Deglaze
Sometimes you run across a concept or technique and you think, “Whoa, that sounds complicated—I’ll have to think about that. Maybe read up on it…”
Deglazing a pan when cooking seems like it belongs to that category, but it doesn’t. My take on deglazing a pan is as follows:
Cook some meat in a pan, probably on high or medium high. Let some of it stick. (e.g. sear a steak, stir fry some chicken, etc.)
Grab a liquid—it could literally be almost anything—and pour a little in the pan. It could be vinegar or broth. It could just be water. It could be beer or wine that you would never serve to someone you were on good terms with.
Heat up the undrinkable liquid and scrape up the stuck food. (optional: add some butter, herbs and/or other stuff for additional flavoring)
Pour the scraped-up mixture over the meat you cooked in the pan in step #1.
Congratulations: you made a fancy sauce using food bits that were destined for the garbage and a liquid you wouldn’t drink unless you were dying of thirst—and you did it by getting a head-start on cleaning the pan.