This Homemade Tartar Sauce is adapted from a culinary school recipe. Big restaurant flavors, in a smaller, super easy-to-make recipe. Skip the store-bought sauce and instantly upgrade any seafood dish.

This Homemade Tartar Sauce Recipe Is Great On . . . Everything!

Since I was a little kid, I’ve LOVED tartar sauce.

Obviously, the mayonnaise part is built into my Midwestern DNA. But add the pickles and the herbs and it just becomes such an A++ condiment. Of course, it’s perfect with fried fish, and 99% of my unabashed love for the Filet-O-Fish (guilty pleasure, please don’t judge) is simply the tartar sauce.

I also love tartar sauce as a dip for French fries, roasted potatoes, and heck, pretty much every other kind of roasted vegetable, too. It’s obviously amazing with all kinds of seafood dishes. Give it to me with grilled chicken, honestly. Tartar sauce all day, every day.

However, I find most jarred and bottled tartar sauces to be very underwhelming. They often have an “off” flavor to me that I can’t quite place. It’s probably just the fact that they’re made with all sorts of fillers and additives and frankly, just not good.

So, fellow tartar sauce lovers: let’s explore making some homemade tartar sauce, using the same recipe I was taught in culinary school (just scaled down for the home kitchen).

Why You Will Love This Tartar Sauce Recipe

• The tangy flavor complements the richness of fried fish so well!
• It’s adapted from a culinary school recipe, which means it has all the big flavors of a restaurant condiment.
• It keeps up to a week in the fridge.

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This Homemade Italian Dressing Recipe is adapted from culinary school, but made with ingredients you likely already have in your kitchen. No preservatives or artificial flavors!

This Italian Salad Dressing Recipe is the only one you’ll ever need!

I’ve been slowly working through some of my culinary school textbooks and notebooks, and adapting the salad dressing recipes from 2 gallon batches for restaurant use to 1 cup batches for us normal people.

This Italian Salad Dressing recipe (that I probably made 50+ times in school) is the latest to get the home chef treatment. It’s made with simple ingredients yet packed with vibrant flavor.

Drizzle this perfectly balanced dressing over fresh greens, toss it into pasta salad or use it as a marinade for grilled meats.

Why You’ll Love This Italian Dressing

• No preservatives or artificial flavors here – just pure homemade goodness.
• Once you get the hang of making it, you won’t need to measure everything. You’ll be able to eyeball the ingredient amounts and have it still turn out perfectly.
• It’s made with ingredients you likely already have in your kitchen, so if you find yourself needing an emergency salad dressing one night, this can be your go-to recipe.

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This culinary school method gives you crisp bacon with no messy stove. Get exact timing for many popular brands. Take the guesswork out!

“I tried this today, and this is an absolute genius way to cook bacon.  It doesn’t smell up the house, doesn’t splatter, and I’m sure my husband will love not having to clean up the stove after I cook bacon.  So this is a winner all the way around.”

—Susan

“As you promised, it really is “cartoon bacon” as it’s ridiculously perfect.  Your recipe’s the keeper.”

—Jenny

I Learned About Cooking Bacon In The Oven In Culinary School

Going to culinary school certainly introduced me to fancy kitchen techniques like making French pastries and hollandaise sauce.

But it also introduced me to something so simple, so basic, so obvious, that I was left scratching my head as to why I hadn’t thought of it before: how to cook bacon in the oven (also: how to cook sausage in the oven). Truthfully, it might have been the most useful thing I learned!

This guide has been visited over ONE MILLION TIMES and made in households across the world. Read on to find out why.

Why Cooking Bacon In Oven Will Change Your Life!

