Celebrity Chefs

3 Tricks to Use When Cleaning Your Grill

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With summer winding down, it’s time to clean all your summertime toys and get everything ready for the cooler months where you won’t use them as much or at all. This includes your charcoal, propane or natural gas grill. Hopefully you got a lot of use from it this summer. And if you have, it likely needs a good cleaning before you start using it more sporadically. To help make this a simple and easy job, here are three helpful tricks to use when cleaning your outdoor grill.

Using the Heat

After months of repeated use, your grill probably looks a long way from the sparkling chrome you brought home from the store. And while you may have scrubbed it briefly after it had cooled from each use, there is probably still quite a build up left over at the end of the summer. One way to make this cleaning easier, according to Lauren DeCarlo, a contributor to RealSimple.com, is to use the heat to your advantage. By turning on the grill on high for a few minutes and letting the heat seep into the dirt and stains, it will make the job of cleaning them away a lot easier. The heat will help to burn off residue left over and help to loosen up previously hard to remove spots. Just make sure it’s cool enough for you to touch before you dive in with your rags and scrub brush.

Tin Foil

With all the rubbing and scrubbing you’re doing to get your grill clean, there’s going to be a lot of flying debris going all over your cooking space. While it’s easy enough to use your hose to spray off your deck or patio, you can’t very well do that to your grill. To protect your heating elements and other fragile grill parts from falling and flying debris, Hadyn Lazarow, a contributor to DIYNetwork.com, recommends placing a large sheet of tin foil over the heating elements to help catch any ash, debris or grease from falling where you don’t want it to be. This also makes it easy to keep your cleaning from getting too messy in the process.

Buckets, Buckets and Buckets

Grill components can get very dirty with repeated use. While you can take the removable parts into the kitchen to clean, you run the risk of getting other areas of your home dirty in the process. So to help keep your grease contained, Jeremy Anderberg, a contributor to the Art of Manliness, suggests using three buckets to get this cleaning done quick and easy. One bucket will be for soapy water, one bucket will be of clean water to rinse off the soap, and one bucket will be to catch any debris you need to get rid of. Then once the cleaning is done, just rinse out all your buckets and set them aside for your next deep grill cleaning.

The food you can make using your outdoor grill is the epitome of delicious home cooking. Use the tips mentioned above to make sure your grill stays clean and in good working condition for years to come.

Divine Dates: Celebrity Chefs Tell About Wooing With Food

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It’s the oldest trick in the book – you’re trying to get someone to fall for you, so you promise to cook them dinner from scratch. Anyone can pick up the tab at a restaurant, but it takes real commitment to make the meal yourself. That’s what makes chefs such a hot commodity on the dating market, if you can ever get them out of their restaurant kitchens, at least.

So what do chefs cook for their dates? Here’s what these 3 famous chefs put on the table when they want to woo.

The Chocolatier In The Kitchen

When NYC chocolatier Aditi Malhotra is ready to bring home that special someone, she doesn’t start with the sweet stuff. Instead, she says that her ideal meal would be three courses; she’d start with a beautiful salad, then a fish dish, and only then would chocolate enter the picture. Her final course, either a chocolate cake or mousse, is sure to seal the deal on any date.

The Cooking Channel’s Bad Girl

Nadia G, host of Cooking Channel’s Bitchin’ Kitchen keeps the mood light on and off screen, but she’s also living proof that even stars can have a hard time finding a date. Yes, like so many of us, Nadia has spent plenty of time honing her online dating profile to attract the perfect man. What has she learned while swiping through dating apps? Mostly that there are a lot of strange characters out there, including men she categorizes as “Mr. YOLO” and “The Needy Vampire.” These guys aren’t getting a home cooked meal any time soon.

When she does find Mr. Right, what will be on the menu? We’re hoping for the gorgonzola risotto she makes on her show, although maybe she favors putanesca – the magic first date food that changed our next chef’s life.

Beyond Boiling Water

When it comes to dating, you may not want to open with pasta putanesca, which translates to “the whore’s pasta” – but if you do, you never know what might happen. For Top Chef season 13 contestant Karen Akunowicz, it was the meal of a lifetime.

In an attempt to snag a date with one of her coworkers at Planned Parenthood, Akunowicz promised a home cooked meal, a daring venture since her mother used to say she couldn’t boil water. Not knowing this about her, however, her coworker agreed and Akunowicz grabbed a cookbook and got to work. A few years later, this same date encouraged her to pursue her new found love of cooking by going to culinary school.

Today Akunowicz admits that the putanesca was dreadfully salty, but she’s also the executive chef at Myers + Chang, so she’s clearly learned from her mistakes. And she’s happily married, so the cooking seems to have paid off.

Cooking dinner may not be the easiest way to win the heart of that special someone, but it’s a tried and true strategy. And the truth is, you don’t have to make anything fancy. What makes it so romantic is the gesture itself. So don’t be afraid to whip out those pots and pans on your next date – it could be just the thing to take your relationship to the next level.

Things to Have in Your Building if You Run a Restaurant

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The restaurant world is a world that is uncomparable to any other. It’s high energy, high stress, high reward when things are going well, and highly disappointing the moment things start backing up in the kitchen and tempers as well as sharp objects are flying. On a good day, things are amazing and it’s the reason that so many people stay in the restaurant business all of their lives.

No matter what is going on in life, people have to eat. It’s often the way they escape the pressures and or monotony of everyday life. People will always go to restaurants, so it’s up to you to be that restaurant that everybody wants to visit no matter the change in their pocketbook, no matter the weather, and no matter how good or bad their day was prior to showing up. [Read more…]

5 Foods Most Likely to Cause Food Poisoning

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With the American food supply being controlled and mandated by large corporations, food safety has seemed to decrease in recent years. It seems you can hardly go a week without hearing about a new recall due to E.Coli, Salmonella, or other foodborne illness. Many of these food poisoning outbreaks are much more serious than a simple stomach ache, and could include death.

While producing all of your own food may not be an option, there are other ways to help protect your food supply. By simply avoiding certain foods or being extra cautious in their preparation, you can help your family avoid food poisoning illnesses. Included here are a few of the foods most likely to cause food poisoning in your family and how to avoid the illness.

beef and poultry
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3 Reasons to Pursue a Career in the Culinary Arts

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Do you enjoy cooking? Do you love it when other people taste your food? Do you live for fast-paced environments where you are pumped with adrenaline? The modern day chef lives an incredibly exciting, and stressful, life. They are charged with producing food, often customized to order, at a rapid rate with no room for error.

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You cannot “accidentally” undercook chicken, overcook scallops, or break a chocolate sauce. Everything done in the culinary arts must be precise and accurate. For many individuals, they believe the challenge of creating culinary masterpieces to be their purpose in life. If you find fulfillment in cooking, perhaps it is time to consider culinary school. [Read more…]