Make sure your onions aren't too wet when you put them in the pan.
What do you mean? Aren't they wet just because they're onions?
You're not going to be able to dry them completely, but water droplets will pop in the hot oil and splatter, so you want to remove excess moisture. (I manage this by just not washing my onions before I cook them.)
Lowering the temperature will also reduce splattering.
Yeah, if the onions are sauteed on medium rather than high, they shouldn't spit at you.
Oh, yeah, I didn't bother to wash them. I figure you don't use the outside anyway. But I'll turn down the heat next time.
Yeah, my thought about the onions is that you're cooking them too hot.
Lately we've been making a salad dressing with equal parts of soy sauce and sesame oil, some halved grape tomatos, and black pepper. It's hard to resist just drinking the stuff.
That sounds like a too-much-oil problem. It's okay if the onions blacken a little (in fact, my GF prefers them that way).
The oven is for cobbler or pie.
Is it possible that you're sauteing your onions at an excessively high temperature, heebster?
Can you enlist a person to do the chopping? My wife doesn't much like chopping the same things you don't. So even if she's cooking [about 10% of the time], I'll often do the chopping/slicing. Food processor things are OK. We have one that does an OK job slicing or shredding veg. Although I'm too lazy too clean it, so I usually chop by hand anyway.
Recipes:
risotto?
'fried rice' -- I just do onions, other veg, some meat, chuck the uncooked rice in and dry fry it a bit in the oil/meat juices, top off with stock and cook until it absorbs. Add seafood and chorizo for paella, add slightly different spices for 'pilau', etc.
Here's the super easiest pasta ever: shred deli ham into a bowl. Toss in a bag of frozen peas. Toss in half a bag of shredded parmesan cheese. Stir in your pasta. Sprinkle with nutmeg, salt and pepper. That's my kind of recipe!
You're killing young neb, absolutely killing him.
Another favourite is a sort of generic 'tagine':
Onions, garlic, meat of some kind, fried and then some ras el hanout added. Top off with stock, add a few dried apricots. Cook until meat is tender, and the sauce thick, then I like to stir in some chickpeas [garbanzos], and some harissa for extra spice. Add a bit of fresh parsley, and serve with couscous or rice. Also a tomato and onion side salad is nice.
Soup is very easy, and it's nice to make a big pot and keep it around for a week.
Vegetable soup is pretty foolproof. Last night I made it as follows:
- Cook some white beans (If I had done this in advance I could have eaten dinner before 10 p.m.)
In a separate pot:
- Saute a couple carrots, a couple stalks of celery, and half an onion (all chopped up) in a little oil, with salt and pepper, for a few minutes
- Then add a couple cloves of garlic, and lower the heat
- Cook until everything is soft
- Add the cooked beans, some sort of stock, and a box of tomatoes in liquid
- Chop up a bunch of parsley and add it
- Cook until it tastes like soup
This is good with grilled cheese sandwiches.
The end.
Ooh, yay. I've been wanting a food thread. There's a big Korean supermarket near the market I shop at, and I've been wanting to try kimchi. Are there any varieties that people recommend? I'm not super adventurous when it comes to Korean and Jspanese food, generally preferring Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese.
The easiest thing I can think of that I love is a sort of pasta e fagioli adapted from a Bugialli book -- essentially a sort of bean soup with tiny pastas topped with parm and olive oil. You very coarsely cut up various veggies and herbs and throw them in boiling water with some beans -- then stick blend the whole thing when they get soft.
O adores it, but would heebies and geebies?
I just love chopping. Also slicing and dicing.
Curry. Meat quick-browned with garlic in deep pot. Add carrots, onions, potatoes, chopped coarse, whatever, water. Simmer long time. Add packaged curry roue. Simmer more long time until tenderness.
Serve on rice.
Split pea or lentil soup is even easier:
- Chop up half an onion and a carrot, and saute in a little oil until soft
- Add water or stock (I prefer water)
- Sort and rinse some dried peas or lentils, and add them
- Boil until everything gets soft
- Add salt and pepper. If it's lentil soup, now you're done.
- If it's pea soup, keep boiling
- Keep boiling
- Boil
- You can puree it now if you're fussy, but I like lumpy soup.
The end.
Also, if I'm in a hurry, I'll just fry or grill some meat -- pork chop or escalope, or chicken. Serve with new potatoes and green veg. Add some butter, fresh herbs and capers to the pan for a sauce.
