How To Cheat At Cooking

[Rolando Kumar]

Hii need to max out the cooking skill on one of my sims so he can make a wedding cake. For the life of me I cant seem to figure it out. I've tried looking online at numerous cheat codes but none are working for cooking. Maxed out fitness and logic just fine but not cooking lol. Can I get step by step on how to do this? Thanks for your time.

Oh wow, I love this! I have been meaning to do the same thing with grains. I can never seem to remember the ratios & cooking times for quinoa. Thanks for stopping by my blog, I'm so glad to have found yours!

I love cooking, and in particular, cooking with gadgets. The sous vide (cooking to steady state thermal equilibrium), the pressure cooker (phase diagrams and the ideal gas law at work), or the convection oven (convective heat transfer coefficients), all produce fantastic cooking results, and appeal to my engineering sensibilities and appreciation for the underlying principals at work.

The problem is that with the precision of all these technologies comes the need to know what settings to use, which often has me turning to a laptop or smartphone to look up a recipe online. If you follow this blog, you'd know that pervasive smartphone use is a condition I've been trying to cut back on. (see The AwkEng Fights Off Distractions from the Internet and How the AwkEng Coped with COVID in 2020 (by Ignoring Work Email))

Anyway... the ideal solution for me should be offline, easy to find on a moments notice (no leafing through index cards of recipes for me!), and can't be hand written, because I'm going to want to update and revise this over time.

The fix was pretty simple. I made a cheat sheet with crib notes for my favorite recipes and gadget settings. It's printed out and taped to the inside of one of the kitchen cabinets. It was also a fun reason to use some graphic design skills, which I hadn't had a ton of opportunity to flex at the time I made version 1 of the sheet about a year ago.

Anyway, I updated the sheet to Version 3 this weekend to include a hot cocoa recipe. With chilly nights in Boston now coming in short supply, I don't know how often I'll be making it, but it's a recipe I tried over and over this past winter to get right.

The tricky part was using the right amount of corn starch to thicken the cocoa ever so slightly, which makes it super rich, and then remembering to make a proper slurry at the beginning, to get the cocoa to fully dissolve.

Cooking a risotto takes a fair amount of attention and work, adding stock a ladle at a time with almost constant stirring. The chemical process behind this makes sense to me. Are there any ways to short cut this process though? I'd like to be able to make a risotto with a little less attention. I'm wondering if some hybrid technique of early attention and later just adding liquid and letting it boil (or maybe the reverse) might provide a similar result with less work.

Actually I've found that constant stirring has little to no affect on the final product. You can simply stir rigorously at the last minute and achieve similar results. Don't believe me? Try it for yourself and you'll see.

Another trick is pre-cooking your rice. Just follow a standard risotto recipe but stop cooking the rice about half way through the process (about 10 minutes in or just before aldente). Strain the stock from the rice and pour it out onto a baking sheet to cool quickly. You can refrigerate it for up to a day. To finish it, just pick up where you left off and - presto - you've just cut out half the cooking time.

If you have a pressure cooker, you can also coopt it to do some of the work for you, as seen in this recipe. The trick there as suggested by many similar pressure cooker risotto recipes appears to be to start with high pressure and quickly release steam.

If you Google for "risotto oven baked" you can get a lot of recipes and comments. The general consensus is that it's not quite as creamy as the constantly stirred stove top version, but that most people would never know it wasn't made on the stove top if you don't tell them.

There is one recipe for risotto that doesn't require that much attention: "Risotto alla pilota". Basically you boil the rice in salted water and then stir-fry it with a particular shredded Italian sausage meat (called "pesto", but it's not that pesto). You then add Grana or Parmigiano.

If cheating like this were really possible, people'd be doing it that way. That said: I've tried to shortcut risotto myself. It's possible: make the batches of liquid larger and you'll still get a tasty rice dish. It just won't be as good as it would have been otherwise.

You don't have to stir "almost constantly" and you can add the liquid in larger amounts, I guess, for a less perfect risotto, for less effort. But I still think you should add liquid evenly throughout the process.

