Healthy Kitchen Habits To Follow

Things to do with and within the kitchen.  Food culture recently seems to be a growing factor influencing our future as it was brought to light for serious consideration since the pandemic paralyzed the entire globe. The change in our food habits and organizing our kitchen though seems to be trivial under the above backdrop, it is important to shape our thoughts and action to lead a long and purposeful life with emotional wellness. Healthy food and kitchen behavior are the need of time. The post is keen to precede the choice of our food, the food-making tools, and serenity in accomplishing a balanced diet and amicable organized kitchen.

The diversified food culture intermingling with globally popular local food and locally altered global food is not a surprising thing due to globalization. With so many people working or going to school from home, the kitchen has become a favorite and most utilized arena in every home. While cooking can be a pleasurable and relaxing pastime and may be claimed as an art, if you’re not careful, you might pick up a few poor kitchen behaviors that will destroy your recipes—or end up in bad health.

To guarantee that you’re getting the most out of your recipes, and even the cleanliness of your kitchen, these are the compiled list of some key poor kitchen behaviors to avoid.

Make sure your pan or skillet is with adequate heat.

If you identify the finest food recipe promising to try on your own, the fundamental role is to cook something from low-medium or medium-low heat and be sure your pan is at the appropriate temperature. Nobody savors undercooked food, especially if you need to cook something for a specific time period. Allow your pan to heat up for a minute or two before beginning your dish.

Low to Medium heat setting while cooking.

It’s a good idea to get the pan hot before you start cooking, but you don’t want it to get too hot. If you’re cooking something at a certain temperature and it begins to burn, the pan is probably too hot unless the recipe calls for you to char something, If you’re flipping frying eggs, appalams, or papads, rice-cakes, cookies, dry fish, sandwiches, this is really critical! Undercooked food is a crime, overcooked food is a sin.

Use soap to clean cast-iron frying pans.

If you have a seasoned, non-stick cast-iron frying pan, you don’t want to fully wipe out the oily, greasy food by using too much soap. While a modest amount of soap is acceptable especially, if you’re trying to extract any harder sticky food particles from browning, the pan should not be saturated in soap all of the time. With some warm water, and a sponge, and a true non-stick pan can be cleaned just fine.

Ways to manage coating in Cast-Iron Pan

• From one server to another, the pan has to be seasoned.

It’s critical to season your cast-iron pan between washes in order to maintain a longer non-stick coating. After washing your pan with a tiny amount of soap or dishwashing liquid, rub a small amount of oil on it and let it dry preferably with vegetable oil. The rusty bits can be scooped out and wiped around the pan surface using a paper towel. or else a clean cotton cloth will do. Thus, seasoning a Cast-Iron pan may lead to a longer lifespan.

• Give settle-down time for meat.

Be careful if you’re dicing into meat right after it’s come off the grill or oven. The meat may turn as hard as a tire spoiling the appetite. That’s because the meat is not allowed to cool down a bit after it was cooked, steaked, grilled, or deep-fried once taken out of the oven. The juices from the whole chunk of meat generally surge up to the surface as it is getting cooked or smoked. Those juices will spill or get rid of the mouth-watering aroma if you cut them open immediately out of the grill/oven. The settle downtime, which lasts around three to five minutes, allows the juices from the meat to soak back and dissolve into the other ingredients, resulting in a delicious recipe. The settling time could be done by loosely covering it with aluminum foil.

• Shredding the cheese.

Many of us are not aware that processed and packed shredded cheese in the fridge is actually covered in cellulose. Cellulose, an anti-caking ingredient is used to keep the cheese from sticking together in the bag and is treated with chemicals for long-lasting use. That’s a killer of your natural recipe. If one tries to make a homemade sandwich, garlic cheese bread, cutlet, or a pizza, shredding your own cheese than the one packed in a supermarket will benefit good health and provide expected taste results without any spoilers.

• Salting the water while cooking pasta

Season your pasta dish with salt while cooking it, because boiling the pasta in salted water will enhance the flavor of even stale pasta.

• Prepare ingredients and keep them ready before cooking starts

If an occasional food for a guest requires frequent stirring, taste check, or whisking a cup of curd, egg, or flour with milk, the last thing you want to do is mess it up or burn it while fetching a shelf or fridge for another ingredient in the spur of the moment. Hence, keeping ingredients ready ahead of time in the right amount, cut, tilled, marinated, tethered, and sequenced, is a healthy cooking behavior, keeping ingredients ready to use before switching on the stove or hob can turn into practice in the art.

• Clean the chicken, meat & fish don’t scrub.

Improper cleaning of meat may lead to foodborne illness if it’s a chunk or left-outs deposit, decay, left unnoticed on your surfaces and utensils. Hence, special care should be taken while dealing with Meat, Chicken & Fish, allocating a distancing place while cleaning them.

• Organized Fridge

A badly managed fridge reflects the family’s ill health. We should have a thorough knowledge of where and what to keep in the fridge next to smelly stuff, and what to cover and leave open to avoid fungi formation.  This helps to keep the food to stay fresh and the family will never be a victim of food poisoning or wastage of food due to rot or perishing.

• Clean utensils and use kitchen cleaning tools intact

Sponges if prolonged for more than the timespan may lead to developing germs, so dishwashing liquid or bars, food wastes staying in thrash for a prolonged period, left open in the air may allow uninvited guests like the cockroach, ants, or lizards. Hence, keep the kitchen and its props tidy and clean. 

• A spoilt recipe is directly proportional to food cooked in a hasty manner

Be aware of the combination of food ingredients. Stop adding ingredients to your kitchen on the spur of the moment because you can end up with something harmful.

Ingredients stocked on your kitchen shelves & refrigerator have to be classified as most essential, necessary, must-have, may have, or not. The measuring criteria have to be identifying the ones that are keepers of our health that form the whole set of the most essential ones, while others may or may not cause more harm than good. It is critical to remove unhealthy kitchen components from your cooking environment in order to live a safe, secure, and healthy life.

What Nutritionists say

Nutritionists suggest that being aware of our food choices scrutinizes our generalized view of food choices. For example, it is a mistake to believe that whole wheat brown bread is healthier than white ones. We are knowledgeable enough that refined flour is ill-natured in case of consistent daily intake like Maida.  We should not get deceived by the very word “organic”, “farm grown’ “brown”, ‘vitamin-enriched, or multivitamin’ on the label is assumed to be healthful. While brown bread is meant to be composed of wheat, they are equivalent to white bread to our bad with additional “brown synthetic coloring”.

Hence, pay close attention to the ingredients on the cover and their proportions in the food, added artificial flavors, and preservatives stocked along with it in case of fresh fruits, tuna, mackerels, yogurts, salty bread spreads, chocolate, peanut butter, pickle, vegetables or meat. No packed or canned food has face value unless we scrutinize and become aware of the truth.

Ponder over the key points stated above:

1. Set up a kitchen for a better diet
2. Cook simple but, healthy foods often with homemade ingredients as much as possible.
3. Stick to a clean, well-organized kitchen with ingredients, sequencing, seasoning, and cleansed utensils
4. Organize Fridge with the vision of what you want to see is what you want to pick.
5. The fridge should not be domesticated supermarket stock. Fill them with more fiber food ingredients, greens, fresh fruits, and coconut milk than bottled beverages, takeout pizza boxes, overflowing ice cream pints, salad dressings, etc.
6. Make sure of having a balanced diet.