10 Tips: Preparing Impressive Dinners

Posted by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Feb 10, 2008 in Personal | 15 comments

Cooking can be easy and fun. Here are a few simple tips that might help you become more relaxed and help you impress people with less effort. If you have a few tips of your own please share them with me!

1: Butter Up
Fat, grease, cream and olive oil taste great and everything tastes better if you add more of it. Real cooks try to make good tasting food without too much fat but that is actually hard. If you cook something, add lots of butter or olive oil.

2: Burn Baby Burn
When you first start to cook you try not to burn anything. It is the nightmare of anyone starting to cook. The trick to making food taste good is to actually burn some of it! That is one of the reasons that meat in restaurants often tastes better: because they have burnt lots of meat before, didn’t really clean the grill and you can taste that.

3: Forget Vegetables
I know, you want to cook great tasting food and it should be healthy too. But forget about the vegetables if you want to impress people! Only add a little bit to each plate. It is more important that the plate looks good than anything else!

4: Use a lot of ingredients
The more ingredients you use the more impressive it all looks. Example: If you serve vegetables (not too much!) don’t just serve one kind. Use three kinds of vegetables, stir fry them and add some mushrooms and fresh herbs. If you serve that people won’t recognize it right away and the different tastes together impress more than one kind of vegetable done right. (oh, and don’t forget, Too much is Too much! Thanks Roy for pointing that out!)

5: Enough is Enough
Your dinner needs certain ammounts of certain ingredients, and not more. What is in a package is rarely the exact ammount of what you need. I often thow away perfectly good food while preparing dinner because I think it is more important to prepare a good dinner than to not waste food. What do I mean? Don’t throw the whole package in! Add just what the meal needs and discard the rest! It isn’t a waste to throw away half an onion if you only need half an onion! (If you don’t want to throw away food just keep what is left for the next day and make soup)

6: Presentation is Everything
A good meal LOOKS good. Haven’t you ever noticed that as the meal is served everybody says “Hmm, that looks good”. You win the game even before you started it by making your plates look good. A friend of mine once bought the best meat he could find and prepared it with great attention to detail and served it. Everybody hated it. Why? Because he painted the meat green with special food paint that was completely harmless and tasteless. But green meat looks so disgusting that you can’t eat it. I spend almost more time thinking about how to make food look good than about combining tastes. Well, almost. So a few tips: keep your plates simple. Not too much stuff on one plate! Decorate the edges with herbs or ingredients. Use colorful sauces, or contrasting colors, around (not on!) your food.

7: Find a Juicy Story
While I cook I look up several ingredients at Google or Wikipedia and try to find a good story. Then, when I serve food, I tell my guests something about what I serve. One example: Sometimes I serve grilled Ostrich (another tip: get strange ingredients and animals. Always impresses people) and before I serve that I always first tell people that Ostrich meat is extremely low in fat (less than 1%) and cholesterol and high in calcium, protein and iron. Ostriches can be dangerous and are known to have attached, and killed, humans. Much more exciting than your average cow. Another example: I often use Vanilla to add flavor to things. Did you know that ‘Vanilla’ got its name from the Latin ‘Vaina’ which means ‘Vagina’? Think about that the next time you ask for a Vanilla Icecream.

8: Learn From The Best
When I have dinner in a restaurant I always study the menu and look at how they combine ingredients. If I see something I think I can reproduce I remember it or write it down. If something tastes great I ask the people serving me if I can compliment the cook myself. Most of the time they love it and chefs often like to talk about their work and share their recipes. The last time I did that was when I tasted a black sauce I didn’t know. It turned out to be balsamic sirup (cook the balsamic until a large part has vaporized. Then add sugar, and stir, until the sugar stops dissolving) which I use to add something special to recipes. Also: when I buy stuff in a store I often ask for tips on how to prepare it. Even if I know I still ask because they might come up with a variation that I didn’t think of. And try to visit stores where they sell exotic food. Pick something from a shelf you never seen before and ask what it is and how to prepare it.

9: Less = More
If you are really REALLY hungry and starving and someone gives you one tiny chocolate cookie it will probably be the best tasting cookie you have ever had. You know this right? So prepare large plates with only a tiny bit of food on it. Don’t send your guests home hungry but give them lots of little things and then finish of with a large icecream desert with melted chocolate or lots of cheese.

10: If All Fails: Order Pizza
Most people are nervous when they cook. Being nervous doesn’t help! I always say to myself “If all fails, I’ll just order pizza”. Remember, cooking should be fun! This relaxes me enough to not screw up dinner. Most of the time…

11: Free Bonus Tip!!!
Serve lots and lots of good wine with your food. The more good wine your guests drink the more impressive your food will appear. The point of a dinner party if to have fun and enjoy yourself.

I hope these tips will be helpful. Let me know if they worked for you and what tips, secrets and technologies you came up with yourself!