A lot has changed since the pandemic borked the entire world. I changed careers and basically flipped the OFF switch on my entire culinary business, including the Fearless Cooking Club. I left the Fearless Fresh site up in case anyone needed the recipes, but I have not logged into the site in… I can’t remember…
Learning how to roasting a turkey in the oven is actually incredibly easy when you get the hang of it. These tips will help you roast your bird to perfection. Here you’ll learn how long to roast a turkey, and the best way to prepare it. I can’t tell you how many questions I get every year from people who are completely intimidated by the idea of roasting turkeys in their ovens. Most of these people are great cooks, and in fact, have no problem roasting a chicken; but give them a bird over three pounds and apparently their earlier bird-roasting experience goes out the window. Perhaps the problem is that they are presenting their roast turkey to anywhere from five to 20 picky people. Or maybe it’s the fact that your dinner investment suddenly went from $9 to $45.
These days, sheep’s milk cheeses dominate my list of favorite dairy treats. For some, they’re an acquired taste, but for others like me, they’re a staple in our cheese drawer. Maybe it’s the luxurious fatty texture—sheep’s milk is incredibly rich, despite the fact that ewes don’t yield that much milk—or perhaps it’s the characteristic grassiness…
Seriously, if you’ve never had a sour cream coffee cake, here’s why you should check it out. The sour cream in this cake gives it A LOT more flavor. It’s perfect with a cup of coffee or tea, or even as a quick snack in the afternoon. Buttermilk add a little extra tang without being overpowering. And, if you don’t have sour cream, you can easily substitute plain yogurt. I personally love the combo of lemon and vanilla, so this cake has a nice fresh lemon-y flavor with warm notes of vanilla. When you pair sour cream and vanilla with lemon and buttermilk, the flavor of this cake is blasted out of the stratosphere.
Can you cook quinoa in a rice cooker? That’s an EXCELLENT question, and a fair one. The good news is you can cook almost any grain in rice cooker, including quinoa and any other whole grains you might be wanting to try. This trick makes cooking quinoa SUPER easy! Cooking quinoa in rice cooker means you don’t have to worry about the water boiling over and making a huge mess on your stove. It also means perfectly fluffy quinoa every single time, without fail. It’s seriously the easiest way to cook quinoa and add more whole grains to your diet.
Feeling overwhelmed with cooking? Let’s start with just one drawer in your kitchen. Here’s why: An organized drawer doesn’t just look better, it will actually help you feel better. If you do one drawer once a week — spending literally 15 minutes of time — by the time the holidays roll around, you will have a WHOLE NEW ORGANIZED KITCHEN.
Figuring out how to cook spaghetti squash in the microwave is pretty simple, with a few basic bits of advice under your belt. When you know how to cook spaghetti squash in a quick and easy way, you can officially kiss those quick, high-carb meals goodby at the end of a long day. There’s a world of difference in how I feel after a standard pasta meal, and the exact same meal made with spaghetti squash instead.
Can you believe I’ve never done a roundup of the most popular recipes and posts on Fearless Fresh? These are the recipes and tutorials that readers keep coming back to time and time again… like for YEARS in some cases. These recipes have been read, pinned, shared, cooked, and baked, more than any others on the site. There’s a reason for that: because they’re rock solid. I hope you enjoy them.
When it’s the rainy season, I want sunny FRUIT. There’s not a lot growing this time of year, but take heart: frozen fruit it a great option — and I swear! You’re not compromising your health or ideals. Here’s why: Frozen fruit can be fresher and more high quality than the fresh fruit you buy in the produce aisle. Yes, you read that right. Let me explain. Fruit picked for fresh sale is often picked long before it’s ripe, leaving it to ripen off the vine or branch. They do this because under-ripe fruit is easier to transport without damage. This is the case even for organic fruit.
Everyone loved the last list of quick cooking lessons and tips so much, I wanted to post a few more that I know for a fact are useful. Again, these super short cooking tips will change the way you cook if you commit to implementing the concepts. Little changes can have a HUGE impact, especially when they make a shift within the foundation of how you do things.
I want to teach YOU how to make vegetables taste good, so I put my very best veggie-cooking tips into my new free cooking training: Make All Vegetables Delicious. Packed with video lessons, cheat sheets, and cooking charts, this master class will take your veggie-cooking skills to pro-chef levels, and you will actually LOVE the vegetables on your plate.
When it comes to flavor, there are two primary factors: 1) What we have, and 2) what we do with it. We may have a pantry full of goodies, but if we don’t know how to use them — or better yet, how to enhance them — then what good are they?
