Miss Vickie's Quick Cooking School  Return to the Main Menu for More Information Americans love nothing more than combining cooking with time-saving devices, and of course the pressure cooker is the ideal, lean, mean, fast-food, cooking machine. Good cooking is based on some very simple techniques which can easily be learned at home. Don't get excited, this is nothing fancy, just the sort of stuff that our moms and grandmas seemed to know by heart. This section will give you some basic cooking information to help you serve up better tasting food, and use your pressure cooker to maximum efficiency. Fancy Schmancy Cooking Terms One of the toughest things about learning to be a good cook is to decipher unfamiliar cooking terms and techniques. You may know how to make your mother's favorite casserole, but when it comes to terms fancy chef terms like"chiffonade" , or "julienne" you think you're in over your head. Don't worry, your mom probably didn't know those words either, she just chopped up veggies for "match-sticks" to make her famous casserole. We can cut out a lot of prep time, and our workload, by using a few shortcuts like using pre-cut vegetables or a good processor to do all that slicing and grating. The results may not be as picture perfect as a fancy chef would like, but most of us will appreciate the time savings. Recipes are just road maps to show us how someone else got there, but one of the joys of cooking is to find your own path, and getting there will be fun. Sometimes we look at a recipe with a long list of ingredients and think that makes it complicated. In many recipes its not that the cooking is complicated, but that the preparation of all those ingredients takes time. Most dishes can be assembled, or started, or even partially cooked in advance.