The 10-Minute Rule or Canadian Cooking Method is one way to cook fish by conventional methods including grilling, broiling, poaching, steaming, sautéing, microwaving, en papillotte, planking, and baking (at 400F to 450F). Here is how to use the 10 Minute Rule:

Measure the fish at its thickest point. If the fish is stuffed or rolled, measure it after stuffing or rolling.

Cook fish about 10 minutes per inch, turning it halfway through the cooking time. For example, a 1-inch fish steak should be cooked 5 minutes on each side for a total of 10 minutes.

Pieces less than 1/2 inch thick do not have to be turned over.

Test for doneness. Flake with a fork. Fish should reach an internal temperature of 145 degrees.

Add 5 minutes to the total cooking time for fish cooked in foil or in sauce.

Even for experienced cooks, Christmas dinner presents a unique challenge. Felicity Cloake examines every aspect of the main course and makes mince pies and brandy butter to keep everyone going

It doesn't have to be a chore - this method ensures a wonderfully moist turkey that's easy to carve

Last night an on-screen Jamie Oliver went to some lengths testing three types of roast spud. Our verdict? Lightweight! Here, our own Vicky Frost tests three varieties of spud with four sworn-by recipes from celebrity chefs. That's 12 lots of potatoes eaten selflessly, all for you. You may find the results surprising ...

So here are the six most common and egregious food myths I commonly encounter, and the truth behind them. You can use this information to either improve your cooking, or to sound like a pompous windbag at your next cocktail party.

Honestly, I really do look forward to my first, frost-sweetened sprouts of the year. (Though, if I'm completely honest, perhaps not quite so much as I look forward to the first broad beans, though that may just be because they often come with a side order of sunshine.) I treat sprouts tenderly, boiling or steaming them until they're cooked but still retain a little bite – about six minutes should do it for small, walnut-sized sprouts, which are the ones we're hankering after here anyway. The other benefit of choosing small sprouts – apart from their superior flavour – is that you don't have to bother with that fiddly nonsense of cutting crosses in their bases to ensure that they cook evenly.

Cheap and delicious recipes for student gourmets from some of the country's top chefs, including Gordon Ramsay, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver

We've grown to love Thai green curry as a spicy comforter, but with some fresh ingredients and a little care you can remind yourself of how the affair began. What's in yours?

There are said to be over 300 shapes of pasta, each of which has a history, a story to tell, and an affinity with particular foods. These shapes have evolved alongside the flavours of local ingredients, and the perfect combination can turn an ordinary dish into something sublime.

The Geometry of Pasta pairs over 100 authentic recipes from critically acclaimed chef, Jacob Kenedy, with award-winning designer Caz Hildebrand’s stunning black-and-white designs to reveal the science, history and philosophy behind spectacular pasta dishes from all over Italy.

This quick supper dish should be salty, piquant and hot. The saltiness comes from anchovies and olives; the piquancy from the tomatoes and the effect of the capers; the heat from dried chilli flakes. Spaghetti puttanesca is not a genteel dish – it should in fact be a little coarse and the flavours should explode in the mouth. It is the best of all standby dishes, ready in minutes and made from ingredients you probably have.

Authentic Indian flatbreads (naan) can be shallow fried or baked - they cook in just 15 mins

Oven-fresh bread is one of life’s simple joys. Ciabatta, a crisp-crusted Italian bread with hints of sourdough and loads of crannies longing for butter, is one of the easiest breads to make at home.

If you're a programmer, hacker, or maker who is interested in learning how to cook, this book is for you. In this book, I'll cover the basics of cooking and provide a number of simple and fun recipes as part of the food hacking experiments, while at the same time exploring the science behind the example recipes to allow you to start discovering your own style. If you're already comfortable in the kitchen, you'll find this book covers a number of new emerging technologies that are making their way from the lab to the kitchen. A number of these new techniques can be adapted for everyday use to make life in the kitchen easier and allow you to discover new ways of cooking.

Is your stock in trade shop-bought or homemade? How do you do your patriotic duty by the scrapings in the roasting pan?

It has a strong claim to the title of greatest British biscuit. What's the best commercial shortbread, and what's your favourite recipe?

So is it as good as a real Neapolitan pizza fired in a wood burning oven? No way. Would I be happy, impressed, and completely satisfied if I went to my friends place and he served me this pie? Absolutely. And on top of that, it doesn't require you to preheat an oven, and the whole thing is cooked within a matter of minutes—a really big deal for me in an apartment that gets absurdly hot in the summer.

Whenever I stay in a hotel, I always order poached eggs for breakfast. It's such a treat to start the day with a thing of beauty, rather than the soggy, straggly mess of protein I generally scoop out of the pan at home. Simple in theory, if not execution, a poached egg is, in my opinion, the only choice when someone else is cooking – the small pleasure of watching the golden yolk spill under my knife never grows old. But I could count the number of presentable examples that have come out of my kitchen on your average hotel toast rack – and still have a couple of rungs to spare for granary. So I'm determined to crack (sorry) the secret of the perfect poached egg.

Baked, boiled, grated or blitzed, its deliciously earthy taste and supreme versatility give healthy beetroot the edge over other summer vegetables…

It's amazing what even quite young children can achieve in the kitchen, and the summer holidays are the perfect time to let them find their culinary feet.

Something very weird happened to Kevin Costner back in 1989. As he stood in his cute, all-American white tee in an Iowan cornfield, the very crop seem to have a message for him: "If you build it … they* will come" it whispered, somewhat unhelpfully. Putting aside the issue of whether Field of Dreams was single-handedly responsible for the Millennium Dome for a moment, I'd like to suggest the same is true of the chocolate brownie. Put brownies on the menu, and people will come, and they will order dessert. They simply cannot help themselves; confronted by the prospect of this all-American delight, the human soul crumbles into fudgey defeat, and a million eyes widen into heart-shaped pools of chocolate goo.

I love chillies. You love chillies. But the problem with chillies is that they tend to attract insufferable willy-waving Nuts readers who think that eating a piece of fruit immediately turns them into testosterone-sodden paradigms of brave, muscled blokiness. Visit a curry house in a student town on a Friday night, and all too often you'll hear the bark and bray of some team or other from across the room: a beefy herd waheying as one of its number gulps and weeps over a mutton phaal, a bowl of red, raw, sadistic chillies burning at his side. The jocular jocks will then taunt this luckless chump with tooth-sucking promises of ring-stingers and agonised, searing squits on the clenched and bitter morrow.

Do you have a passion for pesto? What's your favourite recipe, and is there any better way to eat it than with linguine and green beans?

At the store this weekend, I counted no fewer than a dozen different varieties of pre-packaged pancake mixes. And this was a fancy, highfalutin store that doesn’t even bother to stock the aerosol or otherwise weaponized shake-and-pour varieties. What’s the lesson here? That pancakes are hard; here, gentle consumers who are far too busy to bother making from scratch, just add water.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I make pretty decent pie dough; not because it impugns my manhood but because from-scratch pie crusts, especially flaky pie crusts, are supposed to be difficult. You’ve probably heard about tricks like using vodka or other such sorcery but I’ve always had luck with just the basics. I really wish I had a trick of my own to impart.

"Prep like a pro and avoid disaster on Christmas Day. What's your top tip for taking the stress out of cooking Christmas dinner?"