Restaurant Secrets - Fresh Cooking - as part of the food and kitchen series by GeoBeats.

Certain things you definitely do not want to prepare ahead of time. The first thing that comes to mind would be fish. Fish is best served when cooked right away. That is something that, although you might have raw in your refrigerator for maybe two or three days at most, you want to cook it right away. But luckily, fish takes no time to cook, so that is okay. Other things would be something like mashed potatoes. You can cook them a few hours ahead of time but they really dry out and lose a lot of the flavor. Same thing with butter. Butter will break apart in the sauce if it is not eaten right after it is been heated up. You want to be sure that if you are adding butter to a sauce, that is done at the last second.

There are other dishes such as avocado or apples, things that you are going to want to make, like a guacamole or an applesauce. You are going to want to make it the day that you are going to eat it. Otherwise, it will go bad very quickly. Also, a really good tip is, if you are making, like I said, a marinara sauce or anything that has garlic in it, and you are going to freeze it, this is what you going to want to do. Do not mince the garlic up. Just smash the garlic, put it in your sauce, and when you are finished, remove the garlic. Often times garlic will go bad first out of any ingredient in your sauce. If you have removed it, you would not have that worry but you will still get the garlic flavor inside those sauces.