Learn How A Fire Fighter Cooks. Learn The Tips and Techniques For Making Great Meals

Thank you. Hey everyone, my name is Danny Dumas and this is the earn your title podcast. And today we are continuing to expand the skills that every man should have. And today I'm going to talk about cooking, preparing food in your house, grocery shopping. And this is a skill that as a young man, I did not possess when I was 21, I started in the fire service. And one thing that I, I prepared for was, you know, how to pull hose off a truck. As a paramedic, I could start IV.

I could stick a tube in your throat and intubate you. I could stick a needle in your chest and do plural decompression. I had some skills. You know, I'd been highly trained. And when you first become a firefighter, usually for maybe two or three weeks, you go to work every day, Monday through Friday, and they do some training and some, you know, just normal onboarding stuff. Then you get put on shift. and you get on a fire truck and they usually don't count you as manning.

Meaning if you're supposed to have 30 people, you'd be the 31st person. They're not counting on you to do the job because you're extra. They want to make sure you're safe. You know how the equipment works. But at some point within probably your first month, you get counted as manning, which means today you're the firefighter on the back of the truck and you're expected to, you know, to do all the responsibilities of a firefighter. And on that day I did the most scariest thing.

I had ever done in my life. And I, and I got home the next day and I told my mom, I was still living home. She's like, how was your day? I was like, it was so scary. She's like, you have a bad fire? I said, no. She said, what did, what happened? I said, I had to cook and I had to cook not just for, you know, two or three guys, not for your family who is happy when you put a little bit of effort in. These were 12 grown angry men and I had to prepare two meals, lunch and dinner.

And I did not know what I was doing. Now, thankfully this, I wasn't the first person that didn't know what they were doing and they had a informal process of teaching, which was the year, the guy that drives the ladder truck, he was kind of like the senior engineer. He had, you know, all those guys had 15 to 20 years on. He wrote me a list. He said, go to the store, buy this food.

When I brought it back, he told me step by step, exactly how to prepare this food, how to cook it, how to clean it, how to chop it up. And because they don't want to eat bad food, right? They want to eat good. And but you know, it was a skill I had to learn. And as men, I think it's so important that we could do everything at the house. Now, you might have a relationship with your wife that she's the cook. And that's awesome. She loves to do that. And it's something she likes to do.

But I think we should all be able to do it. Now, one of you is probably going to be better than the other one. And maybe you grill. and she cooks in the kitchen or maybe like when I was growing up, my dad made breakfast. That was like his thing he did. He cooked out, he grilled out, he made breakfast. He didn't make a whole lot of dinners. When I got older, actually he started doing that a lot more, but I having that skill is, is really important.

And I now looking back on it, I really enjoyed it when I first started. I was scary. I mean, it was just, I think it was the atmosphere going from not being able to cook at all to cooking for. 10, sometimes 15 guys and they were mean, just to put it bluntly, they, they would say stuff like, you know what? This was not bad. You know, we'll make it better. If you cook to like 10 more minutes and threw it in the trash and you would just go, okay, thanks.

I just spent, you know, eight hours slaving in the kitchen for this. But eventually they kind of give you a little bit of a break. They'll say things like, you know what? That wasn't terrible. And that's an amazing compliment. And you get 10 years on and they're like, Hey man, that was awesome. They're helping you out and they appreciate the hard work. But.

It's a process. So I want to take you through the process of figuring out what you're going to eat and then cooking it. And I'm going to give you some tools and some resources that really helped me kind of up my cooking game.

And if you, if you're at all interested, the amount of information out there, you can become like an awesome home cook through YouTube, through Pinterest, through Instagram, Tik Tok, you can actually learn some really solid recipes and you only need a couple, you know, like, like, for the new firefighters, I tell them you need three lunches, three dinners. You need to be able to make soup. You need to be able to cook every kind of protein and a couple of pasta dishes and you're good to go.

So step one, you actually have to get food. What me and my wife have done and it is very helpful is on Sunday, Saturday or Sunday, we'll make a list for the week. We usually just plan one meal. So we're not planning breakfast, lunch and dinner. We'll plan dinner. And then we'll, you know, leftovers will just happen for lunch and breakfast foods are just the general, you know, we have stuff for pancakes. We have stuff for cereal.

So we plan every, every day we plan one meal, one big meal, and that's usually dinner. And the plan might just be like on Tuesday, there's a soccer game. So we're going to go out to eat. So we plan that all out. You get the meal and you just get the general idea and you write it down. We're having barbecue chicken this day. We're having pulled pork that day. We're having spaghetti. Write it down. Then. Yeah, for each meal you write down everything you think you would need.