• No stovetop splatters. Oven bacon doesn’t splatter nearly as much as skillet bacon does, and even if it does, the splatters are inside your oven and not all over your counters.
• Leaves you free stovetop space for a griddle. Plenty of room to make pancakes or fried eggs without having to jostle a bunch of pans around between burners.
• The best way to prepare large quantities. You can fit much more bacon on a rimmed baking pan than you can in a skillet.
• Great when you’re preparing a brunch menu for a crowd (think Easter or Mother’s Day). The bacon can just cook away, unattended to, while you’re finishing up the rest of the meal.
• You end up with cartoon-like perfect crispy bacon. It’s not shriveled up little pieces – it’s mostly flat, perfectly cooked bacon. If you want to pull out your phone and take a picture of it, well, I won’t judge!

The post Cooking Bacon In Oven (How They Teach It In Culinary School) appeared first on Foxes Love Lemons.

The BEST Veggie Lasagna Recipe

We’ve all had bad banquet food. In my experience, it involves a choice of overcooked chicken or bad vegetable lasagna. The lasagna is mushy and overcooked, and it’s usually runny and watery.

One of the few banquets I’ve been to that has had great food? My culinary school graduation, of course. My instructors knew what they were doing when it came to banquets, and they knew that vegetable lasagna can be great if it’s made well.

And it turns out that making it well involves a secret ingredient. An ordinary item you can find at any grocery store, but it has a magical purpose when it comes to veggie lasagna.

Read on to find out what this item is, and why it guarantees that you’ll soon be enjoying the most flavorful, cheesiest, well cooked, NOT WATERY vegetable lasagna you’ve ever had.

Why You’ll Love This Vegetable Lasagna Recipe

• Despite being meatless, it’s super hearty and satisfying. Even meat lovers will probably get on board with this dish.
• Packed with a variety of vegetables like zucchini, bell peppers, mushrooms and spinach, you get a lot of nutrition here, including vitamins, minerals and fiber.
• You can assemble this up to 3 days before baking, making it perfect for stress-free gatherings.

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I’m back with the final installment of “What I Learned In Culinary School” (check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them!). Since I’ve already had a long day in the kitchen doing recipe testing, I’ll just go ahead and jump right into it. While this is the last installment of this list, I will be back in the future with some specific things I learned (ones that pertain more to a certain recipe or technique rather than general kitchen tips).

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I always wanted to start a blog in culinary school, but I just never got around to it. It would have been a natural fit, with a TON of fresh content each day, so I’m kicking myself that I didn’t do it. But, after waking up at 4:30 am and going through a long, grueling day at school, by the time I got home in the late afternoon, I was beat to hell. If I was feeling extra motivated, I would drag myself to the gym to try to counteract the ten million calories of food I was forced to taste each day. Other days, I would just take a nap, wait for my husband to get home, make dinner, and then go to bed and start it all over again. Needless to say, the culinary school blog just didn’t happen.

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Not too long ago, I was an avid home cook – cooking and baking as much as I could in the evenings and on weekends. Then I decided that my job in advertising wasn’t for me, so I quit and went to culinary school! I thought what I learned in culinary school would change everything about the way I cook at home – but it didn’t. I don’t cook gourmet five-course meals every night, that’s for sure. While it didn’t change my style of cooking, it did change how I cook at home, making me faster and more efficient than I had been before. Here are the top 5 things I learned in culinary school, and how I’ve transferred that knowledge to my home kitchen.

Work the mise en place
Any list of this nature would be remiss to not mention mise en place, a French phrase that means “put in place.” Do I have every single element of a dish chopped before I even start heating up my pans? Definitely not. But if I’m working from a recipe, I make sure to thoroughly read the recipe (also part of the mise en place!), and at least devote a portion of my tiny amount of counter space to staging most of the ingredients. That way, I’m not opening the fridge 8 different times or walking back and forth to the pantry cupboard. This one step makes me more efficient in the kitchen, and it subtracts a few minutes from my meal preparation time and makes the whole process a little bit more enjoyable.

Start with HOT pans
Instead of putting a cold pan on the stove, then adding your oil, turning on the heat, and waiting for it to get warm, put an empty pan on the stove. Let it sit over the heat while you prep your ingredients. When you’re ready to start cooking, your pan will be waiting for you, nice and hot. And that hot pan will give you a darker sear on anything you are making. And that means quicker cooking and more flavor!

