When you want a dish to have quintessential garlic flavor that permeates each bite, mince it. You can mince with a knife, or a garlic press.
Either way, you need to free the individual cloves. To do that, press down on the head with the heel of your palm. Apply firm, even pressure so the cloves don't fly all over the place.
To peel an individual clove, cut of the hard stem end where the clove attached to the bulb. Either stop the cut just short of the skin on the other side and peel the skin around to remove it, or make the cut all the way through and squeeze out the clove. The older the clove, the easier the skin releases.
You can also peel it by setting the side of your knife blade on the clove and pressing down until you feel the skin release, though not hard enough to pulverize it, or the skin will get mixed in with the garlic.
To mince with a knife, smash the peeled clove with the side of the knife. Then just run your knife back and forth across the smashed clove, chopping as you go until it's as fine as you like.
If you don't want individual little pieces of garlic and have a press, just put the whole peeled clove (or cloves, if you can fit them) in the press and squeeze. Use your knife to trim away any clinging garlic.
A crookneck squash is a yellow summer squash with a distinctive curved neck and bumpy skin.
It's thought that all yellow squash were originally crookneck; only through breeding have we ended up with the straight-necked, smooth-skinned yellow summer squash we more often see today.
Like all summer squashes, crooknecks are picked while immature and have an edible skin. If you happen to get an older crookneck with a particularly tough exterior, you might want to cut some of it away with a vegetable peeler. The thicker rind of the crookneck and the slightly sweet flesh hold up beautifully when baked, roasted or grilled.
Recipe: Grilled Shrimp And Squash Kebabs (Cookthink)
Recipe: Chicken In Parchment With Mushrooms, Red Onion And Squash (Cookthink)
(Image courtesy of Wikipedia.)
What's the difference between yellow squash and zucchini?
What's the difference between yellow squash and zucchini?
What's the difference between yellow squash and zucchini. As far as cooking goes, not much -- just their skin color. We substitute one for the other all the time.
Both are so-called summer squashes that are picked while still immature, so that their thin skins and soft seeds are still edible. A yellow squash is of course yellow, with either a straight body and smooth rind or a crookneck and bumpy skin (which looks odd but is perfectly fine to eat).
Recipe: Zucchini Soup With Lime (Cookthink)
Recipe: Grilled Shrimp And Squash Kebabs (Cookthink)
Reference: Cucumber vs. zucchini (Cookthink)
what you should know
Like its summery sibling zucchini, yellow squash is picked immature so that its soft seeds and thin rind are still perfectly edible. (So-called winter squash -- butternut, acorn and so on -- mature fully before harvest.)
flash in the pan Because yellow squash has such a high water content, it's best suited to cooking quickly on the grill or in sautés and stir fries. At only 36 calories per cup, yellow squash packs a light, healthy punch of dietary fiber and Vitamins A and C.
sliced and diced When prepping yellow squash, we tend to go with large cubes for roasting, long slices for salads and dipping, and rounds for pizzas and frittatas.
well, i'm a crookneck Yellow crookneck squash has a thicker -- but still edible -- rind that holds up well in gratins and kebabs on the grill. If you happen to get an older crookneck whose rind is too tough, whittle it down with a vegetable peeler.
what you need
To dish up a squash gratin, try this stoneware baking dish from Le Creuset or several of these cute single-serving versions, also from Le Creuset.
As always, we're mad about our vegetable peelers. (Last year, Claire pitted the straight peeler vs. the Y peeler and found the Y lacking.)
If you've developed a passionate love for squash, then you have something in common with Amy Goldman, author of The Compleat Squash: A Passionate Grower's Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes, and Gourds.
what you do
A quick grill brings out all the flavor of a fresh yellow squash in just a few minutes.
Yellow squash gratin with basil is just one step more complicated, and still simply delicious.
The delicate, moist texture of squash works well in a papillote, like this one with chicken, red onion and yellow squash.
We love to serve yellow squash and Italian sausage against the doughy backdrop of flat pappardelle noodles.
Featured recipe: If you're craving something crispy and fried, try these summer squash fritters with herbs. The recipe comes from Food 4 The Week, and is the featured recipe for this week's Root Source Challenge.
Tongs are the most useful tool in the kitchen.
Having a good pair of tongs is like having a heatproof robotic arm in the kitchen. Consider a partial list of things you can do with a pair of tongs: stir something in a sizzling pan; flip something in a sizzling pan; move something around in a sizzling pan; spear something in a sizzling pan; push something in a sizzling pan to check for doneness; hold something above a sizzling pan to taste it; take something out of a sizzling pan. And that's just around a sizzling pan. Standing around a grill or reaching inside an oven, tongs are critical.
You can spend a small fortune on specialty tongs, but you don't have to. OXO's Good Grips stainless steel tongs are inexpensive and probably as special as you’ll ever need.
So here's our public service announcement - buy tongs now.
Lemon zest adds a bright spark to a dish. There are lots of tools for zesting a lemon -- zester, a knife -- but it's hard to go wrong with a fine grater (such as the popular Microplane version), which makes a beautiful light zest that melds into a dish and gives great flavor.
To zest with the Microplane, just rub the lemon in one direction against the little blades. Turn the lemon as you go so you remove only the yellow part -- the zest. You don't want the white pith just beneath -- it's bitter.
If you use a traditional zester, which makes long, thin strands of zest, or a knife, be sure to finely chop the strands with a knife. The finer shrivels of zest will permeate the dish better than the strands.
To get the most flavor out of lemon zest, add it toward the end of cooking.
Recipe: Agnolotti With Eggplant, Tomatoes And Garlic (Cookthink)
Recipe: Broccoli With Fettuccine, Lemon Zest And Parmesan (Cookthink)
Recipe: Cremini Mushroom Risotto With Lemon Zest (Cookthink)
Reference: What is a Meyer lemon? (Cookthink)
Chopping is probably the most common way to prep an onion. Chopped onions show up in anything that needs the basic, earthy pungent flavor that onions give. Chop them larger for longer-cooking dishes like stews and rustic soups, and smaller (call it a dice if you like) for anything from salsas to sauces to ragouts.
To start, cut the onion in half through the root. The root itself will help keep the onion together for chopping
Rotate the onion 90 degrees and cut off the papery end (not the root end). This will make the skin easy to peel away and discard.
Peel back the onion's papery skin. It's often easiest to peel away the first layer of the onion along with the skin.
Make a series of diagonal cuts (roughly 45 degrees) into the side of the onion. Keep more space between the slices for a large chop. Make the cuts closer together for a small chop or a dice.
Now make a series of horizontal cuts to finish shaping the chop or dice.
Finally, rotate the onion again and slice crosswise against the checkerboard pattern you made in the onion. The chopped pieces will fall away from the onion.
