How to Cook Healthy for Beginners

1. Joanna Intro Minestrone Pt 1: Hello there. My name is Chef Joanna. And today, I want to show you how to cook healthy and how to use your knife because I get the question a lot and people are like, you know, how do I hold my knife? How do I cut properly? So I just want to give you a little quick tips on how to do that. And hopefully by the end, you'll feel more comfortable, confident cooking yourself healthy meals and just get into. 2. Joanna Minestrone Knives Pt 2: So the first step, I want to show you the knife, how to hold a knife and which kind of knife to use. We'll start with the paring knife, the small one here, just for, you know, small jobs, strawberries, jalapenos, deveining some things. Then we have the Santuco knife, which is, like, a Japanese style, and that's used for a lot of chopping stuff. And it's really practical when you want to scoop up food and put it into the pan or pot. So this one is a go to for a lot of people. My favorite is the chef's knife because it's kind of the all around knife. For all jobs, it's a little heavier. So if you have to cut through, like, a skin or something, it's pretty practical. And so now I want to show you how to hold the knife because a lot of people don't hold it correctly and you can get injured. If you don't hold it right, you'll get tired faster. So let me show you how to hold it. So whatever hand you're going to hold the knife with, you get the last three fingers here. You wrap it around the handle, and then you pinch this part right here. And once you do that, you should have a lot better control and kind of have this extension of your arm here, and you can see you can really maneuver it really easily. But a lot of people hold it like a club, and when they start to cut, it kind of moves. That just kind of makes you more tired because you're constantly trying to try to make it straight. So just pinch that, and you should feel like a lot better. It might not feel as comfortable at first because you have to get used to it. But in the end, it's safer and easier. Now, with your other hand, this is now more dangerous because it can get chopped or sliced, whatever. So you got to tuck this hand, whatever the non knife hand. And you always want to tuck it, never have your fingers flat like this on the board if this slips at all, you know, these can get hurt. So always tuck that behind. And then, before we get anything to chop, just practice. You can either touch this kind of knuckle here. Some people will do two knuckles here, but it depends on your hand orientation and everything. You just want it flat. So if you slip, you don't cut anything or, you know, it'll just glide past your fingernail or something. And this is really going to tell you how small or big your food pieces are going to be. So this is kind of the brains here of the operation, just showing you like guiding you how big or small. And then lastly, the movement of the knife when you're slicing and chopping. The easiest way that will guide through your food is kind of tip to heal and you kind of want to move it away from you like that. And that will just, like, slice through the food instead of smashing it, which can bruise, the onions and everything. So just try to do this movement, and you can practice this before you cut anything so you feel comfortable. Now I want to show you with some veggies here, we're going to get into the chopping so you can see how it's done. 3. Joanna Minestrone Veggies Pt 3: So the most fun way to learn how to chop is, you know, to have a result at the end. So I don't want to just go through all the chopping. I want to have something to make at the end. So we're going to make a minestrone soup so we can practice all these chopping different veggies and shapes and sizes. The ingredients we need, we're going to have onion, we're gonna have garlic, some celery, carrots, zucchini, and some kale. So we're going to start with the celery just because I find it's probably the easiest to practice on because it's flat and we can go over. So this has been washed. And we'll just remove the leaf part here, and then we will trim off the ends here. Okay. So we'll start with just one just so we can practice the technique of chopping. Remember, have this kind of hand tucked and then pinch there. And then it's up to you. If you want to have contact with the knife, you can. I feel comfortable with that, but some people want to hold it over here. But try to, you know, do this here and uh what you want to do is you want to focus on getting the same size. So if you start at one size, you know, stick with that size because that's going to be the same cooking time for that veggie. So you don't want to do some small, some large, some will overcook. So will get too soft. So stick with the same size and see how I am kind of rocking, you know, front to back here and kind of making it go away from me. And it's also really important. I see this a lot that either people don't have a cutting board that is stable. So you always want to make sure you have a good cutting board. If it's a plastic one, put a damp paper towel underneath, and that will hold your plastic cutting board in place. So hopefully, this is a good practice for you. You can get a whole bunch of celery and chop it up. We got our celery ready to go. Next up, we're going to do the carrot, which can be dangerous because it's very unstable and roly. So I always like to cut it in, you know, half or thirds. And then there's a couple ways to do this, but I think the safest is kind of, like, make a divot into the middle there. And then slowly kind of just whenever you do this, keep your hand up and not curve down or anything. And you cut it in half so that now you have a flat surface, and it's a lot safer to work with. And you want to do that for anything that is kind