Play with your Food Episode 1 - Cooking Basics

Hi everybody, I'm Marc Dunham, executive chef for the Atherton Hotel and Rancher's Club on OSU's campus. Today we're
standing outside the Food Pyramid here in Stillwater, Oklahoma. This show is all about making cooking fun,
easy and delicious. We're going to start with the basics
of how to shop for your refrigerator and pantry right here on Play With Your Food. Let's go inside.
[music]
So now we're inside the store.
Most grocery stores are set up in very similar fashion. We're on the outskirts of the store, the produce aisle.
This is in my opinion, where you need to spend a lot of
your time and money and a lot of people have a lot of questions about what to buy. It's real simple,
you buy stuff you like.
You buy stuff you can afford. You buy stuff that looks good. Don't complicate it and try to get worried about whether it's
necessarily organic or not organic, you know what your family needs, you know what your family eats so buy what you like.
I personally like a lot of herbs so
I'm going to grab some merchants.
It's summertime, so even the grocery stores are stocking things that are in season. Peppers are really available, there's
a lot of asparagus, lots of
field green things like that. I love peppers, my family loves them so I'm going to grab a few of those.
And again, doesn't really matter
which type you like.
Just grab them and
we'll figure out what to do with them later.
The asparagus is looking really nice so I'll grab some.It's easy to cook, it's good for your family, looks
like it's a good price.
Don't buy this in the winter time necessarily, it's a little expensive but this is good for now.
Eggplant in the summertime really a good buy. There's lots of stuff we can do with this, we can roast it, cut it
into bite size pieces and puree it. This is a really good value.
Your kids may not like it but give it a try.
Grab a couple of pieces of this
without knocking everything off the shelf. Some of these banana peppers look pretty good too.
And I think I actually need a little bit of ginger to finish the lobster special for tonight at the restaurant. So,
I'll grab a couple of pieces of this
and I think one more thing over here in the potato aisle.
So the last thing I'll pick up are potatoes. We're going to grab Idaho's.
Since we're talking about real simple potato preparations next week, we're going to grab a few of these.
We are in the aisle where we are going to shop for some grains, some rice and some pasta.
Two things I think you always need to have in your cabinet, rice and pasta. They're quick, inexpensive and
really good for you. When you step into these aisles, there are so many different choices. You've got all these
bottled choices, fancy packaging things like that. I generally go for what I shop for at the restaurant,
inexpensive, straightforward packaged rice. I've got white rice here and brown rice.
Today I'm probably going to choose brown rice because I like whole grains. It's good for you. It takes different
cooking, but still it's a little more tasty in the end.
And then
I'm going to grab some white rice because we'll talk about how quickly white rice cooks later.
For pasta it's pretty much the same with rice. The way I shop is a lot of these pastas are going to end up
tasting the same, so why spend a whole lot more money on one with fancier packaging, but marketing works. So what I
normally buy is
one type of like spaghetti or fettuccine so we've got spaghetti here. It's like a pound so you can feed a family
really quickly and then I like to get some sort of shape,
and generally I like to get penne.
Get a box. It cooks up real nice. It's real easy for salads, tomato sauce things like that.
Now we're in the oil aisle and for me at home there's a couple of things that you need in terms of oil, an inexpensive
everyday cooking oil, which I find canola oil is really good for that.
So we'll grab some canola oil. It's high in
monounsaturated fats, which is good for the family. It's inexpensive, it takes heat well so it doesn't scorch.
Then you need something
a little more refined in terms of flavor and things like that for salads and finishing oils and you can see there is a
ton of different olive oils here. Again, this is a matter of if you know a lot about olive oil then you can start
to get picky. If you don't know a lot about olive oil, the best thing to do is to start trying them.
There's tons of marketing schemes in terms of the bottles.
I sometimes just come grab the least expensive one. This time, I think however,
I'm going to
grab Rachel Ray's because she's kind of cute and marketing works. While I'm here I'll pick up some salt. Salt's really
important. I'll grab some sea salt.
This is really important to balance all the flavors in your food so make sure you have a decent salt on hand.

