Welcome to The Dish, I'm Natasha, this is your two minute tip to help you cook better food. And today I want to talk about a summer favorite. One of my favorite ingredients to eat during summer time, which are tomatoes. They are in season. They're ripe, they're delicious. They're sweet. It's best time of year to enjoy tomatoes. If you're going to eat tomatoes, make sure it's a summer tomato. And one of the ways that I encourage you to try out eating tomatoes is sun drying them or dehydrating them at home.

When you dehydrate them, you really concentrate all of that flavor. So you get the sweet and the savory flavor of tomatoes packing with a really strong punch. That is absolutely delicious. It's a great addition to lots of dishes. I love it with breakfast eggs, frittatas, omelets. You can pack it into pastas. It goes great with pretty much anything you can think of. It's super, super delicious.

So what you want to do to make your own sun-dried tomatoes, it's very, very simple and easy.

You don't even actually need the sun to do this so you can do it anywhere in the world, no matter what time of year it is or what you have access to -  if you don't have a super hot place that you live in. So what you want to do is you'll get some tomatoes. It's really easy to use like a plum tomato, grape tomatoes, a cherry tomato. Those are all really great.

You're going to slice those in half and then you're going to put them in an oven. A low heat oven. So anywhere from 200, 250 degrees Fahrenheit for a couple of hours. So two to three hours it's going to sit in there. And during that time process, it will dehydrate and you'll get that nice and juicy, savory, concentrated flavor. Make sure that you've seasoned that with salt before you cook it. And then after you can also add additional herbs, you can do things like oregano or rosemary time. Those will be wonderful additions to add to your tomatoes.

And then when you're storing those, you'll just want to make sure that you add some oil. Add olive oil, if you're going to be storing these for a longer period of time. Packing it into the oil will help preserve it and keep it for much longer if you're not going to use those immediately.

So that is my two minute tip for you this week. To make some delicious sun dried tomatoes so you can enjoy tomatoes all year long. Get the good stuff in the summertime and then enjoy all year long.

That's it for this week. I'll see you next time.

​Hello, hello, everyone, I'm Natasha Ho, welcome to The Dish, this is your two minute tip to help you cook better food today. It's summertime, so I want to talk about grilling and how to get really great results from your grill. Just three really quick things that can help you get great results when you're grilling. First and foremost is making sure that you are cooking on a clean grill. This is super, super important for multiple reasons.

One, it prevents sticking. A dirty grill is the number one reason that food will stick to the grates of your grill. So make sure to clean this off. Number two, it will help with getting those signature grill marks, if that's what you're going for. From an aesthetic point of view, making sure that your grill is clean will help you with that. And also it helps for a sanitary reason. Making sure that we have a clean grill will prevent any leftover residue bacteria from being on the good, clean food that you're cooking currently.

The next thing to understand about cooking with your grill is the different areas of heat that you'll have available on your grill. So you can have direct and indirect heat. Direct heat is anytime that you're cooking directly over the heat source, that is direct heat. So you're going to be cooking with a very high temperature, if you're using a direct heat source.

If you're using indirect you're moving the food away from the heat source. So you're cooking adjacent to the heat source. So you're not going to be getting as high or intense of a temperature. You're going to allow the  food to cook more gently and slower.

And then finally, the last thing to understand is using the lid of your grill. And really, this is a key part of becoming a grill master is learning how to use that lid properly. And you can use the lid of your grill to create an environment of indirect heat, more like convection that's happening by allowing the heat to surround the food. This is really important if you're trying to smoke the food because you're going to capture that smoke and allow the smoke to permeate and add flavor to your food.

So those are three important things to understand. If you are going to be grilling and if you want to dive even deeper into how to get great results using grilling and heat in general, you have to come on over to my Facebook group, Travel and Feast, we're starting my Birthday Backyard Barbecue today to celebrate my birthday, which is this week, and I want to celebrate it with you.

So come on over to Travel and Feast. We're starting today at 1:00 p.m. Pacific Time today, July 20th, and then we'll be continuing throughout the rest of this week. I'll be in the group tomorrow, Wednesday at 1:00 p.m. and Thursday, my actual birthday at 1:00 p.m. Pacific Time each day. So you come on over there and join me. And if you are not able to join live, you can also catch the replays. Just make sure to register on my website. www.heynatashaboo.com/BBQ to get all of the details, the recipes and the replay. So I look forward to seeing you there later on today. And until then, take care. Bye.

Hello. Hello. I'm Natasha Ho. Welcome to The Dish. And I'm just about to head out to get some knives sharpened, and it reminded me that this is a topic I wanted to talk about here with you all: Getting Knives Sharpened.

And specifically, what's the difference between sharpening a knife versus honing a knife? Now, a lot of people have a device that looks a lot like this at their house, and they will refer to it as a knife sharpener, which it usually is marketed as a knife sharpener, but it's a bit of a misnomer because what it doesn't actually sharpen your knife.

So let's talk about difference between sharpening a knife versus honing a knife. So when you are sharpening a knife, what you are doing is you're changing the actual structure of the blade.

You'll often be removing some of the metal in order to make the blade sharper on a microscopic level.

So you're trying to align all of those little metal molecules in a straight line so that the knife will become incredibly sharp and be able to slice through anything. On the other hand, when you are honing a blade, you're not going to be removing any of the metal from the blade. You're not changing the overall structure of the blade.

What you're trying to do is realign the molecules of metal into a straight line. So over time, as you're chopping and slicing and dicing, the metal will start to become misaligned.

Some of those molecules will start to kind of get pushed here and there by the impact with the food that you're cutting. And so when you hone it, you basically use pressure to push all of those molecules back into alignment so you can elongate the life of the blade, the sharpness of the blade over time by honing in between your sharpening. So using something like this, you can make the amount of time that you have between sharpenings much longer because you hone it between each of those uses.

And then when it is actually not able to be sharpened by honing anymore, when you've really lost the edge on your blade,  then you can take that to a knife sharpener. And they will sharpen it for you. Or if you feel comfortable doing it at home, you can do that as well.

​But you don't need to sharpen as frequently honing something that you would do regularly. But sharpening. Most people only need to do that a couple of times during the year in order to keep a good edge on their blade.

So I wanted to explain what the differences between those two things, because a lot of people mix those two things up. And you might think you've been sharpening your knife all this time when what you're actually doing is honing it, and your knife still needs to get a good sharpening. So make sure that you check your knives. We always want to have very sharp knives in the kitchen. I always say a sharp knife is a safe knife.

I'll see you guys here next time. Bye.