of roly in nature. And then we'll cut that in half. And now we can cut it into a little chop here. I have nothing to say. Okay, so now we have our carrots ready. That's going to go into the bowl with our celery. And we're getting some nice colors here. Okay, next up is the always talked about the onion. Everybody wants to know how to chop the onion correctly, and they're scared of it, 'cause now this is, like, super ly. So how do you do this safely? Well, the first cut is always kind of the hardest. I don't tend I don't peel it first. I cut it into it and then peel it. So, again, I kind of, like, get a divot there and then can kind of just smack it down like that. Um, and now it should be pretty easy to peel. And so you just kind of peel off any of those the brown layers on the top there. Okay, so once you have the onion like this, we're going to just trim it up a little bit. So trim this part off and this part, but keep the root intact because I'll show you in just a second here. So starting with one half here, you need a very sharp knife for this. Otherwise, it's kind of hard to do. So make sure you're sharpening your knives. Like a sharper knife is a safer knife. So just make sure it's sharp. And we're going to start like this. And do horizontal cut into the middle, but we don't go all the way. We just kind of go to the edge of the root, keeping it intact. So as far as you can go there, you bring it out and see it's, you know, still very much intact, so it's easier to work with. And now we're going to do little cuts this way, but also don't go all the way down, so you want to keep it intact. And this is where a sharp knife really is necessary to go into this onion. And so you have those cuts there. So now we've cut it in half, and we have all those little cuts. And now this is the really cool part, but also tricky. You have to really hold it together with your hands as you cut because it's a little more, you know, movable, unstable. And then you know, gently, you start cutting all this way and and your onion is perfectly chopped up because you've cut it both ways horizontally, vertically, and you get these nice, perfectly little uniform chops. Okay, so once you get to this root area, you can, you know, just cut around the root. And there's not a great way to do this, but I just kind of like to chop like that, you know, one way and then we're just going after the same size here, so then I'll kind of scoop them up like that and do another cut like that. And people always ask, you know, how do you not cry when you cut the onion? And there's a few techniques, but none of them have really worked for me. But refrigerating your onions kind of help a little bit, when they're colder, the odors don't come up to your eyes much. I've also heard if you put bread in your mouth while you're chopping, it helps as well. But I know one of the main things is the sharpness of your knife. So if you have a dull knife and you keep bruising the onion, you're just releasing more odors into your eyes. So, a sharper knife where you can do it quickly and get it done fast is going to be better for your eyes and not make you cry. So now we're going to put this all together. And I put these in a bowl here because this is the foundation of cooking, especially for French cuisine. They kind of were the ones to make cooking the formal way that it is. And this is what's called a mirepoix. So, it's basically a mix of onion, celery, and carrot. And it's always like two parts of onion to one part carrot and one part celery. And this is going to be the base of, like, everything, especially French related cooking. A lot of Italian too, where you start a soup, you're going to saute this first or you start a stew, and then you add meat or veggies. This is kind of the flavor base of everything. So if you have this, I always kind of have these in my fridge, and then I can add whatever else to it. So it's kind of a good thing to know your mirepoix here. And then we have a little garlic we're going to do. So we need two cloves. And the best way to do the garlic here, I know people have garlic presses, but they are just take more time to clean anyway. So I like to do it like this. I put the heel of my hand here, and the knife is touching the garlic, and you kind of just do one hit. And once you smash it, you can take off the papery skins pretty easily. And you do that for here. Maybe twice and the skin's removed. And then you can kind of, you know, do small cuts one way and then kind of shovel them up here and you can do it the other way. But you can also, smash it, too, if you feel comfortable. Uh, you know, you kind of have to maneuver the knife a little more. But that's also one way to get them. We're just kind of getting them to a mince. We're going to put this to the side, we're going to saute that after. Otherwise, it will burn with the mirepoix. So next up, we have the zucchini, which is probably going to be a breeze for you to chop because it's soft. So we'll just cut off the ends first here. And we're going for a small chop. So you can kind of cut it in half first and then kind of do some planks like that. Remember, anything that is kind of rolling, you'll just put on its side once it's flat and it's a lot safer that way. So I kind of like to just kind of lay them out on the flat side, and then just go through you cut them all that way, and then we'll put them in little bundles here. And we'll just go for this small chop. So, you know, do what's manageable to you. If you want to do less at a time, that's totally cool. Just always keep safety in mind and go slow if this is, like, a new cutting technique or holding the knife is new. So that's our zucchini here. Finished up. Lastly is our tail here. Okay, that's gonna be the last thing to go into our soup. So you can get this already, you know, chopped up