tasty results and time-saving benefits.

But regardless of the obvious benefits, cooking mistakes can still happen when attempting to follow a recipe you can't wait to try. I receive many letters from readers confused as to why a certain recipe didn't turn out right. On closer examination it's normally one of the 3mistakes I'll list in this article. In fact, if you make sure to avoid making these 3 mistakes your recipe will have a 75% chance of turning out right.

However, if you make one of these mistakes your dish will have a 75% chance of turning out wrong. Either, bland, tasteless, dry, or generally inedible.

1. Missing the Action Words. Many times people go over the ingredients they'll need for the recipe with a fine tooth comb. But they'll often miss one or more of the action words or verbs in the menu. For example, chop, dice, mince, fold, simmer, etc. They'll rapidly boil instead of simmer or they'll dice instead of mince. They'll often miss a little detail that could change the integrity, taste and overall result of they dish.

2. Not Fully Understanding Cooking Terms. You can trace many mistakes back to this one basic mistake. Not knowing what a specific action term means. If a recipe requires you to broil and you thought it said boil. Or you stir when the recipe said to whip, especially if your making a topping, your result will be less than satisfactory. A good tip is to simply keep a dictionary close by , if in doubt about a term look it up. Better to take 2 minutes to look up a term you're not sure about than waste time making a bad recipe mistake.

3. Not Checking Your Temperature This is a biggie although it may see obvious at first glance. A large percentage of recipe mistakes happen because of temperature problems. One point to keep in mind is realizing many ovens heat differently because of calibration, altitude and other factors. So, after you've made sure you've set the temperature correctly, make sure you check the food often.

As you follow these simple but important solutions you'll start to get more soul food recipe confidence - and experience more mistake-free recipe success.