How Going Out to Eat Can Improve Your Home Cooking Skills
Observations from Restaurant Foods
A Salad
Sitting at an outdoor restaurant in Vermont, I ordered the best salad I’d ever had. My husband and I were halfway through a weeklong, outdoor-focused vacation, hiking, biking, and otherwise exploring the northern part of the state. Many of the restaurants we’d tried seemed to specialize in American grill foods. After eating similar fare three days in a row, we found ourselves craving anything green.
Enter the blackberry goat cheese salad. It contained elements I didn’t know how to make. Some kind of sweet maple-coated walnut. Something called balsamic glaze. But I realized, staring at the menu, that it listed every ingredient. I had all the information I needed to make it at home in New Jersey, with a quick Google search to learn how to prepare the unfamiliar elements.
I’m a home cook at best, but I was able to recreate that recipe. Now it’s something I reach for again and again. I’ve even experimented with swapping ingredients and discovered I like it even better with blueberries instead of blackberries.
If you take nothing else away from this post, consider looking at restaurant menus for salad ideas. They just might contain all or most of the recipe.
A Sandwich
At another restaurant, I had a ham and cheese sandwich with sliced apple inside it. The granny smith apple added a satisfying crunch to what would otherwise be a soft-textured sandwich.
When putting a sandwich together, I used to only consider how the flavors worked together. Now, I’ve learned to also ask, what is the texture experience? Humans don’t just crave nutritional variety, like my husband and I did after eating fatty and fried foods 3 days in a row. We crave different textures! This realization helps when winging it or modifying recipes.
An Entrée
As a kid, I never had a fish dinner I enjoyed enough to want seconds, unless it was fried. Friends encouraged me to try sushi, which is a completely different experience. It turns out, I love it! I’m not brave enough to prepare raw fish at home, though.
In search of more fish I could enjoy, I tried salmon glazed with teriyaki sauce in a restaurant. What a combo! This salmon was well seasoned and sweet from the glaze. Most importantly, it had the smooth, slightly springy texture of fish that is cooked exactly right. So it was possible to enjoy cooked fish outside of a California roll! I’d grown up eating overcooked fish!
I went online and looked up recipes that used teriyaki or soy sauce glazes, which turned out to be relatively easy to make once you get the hang of thickening it with cornstarch. The hard part was learning not to overcook my fish. Now, as long as I pay close attention, I can recreate that buttery, delicious experience I had at the restaurant. I’ve even ordered similar dishes while dining out and decided I make it better at home!
So, next time you go out to eat, see if you notice anything you can do yourself. Even a small observation can level up your “food at home.”