Unless you’re baking, don’t bother to measure anything
This is something that the chef instructors would stress again and again when they saw students pull out measuring cups in the kitchen. Sure, if you’re making pastries or mixing up a comically large bowl of cornbread batter, you absolutely need to measure your ingredients. But on the savory side of things, you really don’t. If you’re working from a soup recipe that calls for 2 tablespoons of tomato paste, just add what you think looks like 2 tablespoons. Taste your dish, and if it needs more tomato, add more. Learning how to “eyeball” things will make you a stronger and faster cook. It also means less dishes to do after dinner!

Do your prep work in stages
For example, say you’re making apple turnovers, and you need to peel, core and slice 4 apples. Instead of taking 1 apple, peeling it, coring it, slicing it, and then grabbing another apple and repeating the process, work in stages. Peel all 4 apples. Then core all 4 apples. Then slice all 4 apples. It’s a small adjustment, but it adds up to a huge change in productivity. You’ll be able to tackle any kitchen task quicker if you keep this strategy in mind.

Season your food!
This is something you learn the first day of school, and never stop using. If you’ve ever wondered why restaurant food tastes so good, it’s probably the salt. But here’s the thing, seasoning doesn’t just include salt. Acidic elements like citrus and vinegar are just as important (and healthier!). I always have lemons and limes, as well as a wide variety of vinegar on hand for seasoning.The acids work in many ways – cutting the richness of a creamy dish, balancing the sweetness of a sugary dessert, adding a bright flavor to a meal that ends up flat-tasting, and making just a little bit of salt go further. Just before you serve your dish, taste it and see what you think. If it seems a little bland, try adding a squeeze of lemon juice, then taste it again to see if the flavor has improved.

For more tips and tricks from what I learned in culinary school, be sure to check out my culinary school archive.

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Before I was allowed to apply for admission to my culinary school, I had to pass a basic skills class. I’m sure it was designed to separate the serious from the lackadaisical; the ones truly interested in cooking vs. those who just wanted to be a TV celebrity chef.

One of the very first things we had to demonstrate we could make was a basic tomato sauce. And you know what? This “basic” sauce was better than any pre-made sauce I’d ever eaten out of a jar.

Today, I’m sharing with you the notes I took down as my chef instructor taught us to make this sauce. Serve over traditional pasta with black bean meatballs, or our squash noodles recipe. Or, use as a sauce for a chicken pizza or a crostini pizza bar.

The post Quick Culinary School Tomato Sauce appeared first on Foxes Love Lemons.

In my “What I Learned in Culinary School” series, I’ll be sharing tips and tricks that I learned from two years of working with some of the country’s best chefs.

This will include big things like learning to work efficiently, and small things like how to cook bacon perfectly.

All of them will be applicable to your home kitchen, making you a faster, better, and more confident cook.

It’s just a guess, but I’m betting that vegetable consumption across the U.S. is at an all-time high each January. But with eating lots of veggies, comes lots of veggie scraps.

I always strive to reduce food waste in my kitchen, so instead of throwing those scraps in the garbage, I use them to make delicious homemade vegetable stock.

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In my “What I Learned in Culinary School” series, I’ll be sharing tips and tricks that I learned from two years of working with some of the country’s best chefs. This will include big things like learning to work efficiently, and small things like how to cook bacon perfectly. All of them will be applicable to your home kitchen, making you a faster, better, and more confident cook.

There’s an infinite number of ways to make russet mashed potatoes, and that’s one thing I love about them. You can make them really smooth or leave them lumpy. You can mash them with a ricer, masher or mixer.

You can stir in melted butter, room temperature butter, milk, cream, sour cream, buttermilk or something else (hello, blue cheese mashed potatoes).

But I think there’s one thing we can all agree on: a bland scoop of mashed potatoes is the worst scoop of mashed potatoes.

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