For a while there I was posting mini cooking lessons on Instagram, but people who read my site here weren’t seeing them in IG. In an effort to keep everything educational in one place, I’ve copied my best quickie cooking lessons over here as well. These are super short, bite-sized cooking tips that will change the way you cook if you put the concept into practice. Never underestimate the power of a simple change when it’s implemented regularly.
I was a young 20-something adult trying to get along in the world, when I got super sick. Like, GAME OVER sick. ? I was in and out of the hospital, bleeding internally. My doctors told me I had an autoimmune disease, but the medications and treatments did nothing to help. I getting sicker and sicker. Then I got fired from my job because I was no longer able to work a full day.
Every time I make this cake, people raise an eyebrow at the addition of oats. They don’t consider them a dessert ingredient outside of oatmeal cookies. That’s too bad, because when tossed with butter and honey, then toasted, oats take on a super crispy, crunchy texture that’s missing from the vast majority of the desserts I’m served. The lesson here? There are two:
The Fearless Cooking Club is a video training program that includes tons of printable cooking charts and a 24-7 cooking support community. New modules with 10-20 videos and cheat sheets are released every single month. The FCC contains everything I wished I had when I wanted to learn to cook, and again wished for when I was determined to up my cooking game. Instead I had to go to culinary school. Now I’ve put all of my knowledge into the FCC, just for you. Basically, I’m going to turn you into a ninja cook. You’ll have me by your side, personally, every step of the way.
We’re in the homestretch of winter, inching into what looks to be a dreary spring time that will hopefully yield a profusion of flowers and produce come summertime. As someone who suffers from seasonal depression (AKA Seasonal Affective Disorder ) this time of year is especially tough for me. ??
This is my favorite pizza, a pizza Margherita. It’s seriously one of the most delicious things in the world. Look closely and you’ll notice there are really only three ingredients besides the crust: tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, and basil. How can three ingredients bring so much flavor?
This shot is from the photo shoot of my cookbook, Melt: the Art of Macaroni and Cheese. Me looking over proofs shot by Matt Armendariz and styled by Adam Pearson. It’s a week I go back to in my head often — I dream of having a studio filled with dishes and fabrics, but more important, I miss the energy of that week: a handful of passionate people working together to cook, style, shoot, and eat. Creating art and then immediately letting it go.
An easy way to cut through all of that fat and salt is… a huge pile of pickled carrots, daikon, and cabbage. Plus a creamy cilantro dressing with lots of green flavor, a fluffy cloud of cilantro greens, and an extra lime wedge to push it over the top and into #flavortown.
Ok, let’s talk salt and acid… two of the most important tools in your cooking arsenal. They bring simple ingredient to life. They transform any dish from “meh” to “WOW.” This dish, a basic red-braised pork from the cookbook Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees, is a perfect example. It’s flavor profile comes primarily from shaoxing rice wine (acid) and two kinds of soy sauce (salt + #umami). And of course, slow cooking — which is a HUGE flavor factor in and of itself.
This simple Persian spiced veggie dip is another great example of flavor in action. Plain yogurt is gussied up with a few herbs and spices, but nothing extravagant. When it comes to layering flavor it pays to be smart about what you’re creating. You need to add only what works well together… without muddying the flavor.
The key is to LEARN TO SALT YOUR FOOD. When your food is salted enough, a taste should elicit a physical reaction when you taste. It should feel like a *zing* that you can feel viscerally — deeply in your palate and throat, and even sometimes in your fingers and toes.
Let me be the one to tell you: there are SO many winter vegetables to enjoy. Broccoli! Sweet potatoes! Brussels sprouts! Carrots! Beets! All sorts of hardy winter greens, like chard and kale!
Cooking is a practice. Like meditation, like baseball, like playing the piano. It’s not something you can pick up and immediately be good at. Sure, some people find it easier than others, but for EVERYONE it is a practice that gets better over time.
I can’t contain how excited I am to announce the launch of my online cooking school. I can’t believe it’s finally here! Today, finally, is the launch of the Fearless Cooking Club. After over a year of building, writing, filming, and cooking, it’s ready!
Panettone is one of the most popular Christmas breads sold all over Italy (and the United States) during the holidays. It originated in Milan around the fifteenth century and has been the subject of much lore. A commonly told story of how this bejeweled bread came to be goes something like this: A young nobleman falls in love with a baker’s daughter named Toni. He disguises himself as a pastry chef ’s apprentice and creates the tall, fruit-studded bread to present to Toni, calling it “Pan de Toni.” The bread is a success in the bakery, and the father blesses the marriage. This easy panettone bread is a quick alternative to the 2-day prep time of traditional panettone recipes.
