Tuesday, November 23, 2010

A Favorite: Gourmet Magazine's Test Kitchen

Last year my good friend Valerie hooked me up with some locally raised chickens from a farmer in Lancaster County. Sadly, these birds languished in my freezer for quite a while since I had just had baby #2 and was not big into cooking. This summer, I came across one of these chickens in the big freezer and a dinner idea was hatched. We would have bbq chicken on the grill. The only problem - these chickens were not cut up. But I am resourceful girl, I thought. I was sure that with the help of the internet, I could carve up a whole chicken into grilling appropriate pieces.

So I typed "How to cut up a whole chicken" into the Google search box and found several helpful sites. (In retrospect, I am glad that I didn't stumble upon anything too graphic.) The most helpful hits were actually YouTube videos of people demonstrating this culinary skill. This chicken experiment really redeemed YouTube in my view.  Up to this point, my primary experience with YouTube was showing Kara random Disney or Sesame Street songs. Aside from entertaining my kids, I suspected that YouTube was of questionable utility to a stay at home mom.

The best site, by far, was from the now defunct (so sad) Gourmet Magazine website. On the video section of the site they have a sub-section called "The Test Kitchen". Embedded here are quick instructional videos on a wide range of kitchen topics: from how to cut up a whole chicken, to how to warm tortillas, to how to crack a coconut, to how to sharpen a knife. I am telling you this has some great stuff.  I have never even heard of corn silk tea, but after seeing the video, I kind of want to give it a try.

So this week, as you are considering making gravy, pie crust or carving up a turkey, check out Gourmet's very informative site.

Here is a link to "How to Get a Moist Turkey."

No comments:

Post a Comment