So let's say we're going to have spaghetti and we know we need noodles. We need spaghetti sauce. We need some type of ground beef, sausage if you like it, garlic bread. And we try to have a vegetable at every meal and we're planning meals. The easiest way I can remember is you need to have a dead animal, some type of vegetable, a green vegetable, preferable, and then some type of carb or starch, so noodles or potatoes, something like that. And that makes a pretty good meal.

And that's a pretty good. So you make spaghetti, you list everything you need. And then before you go to the store and you do that for all the meals. So you write them all out, everything you need. Then you open up your refrigerator, you open up your pantry and you cross off the items. you know, we got spaghetti sauce still. We're good. We don't have noodles. We have ground beef. You just cross it all out. Then you look at your list.

and everything that's not crossed out that makes it to the shopping list. Now, one thing we use, we use this, and there's lots of apps out there now, but there's one called any list and it's free and it's awesome. It syncs between me and my wife. You can have the paid version of which we've tried before where it has whole meals where if you sit, you can just hit spaghetti and it puts all those items in the list automatically, which is pretty cool. Google notes will do that.

Like we share the meals for the week on our Google notes or excuse me, Apple notes. If you have an iPhone. And that, that syncs up. So when she updates the meal plan and we both have access to the list, we both know what we're going to be eating. So we have this list, any list, it's awesome. And we use it throughout the week, not just for meal planning, like on Sundays, but so like today I made pancakes. If I use the last of the syrup, I open up the app and I put on, syrup.

And then next time we go, we're not thinking, what do we need? So first thing you do, create the list, add the ingredients. then shop out at your house. You shop at your house, you take everything that you don't need, cross it off the list. And then now you have a list of things and by planning our meals, shopping at home first, we save a significant amount of money. And right now that the grocery bill, I'm sure you guys are experiencing this as well.

We're in, you know, I'm recording this in May, 2024. The, with inflation, the food cost has gone just. Just crazy. I mean, we could easily spend 1500 bucks a month on food. If you would have told me that, you know, 20 years ago as a young single man, that you're going to at one point in your life, you're going to spend 1500 dollars on food. That's unbelievable. When we plan though, we're way closer to a thousand dollars than we are to the 1500 dollars.

And that just, you know, planning out your meals. If we're going to have like, maybe we're going to have rotisserie chicken one day. The next day we're going to have chicken noodle soup because we're probably going to have some leftover. Making your meals stretch. that's been very helpful. So if you're kind of on a crunch for figuring out how to eat affordably, planning your meals is important.

And if you're having any health goals, which I don't, which you know, things you do or don't want to eat, planning it out ahead of times, writing your list and only buying what's on the list can be very helpful. So make your list, shop at home, then go to the grocery store. So now you've acquired the food, you're deciding to cook. How do you, you know, how do you, how do you put these meals together? And while it seems very simple, just YouTube it.

The amount of things that I YouTube, just how do I make this fill in the blank is, is awesome. One thing that I, I, it took me a little while to figure this out as long as you're not baking. So if you're baking, which would be like baking a cake, baking bread, those are very specific measurements of, of salt or sugar or flour to get the right consistency of bread.

Anything else though, everybody's just making it up. You know, like I make a chicken noodle soup. I don't know how much of everything I put in it. I just know the things that I put in it. I know the ingredients, but I don't know how much. And it, cause it varies a lot. If we were doing a whole root history chicken, that's, you know, two pounds, that's going to be way different than if it was a big one, it was four pounds. You know?

So like, I can't tell you that you need to put a tablespoon of salt in there, but I know that I put salt. I put pepper, I put garlic, I put cumin, I put curry, you know, like these things that I put in and then I taste it and I go, yeah, that's good or that's too salty. And if it's too salty, I just add more water. So taking away the pressure of knowing, having to know exactly how to do something, it made all the difference in the world.

Cause I would be stressed out, like, I don't know how to make this. Everybody just made it up. There's no solid rules. As long as you're not baking. When you're baking, You know, you kind of kind of nail the ratios of salt and flour and things like that. So if you're cooking, cook it like you want. If you really like garlic, like I like garlic. When someone says like a clove of garlic, I put in the whole thing because it's I like it and it's I usually have never had anything that says to garlic.

