Dangers of cooking with Teflon

(click image above for high-res infographic)

Nonstick pans are a huge convenience when it comes to cooking. You don't need to spend forever scrubbing your pans and you can get away with using a lot less oil when you cook. But for all the good, there's some potential dangers that every cook should be aware of when it comes to nonstick.

Nonstick pans are coated with the synthetic polymer polytetrafluoroethylene - better known as Teflon®. What you may not know is that Teflon can release toxic fumes when heated above certain temperatures. One of the gases, perflurooctanoic acid (PFOA) aka C-8, has been linked to cancer and birth defects in lab studies, and is suspected to be the culprit behind the birth defects found in children of DuPont (maker of Teflon) employees who were exposed to the substance.

More half-cooking: chili soy succotash with potstickers

Given the warm response to the last half-cooking post, I figure I have to follow with another. Today's chili soy succotash is a dish that I learned from my dad and it's so easy that it's my go-to dish whenever I'm most crunched for time but want to get in some veggies. It also pairs nicely with meaty quick-cooking items like potstickers.

The art of half-cooking

It's really fun and rewarding to cook fancy stuff, and I wish I could do it all the time. But the reality is that unless you're basking in free time, or work as a food pro, there are just not enough minutes in the day to make the majority of your meals exquisite. This is especially the case if you're like me, working in the tech-startup world where 15 hour days and 7 day work weeks are pretty commonplace (and as a result instant ramen and microwave dinners are pretty commonplace too). So what do you do when you want a yummy, healthy meal and don't want to go out to eat every day? Where do you turn when you're fed up with how the Lean Cuisine never looks or tastes as good out of the microwave as the box cover would lead you to believe?

The answer is what I call half-cooking: using pre-prepared and often pre-cooked ingredients to help speed up your cooking. If you're a hard-core cook, this may seem like cheating. But if you enjoy being efficient while eating well, then hopefully this is more akin to a creative challenge on a time budget. I half-cook almost every weeknight, and as a result I've come up with a bunch of short-cuts and efficient recipes that help me get through the week with a happy tummy. I'll be sharing these tips in this and upcoming posts.

How to chop onions without crying

I recently attended a dinner party where we decided to make some guacamole from scratch together. It was then that I found out that one of my friends didn't know how to chop vegetables. Eager to learn and pitch in, he took up chopping the tomatoes, while I volunteered to demonstrate how to dice the most notorious veggie on the chopping block: the onion.

The basics: How to dice an onion

You might wonder how much explanation is really required for this basic task, but there is actually a decent amount of technique to it (though for those of you who have been chopping veggies all your life, the following section might be more interesting). I first learned how to mince an onion by watching the masterful Jacques Pepin on PBS, and this technique was later reinforced by watching the meticulous folks at America's Test Kitchen (gotta love PBS cooking shows!). Here's how to do it: