How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Recipe

Most of us like cooking fabulous meals to share with one or more friends or loved ones, but if you’d rather cook a bland, tasteless and dull meal that no one will want to touch, here’s how to ruin a perfectly good recipe and ensure that there’ll be plenty of leftovers !

1. Using raw and unflavored tofu without added flavors such as spices or sauces will result in a bland and flavorless dish. Since tofu doesn’t taste like much on its own, even just frying it in a flavorful oil such as a good quality olive oil or sesame oil will give it a rich depth of flavor. Pressing tofu before using will enhance the ability of the tofu to absorb flavors.
   More: How to Press Tofu

2. When serving whole grains and cereals such as rice, oats, millet or barley, there are a couple ways to ruin the dish. Undercooking the grains so they are crunchy and hard, rather than soft and chewy will remind your guests of birdseed, ensuring lots of leftovers. Secondly, cooking grains in plain water rather than a rich flavorful vegetable or mushroom stock misses the opportunity to create an aromatic layer of flavor in dishes such as casserole, a pilaf, stew or risotto.
   More: Vegan Barley Pilaf Recipe

3. To really ruin a favorite dish, cook the same thing everyday. Often, new vegetarians and vegans haven’t explored the plethora of fabulous animal-free foods and resort to eating one or two things over and over (and over!) again. Usually it’s something familiar, such as pasta with marinara or bean burritos. Incidentally, eating a repetitive and nutritionally unbalanced diet is a surefire way to feel horrible on a vegetarian diet, but that’s another topic for another day!

4. Remember when you were a kid and hated eating your vegetables? For many of us who have that classic memory, it’s probably because whoever was preparing your meals was adept ruining recipes via method number four. Overcooking vegetables is sure to turn a perfectly good recipe into a soggy and flavorless mess. Broccoli, for example, loses both color and flavor when overcooked. Vegetables should still have a bit of resistance when you bite into them, they shouldn’t melt in your mouth!

5. Using processed foods instead of fresh will sacrifice both flavor and texture. Sometimes, frozen or canned fruits or vegetables can be substituted for fresh, but for certain vegetables, such as spinach, there’s really no comparison. Canned or frozen spinach is hopelessly slimy to the point that it is soggy and unrecognizable already! Mushrooms are another food that really just isn’t the same when canned. Use dried mushrooms instead of canned, if you must!
   More: Spicy Chickpeas with (fresh!) Spinach Recipe

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