I learned about Cooking Bacon in the Oven in culinary school.

Going to culinary school certainly introduced me to fancy kitchen techniques like making French pastries and hollandaise sauce.

But it also introduced me to something so simple, so basic, so obvious, that I was left scratching my head as to why I hadn’t thought of it before: how to cook bacon in an oven. Truthfully, it might have been the most useful thing I learned!

This bacon in oven page has been visited over 908,000 times and made in households across the world. Let’s find out why.

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The BEST Veggie Lasagna Recipe

We’ve all had bad banquet food. In my experience, it involves a choice of overcooked chicken or bad vegetable lasagna. The lasagna is mushy and overcooked. And unlike it’s meatier cousins like Greek lasagna, it’s usually runny and watery.

One of the few banquets I’ve been to that has had great food? My culinary school graduation, of course. My instructors knew what they were doing when it came to banquets. Not only did they offer up lamb lollipops and the best vegetarian quiche, but they knew that vegetable lasagna can be great if it’s made well.

And it turns out that making it well involves a secret ingredient. An ordinary item you can find at any grocery store, but it has a magical purpose when it comes to veggie lasagna.

Read on to find out what this item is, and why it guarantees that you’ll soon be enjoying the most flavorful, cheesiest, well cooked, NOT WATERY vegetable lasagna you’ve ever had.

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I’m back with the final installment of “What I Learned In Culinary School” (check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them!). Since I’ve already had a long day in the kitchen doing recipe testing, I’ll just go ahead and jump right into it. While this is the last installment of this list, I will be back in the future with some specific things I learned (ones that pertain more to a certain recipe or technique rather than general kitchen tips).

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I always wanted to start a blog in culinary school, but I just never got around to it. It would have been a natural fit, with a TON of fresh content each day, so I’m kicking myself that I didn’t do it. But, after waking up at 4:30 am and going through a long, grueling day at school, by the time I got home in the late afternoon, I was beat to hell. If I was feeling extra motivated, I would drag myself to the gym to try to counteract the ten million calories of food I was forced to taste each day. Other days, I would just take a nap, wait for my husband to get home, make dinner, and then go to bed and start it all over again. Needless to say, the culinary school blog just didn’t happen.

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Not too long ago, I was an avid home cook – cooking and baking as much as I could in the evenings and on weekends. Then I decided that my job in advertising wasn’t for me, so I quit and went to culinary school! I thought what I learned in culinary school would change everything about the way I cook at home – but it didn’t. I don’t cook gourmet five-course meals every night, that’s for sure. While it didn’t change my style of cooking, it did change how I cook at home, making me faster and more efficient than I had been before. Here are the top 5 things I learned in culinary school, and how I’ve transferred that knowledge to my home kitchen.

Work the mise en place
Any list of this nature would be remiss to not mention mise en place, a French phrase that means “put in place.” Do I have every single element of a dish chopped before I even start heating up my pans? Definitely not. But if I’m working from a recipe, I make sure to thoroughly read the recipe (also part of the mise en place!), and at least devote a portion of my tiny amount of counter space to staging most of the ingredients. That way, I’m not opening the fridge 8 different times or walking back and forth to the pantry cupboard. This one step makes me more efficient in the kitchen, and it subtracts a few minutes from my meal preparation time and makes the whole process a little bit more enjoyable.

Start with HOT pans
Instead of putting a cold pan on the stove, then adding your oil, turning on the heat, and waiting for it to get warm, put an empty pan on the stove. Let it sit over the heat while you prep your ingredients. When you’re ready to start cooking, your pan will be waiting for you, nice and hot. And that hot pan will give you a darker sear on anything you are making. And that means quicker cooking and more flavor!

Unless you’re baking, don’t bother to measure anything
This is something that the chef instructors would stress again and again when they saw students pull out measuring cups in the kitchen. Sure, if you’re making pastries or mixing up a comically large bowl of cornbread batter, you absolutely need to measure your ingredients. But on the savory side of things, you really don’t. If you’re working from a soup recipe that calls for 2 tablespoons of tomato paste, just add what you think looks like 2 tablespoons. Taste your dish, and if it needs more tomato, add more. Learning how to “eyeball” things will make you a stronger and faster cook. It also means less dishes to do after dinner!

