Serve seafood or meat salads in wedges of melon. Crab meat in honeydew for instance, or chicken in cantaloupe.
1. Don't wash your chicken! It's a common practice. but washing your chicken doesn’t make it safer, it potentially contaminates your sink, your counters, and everything within splashing distance of the faucet. 60 percent of people who washed their chicken had bacteria from the chicken in their sink, even after cleaning their sink. Use clean hands when you prep your chicken and cook it until a meat thermometer reaches 165° F. Also, wash your hands immediately after preparing your chicken.
2. dd a cooked-meat filling to split, unbaked canned biscuits. Bake and serve as individual meat pies for cocktail-party hors-d-oeuvre.
3. Rub inside of any poultry with ground thyme or sage before roasting.
4. Mix a good amount of crispy fried onion bits into a crust as a topping for meat pies.
5. Marinate chicken in a mixture of lemon juice and onion slices before broiling.
6. Stud a small onion with whole cloves to use as flavoring for beef stock or stews. (Remove after cooking). To "stud" an onion is to poke the cloves into the onion...you can also use the cloves to hold a bay leaf or other leafy herbs to the onion.
7. Add green grapes to chicken salad or crab meat salad.
8. Broil a few seedless grapes on seafood casseroles; add during the last few minutes of broiling to chicken or fish.
9. Make a sauce of black cherries for roast pork. Mix 1 can (2 pound) of pitted black cherries, 2 tablespoons brown sugar, 1 tablespoon soy sauce, and a couple of tablespoons of the drippings.
10. Serve broiled chicken with peaches or apricots added during the last few minutes of broiling.
11. Marinades are magic for turning inexpensive cuts of meat into really superb dishes. There are a number of possible combinations for this miraculous liquid, but here's one of the best:
1 cup French dressing, red wine (or white vinegar), 2 teaspoons mixed spices (cloves, bay leaf, garlic), 2 tablespoons mixed chopped onion, parsley, chives, fresh or dried dill, 1 teaspoon powdered mustard.Mix all ingredients together; soak meat in the marinade for at least 2 hours before cooking. Use excess liquid for gravy, basting, or for making a sauce. Fish also benefits from the marinade. Soak the fish for 1 to 2 hours in 1 part vinegar or dry white wine to 2 parts oil. Lemon juice may be substituted for the vinegar or wine.
12. Do not overcook fish. Most of it takes only a few minutes if it's at room temperature. To test for doneness, use a toothpick inserted in the thickest part (usually near the bone). Separate the meat from the bone; when the meat is no longer transparent the fish is done.
13. Try this for two-dish, one-operation broiling; When broiling hamburgers, small steaks, or ham on the broiler racks in the oven, put a drip pan underneath and a dish that will benefit from catching the juice and drippings. Spaghetti or Spanish rice for example with hamburger or steak. Corn with ham. Be sure the meat is not too fat and trim if necessary.
14. To separate excess fat from meat drippings, quickly pour drippings into a tall cup and place immediately in cold water. The fat will rise to the top and can be skimmed off easily, leaving the good stuff for use in gravy and sauces.
15. A surprise center in cocktail meatballs is a pitted ripe olive stuffed with cheddar cheese and cooked within the meatball.
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