So I cook, you know, that's that's me. Do you do you? You can do whatever you want. So that's that's like the the main rule is it's an experiment. Try it out. Sometimes things are awesome. Sometimes they're not that great, but you can try it before you serve it. And if it doesn't taste good, change it up, you know, add something to it. So, yeah, it's not a precise science. It's way more of an art when it comes to cooking things, make them taste the way you want them to taste.

Now there's some tools that I would recommend anybody that's starting to cook that you go out and purchase these. One is an instant read thermometer. My wife has an extreme concern about food being undercooked. She just, she worries a little bit about it and to ensure that it's not, I have an instant read thermometer and I would suggest spending like the above the $10 range. You know, those ones are, they do work, but you stick it into me and it takes like a minute.

If it's on the grill, your hands getting too hot. They have some instant reads that are like one second it reads and they're really accurate. If you're cooking chicken, just stick it in there and see what the temperature is. It saves you a lot. Two, they have the wireless meat thermometers that you leave in. So if you're, you're baking something, if you're like doing baked chicken, you obviously don't want to be opening up and doing the instant read all the time.

Stick the thermometer in there and cook to the right temperature. when you're barbecuing, when you're grilling, that's how it all works. It's, you can't say I'm going to cook a pork butt and I'm going to cook it for four hours. You don't know how long you're going to cook it. You're going to cook it until it's 204 degrees so that you can pull it and that you got a good smoky flavor. That might be eight hours. That might be 10 hours. That could be six hours. Use the temperature to cook.

It's way more accurate, which takes me to the next tool that this was a game changer. And I've only had this for maybe two or three years. It's called a sous vide and it's a fancy word for a water heater in.

It seems when I first saw this, I had never heard of it. I guess they use it in commercial kitchens. If you're going to make, let's say you're going to make steak, you're going to take this steak, season it up, put it in a bag. Now the best way is a vacuum sealer where it actually takes all the air out. It sucks the bag. If you've seen like how things are stored at the grocery store, they vacuum seal it's tight. That's the best way.

So you have a vacuum sealer, you can vacuum seal it, but a Ziploc bag works just fine. you're going to take this sous vide and it kind of looks like a, like a hand mixer, like a wand hand mixer, and you put it in the water and you set it to a temperature. So if you wanted a medium steak, you would cook it to like 140. Now this is very interesting. Some people only want their steak like well, well done because they don't like that raw flavor.

They don't like the texture of things being rare when it's pink in the middle. And the problem, what, what happens usually is to, To get a medium steak, you have the, if it's right, the middle is medium and then the outside is slightly well done. And then the very outside is super well done. And it just, it's not a great way to cook, especially if it's a thick steak. What this sous vide does is you set the temperature and heats the water to 140 and then it never goes above or below.

It keeps it between probably 138 and 142. It just nails that temperature. So the steak, the whole thing cooks to 140 and it's perfect. Now like for most of the, if I make a steak for myself, I'll do it 135 and cause I like a more rare steak. But because I did this, the whole thing from the outside to the inside is 135. You don't get the, like if you tried to cook a steak that rare on the grill, you're probably, the middle is raw where it doesn't even heat up at all.

What do they call it in the, like in the restaurant road would be blue where it's literally raw meat in the middle. because it's hard to judge a thick steak and get the whole thing. Well, the whole thing is at whatever temperature you set it at. And you'll have this in the water bath for one, two, three, even four hours. And one of the benefits of this is, let's say you have friends coming over and they're the friends that are always late.

Well, you want to have everything ready so when they walk in, they eat. Well, if they're the friends that are always late, if you miss a steak by cooking on the grill by two or three minutes, that can be the difference between perfect and... like shoe leather. This with the sous vide, you can cook it. It can be in there for three hours. And the other benefit of this is, it truly is a safe steak to eat. Now you can, if you undercook some meats, you can have the danger of bacteria.

Cause at 165 bacteria dies. That is like when you're cooking chicken, we obviously don't want underdone chicken. That's the temperature you're shooting for. And the reason they picked that temperature is at 165. All the bacteria, the bugs, the nasty stuff that can make you sick dies instantly at 165. It only needs to be there for 30, 40 seconds, maybe a minute, everything dies. So if you would cook a chicken at 140, you're like, there's no way that can be done.

Well, the cool thing is, is if you hold a temperature, which is called pasteurization, if you hold the temperature at 140, let's say at 30 minutes, it kills everything as well. And the best explanation of this I heard of is if... If right now we're on planet earth and the sun is, I don't know, millions of miles away, if you put somebody on the sun, the human being, they would die instantly. That's 165. If you stuck them halfway between here and the sun, maybe they wouldn't die instantly.

