Everyone Can Be A Gourmet Chef

I am personally a big fan of cooking. I take pride in the fact that I actually know how to cook. While I don't think of myself as unique, being a guy that can cook, I do find it amusing that a great number of my friends (both guys and girls) don't know how to cook. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, but I think cooking should be an essential skill for a guy to know. It allows you to have a wide variety of what you can eat, and the ladies love it.

But today's post isn't about "real" cooking. This post is more geared towards those guys and girls who say they can't cook. It has been my pleasure throughout the years to find a number of great kitchen appliances that make cooking easy, and don't leave you with soggy, over heated meals that you would get out of a microwave (though it is a great invention in itself, especially for leftover mac and cheese). But here's a listing of my three favorite "cooking made easy" tools.

The Krups sandwich maker: This is kind of a blast from the past. I remember making sandwiches on this thing with my brother when we were kids. And we had some serious recipes, most notably a pizza recipe that included two pieces of bread, pizza sauce, American cheese, and pepperoni or ham. Looking back, that doesn't sound too appetizing but I remember several nights sneaking our Krups sandwich maker into the basement at 1 AM and making late night sandwiches. And I still have one in my apartment today. Who knew that I would still be using it, but I am. I am a huge fan of making turkey melts, tuna melts, and any other kind of melt I can think of. And the fact that the 'maker cuts the sandwiches diagonally and makes them look picture-perfect only adds to the mystique.

The GT XPress 101: Now, I don't know who Cathy Mitchell is except that she's the spokesperson for this outstanding kitchen necessity. And she sure as hell sold me on the product with her 30 minute infomercial. I literally JUST acquired one of these this afternoon at a yard sale thanks to a good friend of mine, but I can't wait until I bust it for the first time this evening. The concept is fairly unique. It has two pits to put your food in, and it cooks from both sides when you close it. They great thing about this is you can put just about anything in it and it just cooks right up. It's basically a way to throw as much crap into a machine as you want and hope something good comes out. But according to the infomercial, you can put anything from chicken and steak, to rice, soup, or even cakes and cinnamon rolls. The possibilities are endless. And with its non-stick surface and uniquely shaped spatula, it makes serving and cleanup easy as pie...which you could also probably make in this piece of geniusness. Now, I can't write extensively on this until I try it out, but all I can say is I don't expect to be disappointed when I make up some chicken, rice and all the fixin's tonight.

The George Foreman Grill. What can I say about, "The Lean, Mean, Fat-reducing Grilling Machine?" This is really THE standard for kitchen appliances that can make you an entire meal. It is the innovator of the slanted grill, so the fat rolls off as you cook it into the grease tray that comes with it. It can cook your meat from both sides, so you don't have to flip it, and this also "seals in flavor" according to George himself. And George Foreman didn't just quit with different sizes of his original grill. He expanded his horizons, to "The Next Grilleration," and beyond. Now, you can get more than just a grill. You can get an indoor/outdoor grill, a blender, a broiler, a griddle, and many more items. Now, normally I get annoyed when celebrities shamelessly plug their products, but George Foreman is an exception. I'll be a fan of anything he endorses. He says himself he's made more money for his grills than for his boxing, and also claims he is better known for the grills than he is for his boxing accomplishments. And how can you dislike a guy who names all five of his sons George?

The original grill is also awesome for its size. Just knowing that I can throw some ground beef, hamburger buns, and my Foreman Grill in a bag and grill out in my office at work if I wanted, or anywhere else. Before the birth of the George Foreman grill, how would you be able to grill hamburgers in a dorm room? You couldn't!! But thanks to George Foreman, I was able to have summer cookouts in the confines of the dorms. This led to one of my favorite stories from college. It was the dead of winter and my roommate Doug and I were bored in the middle of the night. So we decided that we wanted it to be summer. We put on shorts and sandals and popped open some beers. We grilled hamburgers on the Foreman grills, and as a final touch, we turned on RBI Baseball for the NES and had it simulate a game, so we ended up sitting in our dorm room at 2 AM, watching NES baseball while drinking beer and eating grilled burgers in our summer clothes. How much closer to summer can you get?