Do your prep work in stages
For example, say you’re making apple turnovers, and you need to peel, core and slice 4 apples. Instead of taking 1 apple, peeling it, coring it, slicing it, and then grabbing another apple and repeating the process, work in stages. Peel all 4 apples. Then core all 4 apples. Then slice all 4 apples. It’s a small adjustment, but it adds up to a huge change in productivity. You’ll be able to tackle any kitchen task quicker if you keep this strategy in mind.

Season your food!
This is something you learn the first day of school, and never stop using. If you’ve ever wondered why restaurant food tastes so good, it’s probably the salt. But here’s the thing, seasoning doesn’t just include salt. Acidic elements like citrus and vinegar are just as important (and healthier!). I always have lemons and limes, as well as a wide variety of vinegar on hand for seasoning.The acids work in many ways – cutting the richness of a creamy dish, balancing the sweetness of a sugary dessert, adding a bright flavor to a meal that ends up flat-tasting, and making just a little bit of salt go further. Just before you serve your dish, taste it and see what you think. If it seems a little bland, try adding a squeeze of lemon juice, then taste it again to see if the flavor has improved.

For more tips and tricks from what I learned in culinary school, be sure to check out my culinary school archive.

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This Homemade Tartar Sauce Recipe is Perfect For Fish Fries!

Friday fish fries are common at Midwest Catholic churches and VFW halls during Lent. And even though my family isn’t Catholic, we love attending fish fries!

The fish is almost always delicious, and the people watching can’t be beat. The only thing I don’t love about the tradition is the tartar sauce.

A few churches will make homemade sauce, but most of them serve pre-packaged tartar sauce. I got the crazy idea to make my own tartar sauce and take it with me to fish fries this year, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

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Before I was allowed to apply for admission to my culinary school, I had to pass a basic skills class. I’m sure it was designed to separate the serious from the lackadaisical; the ones truly interested in cooking vs. those who just wanted to be a TV celebrity chef.

One of the very first things we had to demonstrate we could make was a basic tomato sauce. And you know what? This “basic” sauce was better than any pre-made sauce I’d ever eaten out of a jar.

Today, I’m sharing with you the notes I took down as my chef instructor taught us to make this sauce. Serve over traditional pasta with black bean meatballs, or butternut squash noodles. Or, use as a sauce for a chicken pizza or a crostini pizza bar.

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In my “What I Learned in Culinary School” series, I’ll be sharing tips and tricks that I learned from two years of working with some of the country’s best chefs.

This will include big things like learning to work efficiently, and small things like how to cook bacon perfectly.

All of them will be applicable to your home kitchen, making you a faster, better, and more confident cook.

It’s just a guess, but I’m betting that vegetable consumption across the U.S. is at an all-time high each January. But with eating lots of veggies, comes lots of veggie scraps.

I always strive to reduce food waste in my kitchen, so instead of throwing those scraps in the garbage, I use them to make delicious homemade vegetable stock.

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In my “What I Learned in Culinary School” series, I’ll be sharing tips and tricks that I learned from two years of working with some of the country’s best chefs. This will include big things like learning to work efficiently, and small things like how to cook bacon perfectly. All of them will be applicable to your home kitchen, making you a faster, better, and more confident cook.

There’s an infinite number of ways to make mashed potatoes, and that’s one thing I love about them. You can make them really smooth or leave them lumpy. You can mash them with a ricer, masher or mixer.

You can stir in melted butter, room temperature butter, milk, cream, sour cream, buttermilk or something else (hello, blue cheese mashed potatoes).

But I think there’s one thing we can all agree on: a bland scoop of mashed potatoes is the worst scoop of mashed potatoes.

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In my “What I Learned in Culinary School” series, I’ll be sharing tips and tricks that I learned from two years of working with some of the country’s best chefs. This will include big things like learning to work efficiently, and small things like how to cook bacon perfectly. All of them will be applicable to your home kitchen, making you a faster, better, and more confident cook.

I have a love-hate relationship with red onions. My grocery store sells the most amazing chicken salad sandwiches. They’re made with just a few simple ingredients – chicken, celery, dried cherries, red onions and mayonnaise.

Thinking that since I knew all the ingredients, I could save a ton of money by making them myself at home, I gave it a try. And another. And a third.

The problem each time? The harsh flavor of the red onion overpowered everything else in the sandwich, even as I used it in smaller and smaller amounts in each batch.

The whole thing just tasted like, well, an onion salad sandwich. And it left my breath in a sad state of affairs for hours afterward.

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