The last thing I always buy when I come to the store outside of ice cream, because it needs to stay frozen, is meat.
Meat needs to stay cold so it's always the last place I visit before I start packing up everything.
Chicken,
lots of brands of chicken. I prefer
this brand of chicken, Smart Chicken, no antibiotics,
no water injected, things like that and you've got your choice about what you want to pick.
A lot of people prefer the chicken breasts with the skin off. If that's what you prefer and are worried about calories,
things like that
I'll show you how to cook that later. I'll grab some just in case, but I also like chicken legs with the skin on. Chicken legs
with the skin on
cook really well. They seal in

all the juices and things by cooking it slow
and you get a little bit of
different meat texture other than the chicken breasts. Another thing I like to buy for my family
that my wife really loves is pork tenderloin. It's easy
it's quick, it cooks really nicely.
You can do a lot of different things with it so I'll grab a package of this too.
Alright guys, now that we've got everything we'll get checked out. We'll head back over to the school of
Hotel and Restaurant Administration on OSU's campus and talk about some cooking equipment.
We're back in the basic food lab at the school of Hotel and Restaurant Administration housed
in the College of Human and Environmental Sciences, and we're back here to talk about equipment. Equipment that
will make your life easier. Just like every carpenter needs the right tools to make the job easier we'll talk
about equipment that will make
cooking easier and a little more fun and not so frustrating. So I pulled out a few things that
every kitchen in my opinion should have.
If you don't have everything on the list,
don't worry about running out and buying everything on the list all at once.
But if you want to that's always fun too. So let's talk about some pots and pans.
You can do a majority of the recipes we are going to do in the next
10 or 12 weeks done with a few of these pans. We've got
what's considered
a sauce pot. A sauce pot is a little different than a stock pot. Stock pot is bigger with handles on the side.
A sauce pot is
a pot with a handle
connected, just one handle. My opinion, you should grab maybe
two varying sizes, so one medium and one small. And then we've got
saute pans. If you read recipes and are confused about
what saute pans are or what a skillet is, they kind of do the same job. So if you can grab
a saute pan or skillet, however you want to call it. This is about an 8 inch
saute pan.
They come in varying sizes: 6", 8", 10", 12". If you've got a couple of different sizes that'll help.
The key to these is make sure that they're not too flimsy and too thin. Part of the problem with some of the less
expensive pans is when they are too thin and made of all aluminum, they get really hot really quickly and really cold
really quickly. That's when you start to burn stuff. Next I think you should probably have and these are really
helpful, is just a good nonstick skillet.
That'll help you with a lot of egg preparations,
which we'll talk about. Some of the small wares that are pretty essential for some of the recipes are some mixing bowls.
Get a couple of varying sizes.
Decent ones are
usually stainless steel. If you don't like stainless steel and you got ceramic or if you've got wood to some degree
that will work and some of the less
heavy gauge stainless steel or the mixes of aluminum and stainless steel work.
For your rice and pasta, make you've got a colander. Doesn't have to be this big for a normal kitchen,
but any kind of colander, it doesn't really matter. Plastic ones, metal ones, any one will work.
As far as
smaller strainer devices these small strainer guys come in real handy for a lot of different things that we'll talk about.
Make sure you got some spoons. I like to carry a wooden spoon
and a metal spoon. Metal spoons for
different jobs with slots so you can pull things out and the water stays in the pan. And a wood spoon so when
we use them on reactive surfaces, which we'll talk about in the future, that you're not picking up some of the metal,
so a wood spoon is a good thing to have.
You also want to have some tongs to grab things if we've got chicken in the pan or vegetables and things like that
these are pretty indispensable. Don't worry about buying super expensive ones because they'll probably bend anyway.
So just normal tongs from the grocery store will probably work. Rolling pin when we start talking about baking.

Got to have a whip.
There's a lot of whips on the market. There's some if you go to some of the higher end
retail stores that have got nice

spongy handles that are non heat reactive so you don't burn your hand. Then take a look at the different size of
the actual tines. The thinner they are, the more balloon-like they are the better they'll for jobs like whisking
whites. These bigger, thicker ones are more for just mixing things together. So if you're looking for real foamy egg whites
get the
big balloon ones with the little thin tines.
Sheet pans are pretty important. A lot of times you see these listed in recipes as cookie sheets, same thing.
This is a half size sheet pan. Two of these together make a full size big one. This is where I think you
should spend some money and get a nice heavy gauge steel. If you buy the flimsy tin ones they'll end up
scorching products no matter what you put them on and you can have disaster. Then we've got some measuring devices:
measuring cups and measuring spoons. It doesn't really matter if their medal or if they're plastic. I've seen collapsable
ones, which are really nice.
Doesn't matter which kind you get just make sure you grab some.
I think that's about it for the cooking equipment. For a complete list
of all the ingredients that we talked about at the grocery store and all the equipment go to the OSU website and make
sure you join us next week when we talk about tasty spud recipes right here on Play With Your Food.