If you have a little space in your kitchen and some room in your budget, investing in a few convenience tools can save a LOT of time and hassle in the long run. Here are a few that we use in our family, along with a few that work great for other families.

Even the most passionate cooks get tired of the drudgery, as Megan McArdle eloquently describes. (She also includes many more tips for reducing that drudgery!) My husband is devoted to home cooking to an extent I sometimes find kind of insane, but he still demands Chinese takeout on a regular basis.

Love it! We make stock from the ends of rotisserie chicken, just like any other chicken. It *is* a fair bit of work, and sometimes the carcasses will sit in our freezer for weeks waiting for their chance to get boiled down. ?

The disadvantage to using a rotisserie chicken, or any pre-cooked carcass is that a lot of the gelatin and flavor have already been extracted from the bones. You will certainly still get flavor just not as much and it wont have the same thickening power. If you are going to use it I would try throwing in some raw chicken wings (or feet if you can find them and not grossed out! They are the best for gelatin!).

This meal is certainly an ideal choice for those who want to eat on a budget while still enjoying some gourmet flavor. Quiche is not only high in protein, but adding a vegetable to the recipe makes it a healthy and balanced family meal. You can include broccoli, spinach, roasted potatoes, or whatever other vegetable you like.

This article really helped me to have some tricks for cooking I am a working woman and it becomes very difficult for me to do pre-preparations for my family meals so this has given me some amazing ideas thanks

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Introducing Cheat Sheets, a completely new approach to sheet pan cooking. Oven-safe, non-stick silicone dividers that will streamline your cooking and divide your ingredients, to make one-pan meals and meal prepping a breeze.

Separation also comes in handy for families with different preferences, allowing you to create different portions for those with special dietary requirements or specific tastes - because not everybody likes pineapple on their pizza.

With Cheat Sheets you'll never have to scrub another sheet pan again and you'll save tonnes of wasted paper and foil. Cheat Sheets are naturally non-stick so clean-up is a breeze. They're also dishwasher safe!

1. Soak your beans overnight. There are quick soak methods, but I find the overnight soak to be the easiest. Rinse the beans in a colander, and then put the beans in a pot. Cover with water. The water line should be about two inches above the beans. Let sit out at room temp for about 8 hours. If the water seems clean, you can use it to cook your beans. If not, drain and cover with the same amount of fresh water. I almost always cook my beans in the soaking liquid.

Those are suggestions, but there are endless possibilities! Think about the flavor profile you want to go for. How are you using the beans? For me onion and garlic are almost always included. The rest changes.

3. Add fat. My go to is generally 4-8 ounces of olive oil for a pound of dried beans. Bacon and ham hocks are fantastic source of fat and flavor. Beans simmered with a ham bone are always my favorite. You may still need to add additional fat.

4. Cover with water by a 2-3 inches. Bring to a boil. Turn down to a simmer. Cook until tender. Check periodically for doneness. Add more water if necessary. Add salt, and adjust the seasoning to your liking when the beans are almost done. Some varieties of beans will be done in an hour. Larger varieties will take longer.

5. Add acidity. Hold off on adding acidic foods like lemon or tomatoes until the beans are tender or they will have a hard time cooking through. According to Rancho Gordo sugar should also be added later, but I never put sugar in my beans.

These are my Cheat Arepas. Traditional South American arepas are made with ground maize, however for this recipe you only need two accessible ingredients for the dough and it is so delicious. These arepas are inspired by the Venezuelan's version, Reina Pepiada. The filling consists of shredded chicken, avocado, red onion, chillies, lime, and coriander. They're so fresh and tasty, I think you're going to love them!

I love a traditional arepa, like my ones inspired by Reina Pepiada that use ground maize in the dough! This recipe uses more accessible ingredients including self raising flour and greek yoghurt, making your life easier and enabling you to make these cheat arepas whenever you fancy!

Another great lunch or quick snack recipe I love to make is my onigirazu sushi sandwich which is so delicious, or my caprese flatbreads which similar to these arepas, only require two ingredients for the dough!

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