1 . Gong Bao Chicken was originally a family dish of Ding Baozhen, an official of the Qing Dynasty. Over the years, it has become one of the most popular dishes in Chinese restaurants all over the world.

It’s hard for people to refuse the delicious dish. What’s more, it is easy to make. So, why not pick up some chicken and try this recipe out?

RECIPE

Ingredients

chicken breast.................................................300g

roasted peanuts.................................................50g

small pieces of dried tofu.................................50g

cooking oil...............................................2 spoons

dried chillies..................................................5 or 6

spring onions...........................................a handful

soy sauce...............................................1 teaspoon

vinegar...................................................1 teaspoon

sugar......................................................2 teaspoon

salt.........................................................1 teaspoon

Instructions

1. Heat the oil over a high heat.

2. When the oil is hot, add the chillies and stir them for about 30 seconds.

3. Add the spring onions and stir them for about 30 seconds.

4. Add the chicken and cook it through.

5. Add the soy sauce, vinegar and sugar.

6. Add the peanuts and dried tofu and cook for another 1 to 2 minutes.

7. Add some salt and serve.

4 . Could you cook Christmas dinner in an AIR FRYER?

Graphic shows they deliver juicy results on a roast chicken... and they are up to three times cheaper than an oven to run.

The Which? testers initially cooked a three-pound (1.4 kg) chicken in all these appliances, including both a halogen and conventional oven.

This bird would be big enough to feed four people, with enough meat left for some Boxing Day sandwiches. They found the pressure cooker was both the cheapest and quickest way of roasting it, taking 32 minutes and costing a tiny 11p – 28p cheaper than the electric oven. But unlike the oven, it fell short on getting achieving one of the highlights of the Christmas roast – the brown, crispy skin.

The air fryer also cooked the chicken’s skin nicely but gave perfect, tender meat, all for just 18p and in under an hour. Additionally, if you ditched the oven and used an air fryer for every Sunday roast for the rest of the year, using the gadget would equate to an annual saving of £11.

The testers did note that the chicken cooked in the electric oven was also a little dry, meaning the air fryer came out on top over all other appliances.

The cost savings will soon be lost if you have to cook more than one batch though, so it’s still better to use your oven if you’re cooking large quantities.

However, the slow cooker received a bonus point for requiring less hands-on attention, and was therefore the most convenient.

7 . Would you like to put an end to slapdash (仓促的), last-minute meals? Downloading a few meal planning apps may give you more time outside the kitchen.

Many meal prep apps focus on calorie-counting and weight loss, but sometimes meal planning comes down to simply getting a delicious, satisfying meal on the table. Finding an app that will do that is key. Take a look at these top meal planning apps and decide which might work for you.

This app offers healthy recipes, grocery lists, and more. It prioritizes meals that cook in 30 minutes or so. The grocery lists are even made as good as possible to reduce the amount of time you spend at the supermarket, so the whole process, from planning to shopping to cooking, takes up less of your time.

This app allows you to move recipe ingredients (原料) to your in-app grocery list. The list is accessible to every member of the family, meaning anyone can swing by the store to shop. Once you start dinner prep, turn on Cozi’s Cooking Mode, which keeps your screen lit so you don’t have to touch it with dirty fingers. Genius!

This adorable app takes the stress out of packing lunches by getting kids involved in choosing their meals. New dietary-specific bundles ensure that every kid can use LaLa Lunchbox.

With a database of more than 350,000 recipes, this app has seasonal collections featured on its home screen to ensure you’re using the freshest in-season ingredients. Our favorite feature of BigOven? The Use Up Leftovers tool, which suggests a recipe you can make with the three ingredients you enter.

Last Friday, our teacher announced that in order to

9 . Tomorrow’s menus could feature items prepared with complex cooking techniques and presentation — all at the push of a button. Columbia University mechanical engineers have designed a 3 - D printer that can produce and cook dishes at the same time with details at the millimeter scale.

The design combines a multiwavelength laser (激光) cooker, roughly the size of five smart phones piled together, with a microwave - oven - sized food printer. The system uses various light wavelengths to cook in different ways: a short - waved blue laser goes deep inside meat, for example, while infrared beams (红外线光束) brown the surface. As the device’s robotic arm places fine layers of chicken puree (酱, 糊), a high - powered beam moves over them and cooks the meat — with literally laser - focused precision. Thus, users can achieve perfect results — say, a machine - made burger that varies between rare and well done in a checkerboard pattern.

“It gives you a lot more control and customization,” says Jonathan Blutinger, lead author of the paper and a digital - cooking researcher at Columbia. The researchers tested only chicken for this study, but the system can work with other foods as well.

Beyond applying diverse materials and presentation patterns, this type of software - controlled setup could someday scan a QR code to automatically prepare dishes tailored to individual eating habits and dietary restrictions, Blutinger says.

The new technology is “astonishing”, says Megan Ross, a food scientist who studies 3 - D printing at Ireland’s University College Cork. Ross notes that the design is still at a beginning stage and that many technical challenges remain, such as preventing cross pollution between layers of raw and cooked meat. Still, Ross is impressed by the device’s ability to produce foods outside the field of conventional cooking. “Is this going to be sold in shops everywhere in the next few years? No,” she says. “But everyone has to start somewhere.”

10 . Bread Baking in Ancient Egypt

Did you know that bread is one of the earliest human inventions?

    1     Other ingredients(原料) and shapes can vary. Scientists have learned that humans have been eating bread in some form or another for 30,000 years.

Archaeologists (考古学家) have discovered pictures of bakeries and loaves of bread in ancient Egyptian archaeological sites.    2     Home-bakers, usually women, baked only the bread they would need for that day.

In fact, because they had no potatoes or rice, bread was the most important in the ancient Egyptian’ diet. Egyptians used a grain much similar to wheat for their bread. The grain was broken by hand into flour on stone. The flour was mixed with water and salt.     3     This Egyptian bread was a flatbread. Indian naan and Middle Eastern pita are two examples of flatbread eaten today. At the end of the ancient Egyptian period, however, around 300 BC, Egyptian bakers added to their bread an important ingredient: yeast (酵母).     4     Most breads today are made using those four basic ingredients: flour, yeast, salt, and water.

However, bread production today is more complicated. Yes, you can still bake your own bread at home with store-bought flour and yeast.     5     But the bread you see in grocery stores is made in large factories which bake many different breads.