Kitchen Essentials: Parchment Paper

Holiday season is fast approaching, and you know that that means! BAKING. Lots and lots and lots of baking. Cookies, muffins, breads, pies, gingerbread men, and more! Within the past year I have discovered something that has changed the way I bake forever: Parchment paper. Found at just about every grocery store known to man, right next to the aluminum foil and plastic wrap.

Why it took me so long, I'll never know. It's not like I never heard of it. My sister, Beth, even mentioned it to me a couple of years ago. I'm a frugal mom (aka "cheap") and in my mind $3.50 just seemed like a high price to pay for more evenly baked cookies. What a limited vision I had.

Yes, parchment paper can make your cookie-making much easier. No need to use cooking spray, no scrubbing the pan afterward, and I generally don't even have to use a spatula to transfer the cookies to the cooling rack.
But this alone would not put parchment paper on my "kitchen essentials" list. Oh, no. There's also French Bread...
...Spinach balls...

...Meatballs....
...and the cherry on top...the "Mac-Daddy" of them all... Oven-Baked Fries.

What do most cooks hate most about cooking? Clean up! That's right, ladies and gentlemen! We may be culinary crazies who love recipes that require all sorts of tedious labor: dipping, stirring, sprinkles, kneading, cutting, peeling, and even pureeing. But what we hate the most is after the fun and games are over and looking over all the bowls, pots, pans, and baking sheets in the sink. Big items that are hard to cram in the dishwasher. This is especially true for anything with baked-on crud that will require hard labor to clean. (Or lots of soaking if you're lazy like me.)

Enter parchment paper. I know there are some of you saying to yourself that you can accomplish the same easy-cleanup step with aluminum foil, but let me tell you something. It's a large step up from aluminum foil for two reasons:
#1 - foil can tear easily
#2 - foil generally needs to be sprayed with cooking spray

I can remember one time when I was making oven fries and I forgot to coat the foil with non-stick cooking spray before baking. It was a disaster. Never mind that the potatoes were coated in oil. They stuck to that foil like white on rice! And when I tried to get them off five minutes into cooking (after I remembered) the foil ripped in several places in the process. I had to start over with a new sheet of foil, this time coated in cooking spray. Had I been using parchment paper, this drama could have been avoided.

I kid you not.

It's the miracle paper. Whatever you're cooking, nothing sticks. Don't believe me? Try it. I double-dog dare you.