I recently got a request from one of my readers, Mackenzie. She asked: “I was wondering if you could do a Christmas themed email? Like, baking tips so we can bake cookies for Good Ol’ St. Nicholas. One of the biggest problems I have while baking Christmas sugar cookies (or really any cookies) is trying to keep them from falling into a big crumbly mess after I bake them. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong! Other than that, maybe some tricks that you use when baking.” Ask and you shall receive, my dear. Here are some of my best Christmas cookie tips and tricks.
A few years ago I sat down to eat dinner with a friend of mine, a stew she’d spent all day making. She took the first bite. The look on her face was priceless. It was a combination of shock, confusion, and “what the hell just happened??” She coughed hard, so I took a bite to see what the commotion was all about. Within half a second my eyes started to water and I, too, began to cough.
Not long ago, I worked with a student who was CRAZY about macaroni and cheese. Like, this woman said she could happily eat nothing but mac and cheese for the rest of her life. (Honestly, I love it that much, too!) The problem was, she could not make the dish to save her life. Every time she tried she either ended up with a burnt clump or a lumpy, separated mess. She was super bummed that she could not seem to make her favorite dish.
In our one earlier lesson, she was very timid. She never made a move without me asking her to do something and often apologized for the way she did things. This is super common in cooking classes when a student is a total beginner, but I wondered how she hadn’t gotten a little more comfortable in the kitchen from working with her cookbook. As we sat over tea, I asked: “How often do you cook from these gorgeous cookbooks?” She blushed and looked at the floor, then took a nervous sip of tea. “I like the pictures,” she said, “but the recipes don’t make any sense to me.”
Last week I was working with a student and I asked her to get me half a cup of milk. What she brought me was 1 pint of milk — 2 cups worth. I looked at her and smiled, because I thought she was joking, but her earnest look wiped the smile from my face. What she’d brought me was half of a 2-pint measuring cup, so yes, technically it was half a cup… the cup was just really big. So I sent her off again and asked her to bring me back 1/4 of the milk she had brought me.
Let’s get real… salad is a big old fail. Some of us have learned to love it, and some of us even legitimately adore it, but reality is that lots of people hate salad and force themselves to eat it to stay healthy. It’s totally ok to admit it.
My grandmother was an incredible cook and baker. Everyone in the family used to beg for her recipes. Sadly, she never considered herself talented in the kitchen; in fact, she believed the opposite.
When turkeys defy the space-time continuum. And what did we learn from this little situation?
There is a certain confidence that comes with cooking that happens. Just like an artist, the perfect stroke of a brush is like cutting, seasoning, boiling, and preparing. The smell is just the beginning of the bliss that comes with completing, serving, and finally eating your delicious meal. With any accomplishment, our confidence increases, and we feel good. Cooking can bring out the badass in us all. There are five ways that cooking can increase your confidence.
Have you ever found a recipe that you wanted to make but the servings were for a super large amount? A couple weeks back I found a great cookie recipe, but it made 115 cookies. Of course I didn’t even think to split the recipe in half, instead I tried to make the whole batch in my 5-quart KitchenAid mixer. Let’s just say it was NOT the best way to make cookies. I needed to use 2 of my largest stainless steel bowls to make it work, and I had dough flying all over the kitchen. What a nightmare!
First and foremost, roasted vegetables are amazing because they’re delicious. When cooked properly, the sweetness of the veggies shine through (yes, vegetables can be sweet), and the flavor is heightened by an unbelievable crisp on the outside. It’s the perfect union of texture and flavor. Think savory on the outside, sweet on the inside.
The beauty of roasted vegetables is that they’re a great way to get an extra serving of veggies into your day, and they’re also handy for using up vegetables when you have too many hiding in your fridge. When you’ve overdone it at the grocery store or farmer’s market (hooray summer!) and have too many vegetables on hand, making a big batch of roasted vegetables is a phenomenal option and prevents food waste/saves money.
Ahhh, how to cook a perfect steak. While steak is easily one of the most popular meals in the country, the thought of dishing up steak for dinner causes a panic for many home cooks. It doesn’t have to be that way. With the right skills and just a bit of practice, you can dish up perfect, restaurant-worthy steaks at home in less than 30 minutes.
We all know how important it is to eat salads, and dinner salads are fast, healthy way to get dinner on the table. Unfortunately, too many people think of salad as that boring green stuff that restaurants sneak in before you get your steak and fries. I’m going to try to change the “salad stigma” and show you that, by following four simple tricks, you can create awesome, delicious salads you’ll happily eat, even as a main meal.
