Cooking water from vegetables is reusable and healthy: vitamins that are lost during cooking, are partly included in the moisture. You can use the cooking water in sauce or soup, or again as cooking water for other vegetables, pasta, rice or potatoes.
Cooking water and broth you have to keep cool and not too long.
Considered that sometimes specially cut vegetables in a bouquet or in pieces are boiled to make broth it is really a shame to just throw away the cooking water of our cooking art.
You can reduce waste (including energy) by using little water and short cooking or blanching. Vegetables taste better when they are a little crusty or just tender. Do not let them cook until tasteless porridge. Brussels sprouts yarn in 4 minutes. If you cook them too long they taste nasty.
Pasta can cook 3 minutes, turn the heat off and let the moisture be absorbed in the paste while subsequent cooking stying in the hay box. (See also <Hay box>). This includes vegetables (asparagus,...) and fish or meat.
Powders of cereal you first solve in cold liquid, then add stirring the boiling liquid.
Have you cooked rice, then save some of the cooking water. It is full of starch and is a perfect base for a sauce.
I m playing of cooking pasta and rice to use just enough water. So you do not waste energy, water or nutrients. All the water is then absorbed by the food. (The last bit, to avoid scorching, the pan next to the fire, and occasionally stirring.) (Also read: Hay box)
Put your potatoes in cold water. In hot water, the outside will work as an insulator and slow the cooking from the inside.
The cooking water of potatoes you better not reuse. It contains some of the toxic substance solanine. (See <Potatoes>.) You can use it, boiling hot, like steam and fire also, as weed control in hard to reach places (e.g. joints between tiles or stones).
Cook your potatoes in their peels, then let them just refresh in cold water. The peel is then easier to take off.
Cut what you want to boil in small pieces, then you use less water and energy. Cut the pieces in about the same size, so that they are all equal cooked.
Of nitrate-rich (leafy) vegetables such as endive, celery, spinach, radishes, all kinds of lettuce, parsley, Chinese cabbage, fennel, purslane, kohlrabi and beetroot, chard..., a portion of the nitrate stays in the moisture, so you better do not exceed (too much) in using it. This avoids you absorb too much nitrate. The amount of nitrate in organic fruit turns out to be lower and summer vegetables contain (by sunlight) generally less nitrate than winter vegetables, frozen spinach contains less nitrate than fresh.
Nitrates are not harmful in themselves. However, the conversion by bacteria is. Nitrite reacts with hemoglobin in the bloodstream, so that the oxygen transport is made more difficult. Especially for babies it can cause severe oxygen deprivation.
A vitamin C - rich dessert such as orange or kiwi can inhibit the conversion to nitrosamines properly.
Therefore, you should not reheat spinach again. The relatively slow cooling and heating promotes bacterial conversion of nitrate to nitrite. Vegetables that you want to heat up later you better cool down quickly.
Blanching vegetables is to heat them a short time, maximum a few minutes in a boiling liquid, usually water. After this, the vegetable is cooled by flushing them with cold water in order to keep them crunchy. Otherwise, they cook further on by their own heat. This is called carryover cooking or resting.
You can use this as a culinary technique to continue cooking of e.g. roasted meat after you took it from the heater or oven. (Extend the effect by covering or packing it.)
The color of beans remain more beautiful with blanching than cooking.
By blanching nettle leaves prick disappears. Throw them into the boiling water, blanch between 45 seconds and one minute.
Mussel moisture is ideal to make fish sauce. You can let it boil until it thickens. With white wine and cream this moisture is delicious for (fish) soup.
The cooking liquid from stewed pears can be used in (gelatin) pudding, dressing, popsicles, syrup, wine,..
Oil blanching is also called woks.
If I want to heat another dish (sauce, meat, vegetables) when cooking (e.g. rice, pasta, potatoes) then I lift the lid, put a deep plate on the boiler containing the 2nd dish, and lay the lid back on the dish. On one fire is all done simultaneously.
Who does Tabasco on everything can eat very inexpensive. (Winston Groom)