Healthy Cooking With Shelf Ingredients for the Whole Family

Video Transcript

" Hi I'm Linda Leon with expertvillage.com. Today we are going to talk about power cooking; and power cooking is a wonderful concept that I have came up with several years ago to try to help people get out of the kitchen a whole lot faster. The concept of power cooking is very simple: it is to begin to use a simple ingredient list, and then take that ingredient list and put it together in such a way that you can take one main meal and then diversify it into many different type of recipes. So for today's segment, the only thing that we are going to do is to introduce you into some of the basic tools that you would need in order to set up a kitchen in which you could do power cooking effectively. It is going to start off with just a few products. So bear with me for a moment as I show you some of the tricks of the trade for power cooking. Now in order to do power cooking you need some basic staples. These are classified as cabinet items, and then we are going to need seasoning items. What you always want to make sure is that you have on hand are at lease some type of tomato product. Whether it is diced tomatoes, stewed tomatoes, or whatever, but you need to have some type of tomatoes on hand. Next you are going to want to make sure that you have several types of beans. On these are always good to have black beans and some type of chili beans, because what you are doing is your finding products that you can use in multiple applications. You want to have grain on hand whether it is a regular elbow macaroni, or whether you are going to use some kind of spaghetti or lasagna. But some type of grain a whole grain pasta on hand. You're always going to need rice, and different types of rice are probably more preferable. If you note I keep my rice in a glass jar because it stays longer it keeps longer. You want to give yourself room to have Asian influence—a teriyaki sauce or a sweet and sour sauce are good staples to have on hand. Also always keep some type of garlic. Fresh garlic is fine, or you can use these garlic that come in a jar. Last two items that I think are critical are different types of salad dressing, any type you want. I probably have a gazillion types of salad dressing, but some type of salad dressing on hand, and also a good seasoning salt. I like to use sea salt... and I'm Linda Leon with expertvillage.com."