But if you kept them exposed to that radiation that close to the sun in 30 minutes, they would die. So by holding a consistent temperature for a certain amount of time, all the bacteria inside of whatever dish you're cooking, dies and you're not worried about an unsafe meal and you can still enjoy the texture of a, of a, a well cooked, protein. So going back to the steak analogy, what you would do is you'd set it at one 40 or whatever, whatever you like.

You would cook it for two hours in the sous vide. You would take it out about 10 minutes before you're going to, you're going to eat it, dry it off really, really well. Now when it comes out, it looks like a, like a, like a boiled steak, which is, is we don't want to eat boiled steaks. You want the crispy grill marks on the outside. So the way I do it is I get it out and I get it as dry as possible and I'll actually let it rest for five, 10 minutes out of the sous vide while it's drying off.

And then I get a cast iron skillet. I get it super hot so that if you were to drop oil in it, it would, it would, it would smoke like really, really hot. Throw a little bit of oil in there, turn the heat down a little bit after you've got to that where it would smoke. Set your steak on. You're going to sear it for just maybe 30 seconds, maybe a minute, flip it over, get that nice char taste, that char flavor in the steak is perfect. And you can't, you really can't mess it up.

You could probably over char it, I guess, and maybe feel like the outside tastes burnt, but this technology, and you can do it for any type of protein. You can do it with eggs. You can make soft boiled egg instead of hard boiled eggs. Instead of going to 212 at boiling, you could do them at, you know, 200. When you open them up, open them up, it's like eggs over easy. It's an amazing technology. It's not expensive. The company that I use is called Innova. I'm sure there's several other ones.

It was less than a hundred bucks. I think it was like $98. Buy this. This will change. It will make you look like a super expert. Some of the other tools that I use, like I said, I like cooking. We actually have two ovens. We have a normal, just conventional oven. And then we have a steam oven, which is like the sous vide. You can add steam into the cooking process, which it has a sous vide function where you put the probe in and it will keep the temperature exactly the same.

So, you know, you can obviously make this better. The other tool that we use at my house all the time is a pressure cooker. or Instapot is the name. So this is an electric pressure cooker. Back in the day, the pressure cooker, you'd put it on the oven or the stove top and you heat it up and there would be a weight on the top and that would maintain the pressure. So if it got too much pressure, it would let out, but you still had to have heat on. These are electric.

They can be slow cookers, but using that pressure function, you can take something like a pot roast that would take eight hours to cook a roast in the slow cooker. In 45 minutes, it's perfect and you can still slow cook it after that. So you could have it, you know, delayed cook. If you're leaving, you put it in the crock pot in the morning, you go into work three hours or two hours before you come home, it turns on.

It's going to pressure cook for 45 minutes and the pressure is going to go off and slowly release. So when you get home, you open it up and you have this perfectly cooked pot roast. So just making cooking easy with through tools and technology, I think is very helpful. Don't be afraid of it. This is a skill that is, can be really enjoyable. You don't have to be regulated as a guy to just grilling things. Although I think that's awesome.

And if you're going to grill, the easiest way is use a pellet, pellet stove or pellet grill. Literally you set the temperature, you put the probe in there, you turn it on, shut it. Don't look at it until it gets to temperature, take it out and you're good to go. It just, you know, technology has made cooking way easier.

If you want to get into like, you know, adding the wood and all that, that's cool. But realize it doesn't have to be complicated like that. So yeah, that's my, my tips. plan your meals, shop at home, shop at the grocery store, use technology to make life so much easier and cooking and just seek out help. Go to YouTube, go to Pinterest. You can find a lot and you can pressure family. Give your wife the day off. Tell her you love all the food she cooks and you just want to help and get good at it.

It's a, it's a fun skill. It's something that I enjoy doing. And it brings me joy to have people over and have them eat something. This is awesome. This is really good. That feels good to me. And you guys can do that as well. So again, my name is Danny Dumas. So, you know, we're acquiring skills. Hopefully you're enjoying these podcasts.

If you have some skills in your life, you have some things that you're trying to do, you're trying to go after, you have some goals and dreams, I want to help you be accountable. I want to help you get to those dreams, get to those goals. Give me a call, give me a text, reach out. I want to interact with the people that are listening to this podcast and I want to help you. I'm going to leave my information in the show notes. I want to help you free of charge.

I just want to interact with my, you know, the people that are getting some value out of this. And it's just my way of saying thank you for supporting this show. This is the earn your title podcast and I am Danny Dumas and I will talk to you later. Bye.