Cooking flavorful, healthy and delicious food

Welcome to How to cook and visit. This site provides tips and techniques for cooking and visiting with family and friends. How to cook and visit would love your ideas on cooking and visiting, let's face it we all can use good ideas.

When cooking it is best to use fresh quality ingredients. If fresh is not available frozen is the next best. The reason you want to use good quality ingredients is because it is healthier for your body. The nutrients are plentiful in fresh/frozen vegetables and fruits. There are hardly any nutrients (good quality) left in a can of vegetables. The process of processing foods boils most of the nutrients that the vegetable/ fruits have and then add chemicals, additives... most of the time.

Now, as for oil. We will need to add oil to our food some times. Instead of using animal fat oil use olive oil, extra virgin olive oil. Some times we will use butter (not margarine), to start some foods off. Use unsalted real butter in place of margarine. Use it sparingly, not a lot and it's okay. If your one who believes margarine is better for you do some research you may be surprised. These are my opinions based on the research I've done but don't think I know the answers, look it up yourself you'd be surprised at what's out there.

Herbs are nice to use in food. The fresher the better again but in the bottle/jar won't be so bad just check the source. Don't forget spices like Cayenne pepper, you can use it in place of black pepper if you want to. Some people want to use onion salt or garlic salt, go light with the extra salts, for sodium reasons.

So this is just an over view of what to start off with when choosing what to cook. Your basics, the food- fresh, the oil-extra virgin olive oil, the herbs-fresh, bottle, jar and the "spices"-some like it hot. So cook it up, spice it up and eat it up.

Don't forget your company when they visit. When company comes they get the good quality ingredients too they may not eat fresh foods and when you feed it to them they will notice the fresh quality and taste. The food we eat when we visit is part of the conversation.

Let's get cooking.