When I was growing up, my dad had this weird theory about food. It goes something like this: All food is “good” because otherwise, it wouldn’t be considered food. Someone somewhere must have tasted it and had a favorable reaction to feel like eating it again, and then feed it to his or her family.
My dad said he learned it from a philosophy professor when he was an undergrad at UC Berkeley, but I suspect he just made it up to get me to eat “All The Things” when I was a kid. The thing is, though, it kind of makes sense. Your sense of taste is part biology, part preference, and part experience.
Learning how to make perfect eggs is something we get asked about A LOT. If you’re intimidated by cooking eggs, you’re not alone. While they are a breakfast favorite all around the world, many home cooks cringe at the idea of poaching or scrambling eggs themselves. I’m going to change that. With good quality eggs, a few basic utensils, and solid technique, I’m positive even the noobiest cooking noobs can start dishing up delicious eggs from their kitchen.
Here’s a post by Fearless Fresh writer Robin Donovan on a topic I’m asked about ALL THE TIME: “How do I make sure that every part of my dinner is done at the same time, so nothing gets cold while waiting around?” If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me this question, I’d be cruising around in a new Tesla. ? Here’s Robin’s advice on how to manage this sticky-but-common problem. Enjoy! And if you have any questions, be sure to hop into the Cooking Support group on Facebook, where you can get your cooking questions answered on the fly.
Want to learn how to cut onions without crying? We’ve all been there; you bust out an onion to add some flavor to your favorite dish, but the minute you slice into that little monster, you burst into tears like the first time you watched Bambi’s mom die. ? Now, you’ve probably heard a bunch of crazy tips to help put an end to the sob story of cutting onions. To be honest, most of them don’t work. Never fear! I’m going to share 5 real tips that’ll keep the waterworks under control next time you slice an onion.
Not sure what to do with most common spices? When combined correctly, spices make for some incredible flavors. But how do you mix and match spices in your own cooking? More importantly, how do you know which common spices goes with what foods? We’ve all been there: you need to make dinner, preferably quickly, and another plain chicken breast sounds depressing. You really want to make that chicken breast the best thing you’ve ever eaten but you don’t know where to start. If you’re looking to elevate your cooking, taking an inventory of your current spice cabinet is an excellent (and free!) place to start.
Baking scones at home is a great way to experience the pastry in all its glory; fresh from the oven, airy but dense at the same time, hints of flavor and mix-ins catered to your liking. Making them from scratch also allows you to flirt with the different variations of the scone process itself. If you’re a biscuit person, you might make your scones more flakey and round. If you’re a muffin person, maybe you make them with powdered sugar or coat your scone in a sweet glaze. As with everything, making scones from scratch puts you in the driver’s seat of your pastry experience.
Although we might think that perfect pancakes from scratch are super easy to make, they can still be a challenge. In fact, some folks are seriously pancake-averse because they find them so difficult to make. But now’s your change to change that! Perfect your pancake A-game with these tips for making a stack of golden, fluffy, restaurant-quality pancakes.
Cooking knives are possibly the most important thing you need to know in the kitchen. Why??? Because you need to cut things before cooking them, and the better you get at chopping, the faster cooking will go. Also, there’s the safety thing. The better you are with cooking knives, the less likely you are to cut yourself. ?? So practice as much as you can! First off, you only need three things to be a SUPER NINJA with cooking knives.
Sous vide safety question: when can it be safe to eat meat cooked at lower temperatures than the FDA recommends, such as in sous vide cooking? This was a question I stumbled upon on Facebook, and I thought it might be fun to post my response here. The initial conversation started when someone was cooking a roast at 129°F for 72 hours and someone else balked about sous vide safety, saying it was dangerous. Is it safe to eat a sous vide cooked roast that sat at 129°F (54°C) for three days? It depends on a bunch of factors. You have to make the choice for yourself, and in order to do that, you need to consider all the angles.
Moist chicken breast. It’s the little black dress (LBD) of the dinner table. Okay, maybe it’s not quite as sexy, but let’s face it, it’s easy, able to be dressed up or down depending on the occasion, and goes with everything else in your pantry. But just like your favorite LBD, you have to find the right cut, and know how to treat it, to really rock it. I’m the first to fess up to having served my fair share of cardboard-y chicken breasts in my day, but trust me, you’ll feel way better about yourself when you up your chicken game. There is hope for you and your chicken dinner yet. Here are my three favorite methods for ensuring that every bite of chicken that lands on your dinner table is moist and delicious—and sexy enough for a night out even if you’re planning to chow it on the sofa while bingeing on the latest season of your favorite reality TV show.
