Want to spend more nights in the kitchen at your apartments in Upper Kirby? Consistently cooking your own food is one of the best ways to save money, but it can be hard to resist the temptation to go out to eat. That’s especially true when you live in an awesome neighborhood like Upper Kirby, where it seems like a new restaurant pops up every day.  

We’re not telling you to stop going out to eat, but we do want to share some cooking tips that you can use to make your homemade food taste a little better. If you like the taste of your own cooking, you’ll be much more likely to eat at home instead of ordering in or eating out.

Let’s dive right into the list of tips, residents! When you’re done reading the blog below, be sure to share it with your friends and neighbors at your community of apartments in Greenway Plaza.

Try not to add all the ingredients to the pan at once

Although adding all the ingredients at the same time will reduce your cooking time, that shouldn’t be your main goal. If you want to eat quickly, make some frozen food. If you want to eat well, take the time to cook ingredients in layers.

When working with raw meat and vegetables, it’s important to cook them individually so the moisture they release doesn’t interfere with the other ingredients. When you cook a bunch of ingredients at the same time, the moisture that gets released can steam the other ingredients instead of browning them, like you want.

Pair salt with acid and don’t be shy about using either one

Next time you’re at the grocery store, grab a lemon and a lime. You won’t be eating either of these fruits, but you will be using them in just about every meal that you make. You’ve probably already been adding salt to most of your meals, but it's super important to balance that salt with a little bite of acid in the form of a citrus fruit. If your food starts tasting like lemons, you’ve added too much acid.

Invest in better salt and pepper

Here’s a tip that few people ever think about. You’ve probably been cooking with iodized table salt, and that’s not the kind of salt professional chefs use. You want to be using kosher salt and fresh ground pepper. You can grab a pepper grinder from the store, or you can buy the kinds of spices that come with built in grinders. It’ll be a subtle improvement, but an improvement nonetheless.

Work on one dish until you’ve mastered it

If you can master one dish, you can tell people you can cook. You’ll be able to invite people over for dinner or suggest recipes to other people. If you’re just kind of okay at a few dishes, however, you’ll have nothing to make when you have someone over for dinner. It’s better to be great at one dish than okay at a bunch of dishes, so try and fail until you’re successful!

We’re all out of cooking tips for this week, residents! As always, we appreciate you reading this post, and we hope you learned some tips that will help you cook better meals more often. If you liked reading this week’s post and want to read more like it in the future, please be sure to bookmark this page so you can easily check back when the next post goes live on the site. We’ll be back with another post soon, we promise! In the meantime, be sure to follow Metropole on social media. That way, you’ll be able to be among the first to know when new events, promotions and giveaways are happening at your community of Greenway Plaza apartments.