Kitchen Reference

Chicken is the one thing in my fridge I never gamble on. We cook it two or three times a week, it is cheap enough to replace, and the illness it can hand you if you get it wrong is genuinely miserable. So when a pack has been sitting a day longer than I meant, I do run through the checks: the smell, the colour, the feel. What I want to be honest about here, and what most articles gloss over, is what those checks can and cannot tell you. They catch chicken that has spoiled. They do not catch chicken that is dangerous. Those are two different things, and knowing the difference is what keeps you well. ...

Pasta is the thing I cook most when the evening has run away from me, and I almost always make too much. A bag of penne looks like nothing dry and turns into a mountain once it hits the water, so there is nearly always a tub of leftovers heading for the fridge. The good news is that cooked pasta stores beautifully and reheats into some of the best quick lunches going. The catch is that pasta is a starchy food, and starchy foods play by a stricter set of rules than most people realise. If you have read my piece on rice, some of this will sound familiar, because it is the same story with a different shape. ...

We go through a lot of milk, and every so often the maths goes wrong: a big four-pinter comes into the house on a Friday, the week changes shape, and by Tuesday there is more milk left than days to drink it. For years my answer was to pour the tail end down the sink and feel faintly guilty about it. Then I started freezing it, and the guilt went away. Milk freezes far better than most people think, and once you know the small handful of rules it becomes one of the easiest ways to stop good food going to waste. Here is everything I have learned about doing it properly. ...

A roast chicken on a Sunday feeds my household twice if I plan it, and the second meal is usually the better one: cold chicken in sandwiches, a quick curry, a pile of it stirred through pasta. So the question of how long cooked chicken really keeps is not academic in my kitchen, it decides what Monday and Tuesday look like. Over the years I have settled into a way of handling it that is safe without being wasteful, and most of it comes down to getting a couple of numbers straight and building two or three habits that then run on their own. ...

Cooked rice is the one leftover in my kitchen that I treat with genuine respect, and it took me a while to understand why. For years I did what most people do: cooked a big pan, ate what we needed, and left the rest sitting in the pan on the hob until it was cold enough to bother putting away, which on a busy evening could be two or three hours. Nobody ever got ill, so I assumed it was fine. It was not fine. It was luck, and once I understood the actual mechanism I changed the way I handle rice completely. The rules are simple, they are not fussy, and they matter more than for almost any other leftover. ...

Most produce that gets thrown away in my house was not eaten too slowly. It was stored wrong on day one: bananas ripening everything in the bowl around them, potatoes sprouting next to the onions, herbs turning to green slime in the bag they came in. Storage is not complicated, but it is specific, and the supermarket gives you no clues because everything sits out on the same ambient shelf regardless of where it belongs at home. Here is the sorting logic, and the short list of rules that do most of the work. ...

A cup of flour is not a fixed amount of flour. I learned this the hard way, years ago, making a birthday cake that came out like a paving slab because the American recipe meant one thing by “a cup” and my scooping technique meant another. I cook for a family of five, which means I cook a lot, and I have lost patience with recipes that swap between cups, ounces, grams and millilitres as if they were interchangeable. They are not. This page is the reference I wish I had kept by the hob for the last fifteen years: honest about which conversions are exact, which are approximate, and why a cheap kitchen scale will do more for your baking than any of the tables below. ...

I cook three meals a day for five people, and the shops are a twenty minute round trip I rarely have time for. That means I have run out of something mid-recipe more times than I can count, usually with a bowl half mixed and a child asking when dinner is. Over the years I have learned which substitutions genuinely work, which ones are merely acceptable, and which ones will quietly ruin whatever you are making. This is the honest version of that list. Where a swap has a standard, well established ratio I have given it. Where it is approximate, I say so, because pretending precision where there is none is how bakes get wrecked. ...

Every method for judging meat without a thermometer is a proxy. Poking it and comparing to the ball of your thumb, timing per 500 g, cutting it open to look: all of them are guesses about one number, the temperature in the middle. A probe thermometer measures that number directly, costs about the same as one wasted rib joint, and turns the most stressful part of cooking into reading a display. Here are the temperatures worth knowing, and the two effects (resting and carryover) that trip people up even with a thermometer in hand. ...

Everyone ruins dinner sometimes. The lid comes off the chilli flakes mid-shake, the stock cube turns out to be double strength, a child “helps” with the sugar. What separates a bad evening from a served dinner is knowing which fixes actually work, and the honest answer is that there are only two real mechanisms: dilution and balance. Everything below is one of those two, plus a clear-eyed list of what cannot be undone. ...