and everything. But this is how I like to do it from the stem, 'cause the stems are pretty tough. So you can just kind of discard that. Just get the leafy parts. I mean, you can also eat the stems, too, and if it's, like, the top part, I'll just leave it on. It's just the bottom parts that are really kind of tough. Something kind of very satisfying about this. Okay, so once you got some nice kale leaves there, you can kind of bundle them up. And we're just gonna do, like, you know, little pieces here. So now we have all of our veggies ready. Now this is I'm going to throw out another French term. This is called the meson place, which basically means put in place. And it's just a French term, meaning that you want to prepare everything, all your chopped ingredients before you start cooking or turning on the heat a lot of people start cooking, and then things will burn 'cause they're chopping. So, you know, this is how the chefs do at restaurants. Everything is step by step. Have all your stuff prepared before you start the next step of cooking. So now we're ready to turn on the fire, and I'll show you how we get this cooking here. 4. Joanna Minestrone Cooking Pt 4: Okay, so let's get cooking. We got all of our stuff ready. We're going to turn on the heat into a large pot, one of the larger ones you have. And we're gonna put a little olive oil, maybe, like, a tablespoon or two in there. Yeah, this is an Italian soup, so it's a mix of, you know, all these a bunch of veggies. There's some beans in it. It's super healthy. It's something that they eat in, like, the Blue Zones, Sardinia italy where people live 90 to 100. When the oil's hot, so I like to test it. This is kind of a cool little trick. I'll put like one piece of onion in there. And when it sizzles, then I'll put the rest of my veggies in there a it'll tell me that it's now hot enough. Okay, so once it's sizzling, we're going to add the rest of our mire point here. So get all those nicely chopped veggies in there. And, you know, we're just going to cook these a couple minutes until the onions start to look a little translucent. And you kind of want to, you know, stick around and move them around a bit. It's kind of like a higher flame and just move them. For a couple minutes. Okay, so once our veggies are nice and, you know, the green is bright green, the onions are looking a little more translucent. Been a couple minutes, we're going to add pretty much everything else. We're gonna add our zucchini in there. We're going to add our garlic. We're actually going to hold off on the kale. We'll add that a little later. And we're going to add our red kidney beans. These were canned. I just drain them and rinse them a little bit. And stir that around. And then, 'cause I wanted to make it very simple. If you have veggie broth or chicken broth, whatever you want to use, but this is just water 'cause it's still gonna be very flavorful. I just put enough to cover and a little more. Look at that beautiful colors there. We're gonna add some pasta in here. This is elbo macaroni. You can use any pasta you want or leave it out. This is a three fourths cup. So we're gonna put that in there. And then we got some nice Italian spices here. I have the measurements for everything, but I kind of just go to eye now because I made this so often. So, um so the thing with spices is that you add spices towards the beginning to middle part. This is some oregano in here. The spices are kind of thinking them as a tea, like you're brewing the stock. So that's when you add them now versus herbs, which would be fresh parsley, basil. You add those at the end because those are fresh and they have, like, essential oils that would just get kind of, you know, boiled out if you added them right now. So we'll add the parsley at the very end. And there's some thyme here. And last, we have some basil. So you know, this is about a teaspoon or so. And very importantly, because we didn't use a stock, we're going to add salt. Okay, so we're going to get a little salt in here. This is to your taste, but probably at least a teaspoon to start. And it's, you know, a good soup definitely needs, like, a good amount of salt. That's what makes those restaurant soups you like. So we'll taste as we go. And then we'll get a little pepper in there. You can do red pepper flakes, too, if you want. Well, we got the pepper. And what we're now doing is just going to bring that to a boil, and then we're going to cover it and simmer for about 15 minutes. Okay, so after 15 minutes, we got this beautiful soup looking like this. We're going to add our kale in here. And I did taste for a little salt along the way, so I added a little more. It's all really according to your taste. So we'll just stir this in. You could use spinach, as well. Whatever you like. Yeah, this will be, you know, another minute or two. But even if it cooks a little longer, there's no harm there. Stir that in. And then we'll just cover it for a couple minutes here. Okay, so it's been a couple minutes. It looks beautiful. Tasted for seasoning. And now I'm gonna plate it up, so just ladle into a nice big bowl here. Alright, so here's one way I love to plate it, give that little extra boost of flavor, but it's up to you. So I just got nice some aged parmesan here and a grater. And this just adds a little salt and a little crunch also. And then some really good extra virgin, some really good extra virgin olive oil just to drizzle and give a little flavor and a little shine. And that is your beautiful minestrone soup that you made with your knife skills. Okay. Let's get in there. Mm. So good. Yeah, actually really nice. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you learn some really valuable knife skills and are enjoying this beautiful minestrone soup until then take care, and I'll see you in the next one.