Before you toss the chicken carcass, throw it into a pot. Cover it with water, add an onion, a carrot, and some celery scraps, and simmer it for two hours. Strain the liquid, and you have a rich, golden homemade chicken stock for your freezer.
Cooking like a chef isn’t about buying expensive ingredients. It is about respecting the food you already have.
Every home cook knows the feeling. You open the fridge, look at yesterday’s leftover roast chicken, and feel completely uninspired.
As a chef, I am going to tell you a secret: leftover roast chicken is actually better than fresh chicken.
The meat has already absorbed the salt, herbs, and aromatics from its first cook. It is tender, fully cooked, and ready to be transformed. The trick is to never just reheat it in the microwave—that creates dry, rubbery meat. Instead, you want to use it as a premium ingredient in a completely new dish.
Here are three chef-approved ways to turn your leftover chicken into a meal you will actually look forward to eating.
Want to Be a Better, More Efficient Cook? Start With These 6 Simple Prep Habits
A great cook knows how to plan before the cooking begins.
Behind every successful cook is an organized prep list. When I worked as a prep cook, I followed one to a tee every morning. Most days, I wasn’t even at the stove. I was prepping: unloading groceries, sharpening the knives, putting ingredients away, and keeping my station clean as I chopped onions and peeled beets. Organizing the kitchen every day and taking the time to prep my ingredients properly instilled good habits, and I am a much tidier, more efficient home cook because of it.
Prepping at home can be similarly seamless if you set yourself up for success. In our hungriest moments, it’s tempting to rush through a recipe without reading all the steps and tips and default to messy habits. And sure, we’ve all frantically thrown together a meal. But learning how to prep smarter can help streamline cooking and cleaning up, and, most importantly, make cooking a more enjoyable experience. Whether it’s maintaining a sharp knife or organizing a tidy work station, good prep can make all the difference between a smooth cooking session and a kitchen mishap.
A sharp knife isn’t just safer than a dull one, it’s also the key to clean and precise cuts. And it can improve the cooking experience in some surprising ways. For instance, sharp blades make onions less pungent, since a sharp knife ruptures fewer of the onion’s cell walls, and since this rupture is what leads to the production of the onion’s noxious fumes, cleaner cuts mean less eye-watering aroma. A good annual habit is sending your knives to a quality local sharpener.
While setting up a prep station for small kitchen jobs is unnecessary, staying organized when you meal prep or tackle a big project will help you streamline tasks and make cooking and cleaning easier and faster. That means setting up your mise en place ahead of time, cleaning as you go, and keeping the tools you need close at hand. Prepping is especially useful for fast-paced cooking methods, such as stir-frying in a wok.
Lists of “essential” cooking gear can get long quickly. Most of the time, it isn’t necessary to splurge on expensive equipment when you can make do with what you have. But some cooking gear can expand the possibilities of what you can cook, and save you time, too. If you have the budget, it’s worth investing in items like a good Dutch oven for stews, braises, and one-pot dinners, an instant read thermometer and an immersion blender to blend soups and sauces.
You might be able to mince garlic in your sleep, but there’s no harm in brushing up on basic knife skills, especially when you’re working with new ingredients or ones you don’t use too often. (When was the last time you cut butternut squash?). We recommend learning four essential knife cuts: slicing, chopping, back-slicing, and rock chopping. Having good knife skills will make meal prep much faster, safer, and more pleasant. Plus, cutting ingredients into uniform pieces ensures they cook and brown evenly, so don’t end up with some pieces of food that are undercooked and others that are overcooked.
Instead of freezing a large block of tomato paste or minced garlic, divide the portions into useable amounts in ice cube trays or reusable ziploc bags.
You’ll waste less and won’t have to hack away at a frozen block for a single serving. Freezing stacked bags of meals or prepped ingredients is also a more efficient way to meal prep, since all you need to do is defrost, reheat and enjoy!