Steamed Carrots

When preparing healthy meals for your children, there are many different ways to cook their vegetables, but only three methods will retain their color, flavor and nutrients. These three methods are blanching, steaming and stir frying.

All of these methods are quick cooking, so there is no time for the color, flavor or nutrients to be lost. Here’s a quick look at each method.

Blanching The vegetables are plunged briefly into a pot of boiling water, removed and then plunged into cold water to stop the cooking process. This method preserves the brilliant green color of leafy vegetables. Blanching is typically used when adding vegetables to other cooked dishes or salads, or before freezing.

Steaming The vegetables are cooked in the steam directly above boiling water (or stock). A steaming basket, or rack, is inserted into a saucepan with a small amount of liquid which is tightly covered. In order for the vegetables to steam evenly, they should be cut into similar sized pieces. Steaming is preferred to boiling since the vegetable juices (and color and nutrients) are not removed into the cooking liquid.

Stir fry The key to good stir fry is to have the oil hot, and have the vegetables cut on a diagonal. Heat a small amount of oil in a frying pan, or wok and have the vegetables pre-cut. The diagonal cuts provide a greater surface area for the vegetables to cook than a standard straight cut. The increased surface area and the hot oil, reduces the amount of cooking time required. Once the vegetables are added to the hot oil, stir continually with a wooden spatula/spoon for a few minutes. Never let the vegetables sit in the bottom of the pan, since they will burn and soak up the oil.

In order to obtain a vegetables maximum nutritional benefit when preparing healthy meals for your kids, these three techniques are the preferred cooking methods to maintain their color, flavor, and most of all the vegetables nutritional content.

One of the problems with grilling pork sausages is that they need to be cooked completely through, to kill all bacteria (and prevent any possibility of trichinosis). So the longer you grill the sausages, the more it will dry out. The easiest way to prevent this is to cook the sausage first, then grill it.

The technique you will use is called parboiling. Parboiling consists of partially cooking in boiling water, then completing the cooking process at a later time. For 2 lbs of pork sausages, bring ~6qts of water to a boil. Add the sausages, return to boil, reduce heat and simmer for ~20 minutes. Remove the sausages from the simmering water, then grill until the outsides are browned and crisp. You can also parboil the sausages ahead of time, set the sausages in a bowl, then transfer to the grill when ready.

Not only does the parboiling reduce the grilling time, so the sausage doesn’t dry out, but by partially cooking it in water, the sausage remains juicy, like it should.