Essential comfort food cooking ingredients and tips

The key to making the most delicious comfort food is combining your favourite ingredients into a hot and savoury blend that melts in your mouth. That means cooking meat and hard veggies long and slow, keeping them thick and juicy with savoury sauces or soups, and warming them up with spices that aren't too spicy, so they're still easy to eat. The next time you cook comfort food, keep the following tips in mind.

What type of meat to use depends on how long you have to cook and what type of cooking you're doing. If you have all day to cook a stew or roast on low heat, consider using inexpensive stew meat. This kind of meat tastes great cooked in a slow cooker or in the oven.

Alternatively, if you're cooking something up quickly on the stove, it's better to use a meat that won't be so tough and has a little more fat on it. Chicken thighs make an excellent stir fry and are guaranteed to stay moist no matter how you decide to cook them. Garnish your comfort food with bacon to add even more rich flavor.

Hard veggies like carrots and zucchini will soften up into a delicious mush when boiled down in the slow cooker. Try a new flavor by adding summer squash or pumpkin to a curry.

Onions, one of the essential veggies for comfort cooking, need to be treated a little differently. Make sure to fry the onions first on a high heat to soften them up before boiling them in a stew, otherwise they'll be too crisp or even chewy.

Canned condensed soups make a great base for casseroles, soups, and slow cooker meals. Just add pasta, veggies, and cheese to a couple of cans of soup and cook in the oven for an hour to make an easy comfort food dinner.

If you have any broth for cooking thinner soups, you can combine it with flour and butter to make home-cooked gravy, a perfect topping for a finished roast with mashed potatoes.

Spices can warm up a comfort food dish made especially for a cold rainy day. Curries are full of cumin, curry powder, coriander, and ginger. Garlic is a great all-purpose flavor. Create creamy Italian sauces by combining heavy cream, cheese, and butter with garlic, pepper, and parsley flakes.

Depending on how spicy you like your comfort food, you can add chili powder or a dash of Sriracha.

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