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So much for going down to Occupy Oakland. It's already going pear-shaped down there.
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We've been experimenting with Advanced Nacho Preparation at my house. Most recently, we tried for a layered approach, like one does with lasagna. Chips got a bit soggy, but it was great on the goop:chip ratio.
Roasted vegetables. More of a side than a main, but you could just make a lot of it, or serve with rice/bread/whatever.
Step 1: wash & prep one type of vegetable.
Lemma: How to prep some veggies:
Asparagus: Just snap off the bottom of the stem. No tools or cutting required - just bend the tip until it breaks.
Carrots: Peel, cut off the very tips
Broccoli or Cauliflower: tear off pieces of the flowery part, with whatever part of the stalk comes with it. If it's broccoli, you should be able to get away with no cutting whatsoever
Brussels sprouts: cut off bases, cut in half
Step 2: Coat with oil & seasonings (or at least oil & salt)
Step 3: Put on a baking sheet, or in a casserole
Step 4: Grate Parmagiano or other hard cheese over them (this step is optional, especially if it's a side dish)
Step 5: Stick in the oven somewhere between 300 and 450 degrees, keep 'em in until they're browned
Fried rice:
cook some veggies in a wok or a big skillet on high heat. (Frozen chopped veggies are fine. Add chopped/sliced meat if you want. Add a chopped hot pepper if you want.)
Add cooked rice and soy sauce, and whatever else seems good to you. (Garlic powder? Sesame oil? chili powder? The recipe is flexible)
When the rice is a little browned, throw in an egg or two (this is optional), stir quickly so the egg cooks in tiny fragments.
Serve.
Pesto pasta:
Ingredients:
Frozen vegetables
Pasta
Store-bought pesto
Cook pasta according to package instructions.
Separately, cook some frozen veggies according to package instructions.
Drain pasta in a colander.
Put pasta and a few spoons of pesto into a bowl (or the pot you cooked the pasta in), stir until the pesto coats the pasta. Add veggies.
9: shiv does the same for me. I don't mind cooking, but prep is tiring after working all day, and he likes to put things neatly arranged on plates and in bowls so when we work together it's like he's the prep chef and I am Emeril or someone who has the garlic chopped neatly in a little bowl.
Easy salad for when you're too lazy to cook: mixed greens, berries (no need to chop), nuts (same), balsamic vinaigrette, some kind of protein (hard boiled egg, chicken, fish, leftover baked tofu) on the side.
Also get yourself a splatter guard. Cheap, made of mesh, lays on top of pans. (or turn down the heat and press your onions on a paper towel a bit to remove some of the juiciness.)
We do a fair amount of lame burritos. Can of beans, mashed and heated in a pot with cumin and whatever else you'd put in refried beans, lettuce, tomato, shredded cheese, salsa, warmed tortillas, maybe meat if we feel extravagant, could be slices of avocado.
Eggs, as I'm sure I'm the first to say. Ahem.
Either an omelette or a frittata or just scrambled eggs, which can be made fancier (and more dinner-like) with the addition of sauteed chopped onions, chopped peppers (red, green, whatever you have) and/or chopped yellow or green squash, aka zucchini, shredded spinach and the like. You can, if it strikes your fancy, roll the dressed-up scrambled eggs in warmed tortillas. You can sprinkle some cheese on the eggs if you like that.
14 not really most kimchi taste the same to me, if you like hot pickles you'll probably like it. You could buy the stuff at your local non-ethnic food-store as it is more formulated to American tastes.
As to the op. Easy? Not terrible boiled chicken legs (I had very terrible ones growing up). Get pot of salted water boiling. Add other seasoning as desired. Add chicken legs. When water returns to a boil cover and turn off heat. Wait 20 minutes or until your worried about leaving warm chicken legs around, eat. If do didn't use a whole lot of water you also have the start for a chicken broth.
Very basic rice 'n' beans: this is something I got from a friend who had it from his family. They were named Gonzalez, and he was a drummer nicknamed Gonzo, so it's known as Gonzo meal.
It's basically rice with some beans on it, then some veggies on it, sort of a composed thing. The key is that that the veggies are raw, which adds crunch in counterpoise to the rice/beans toothiness.
- Make some rice.
- Separately, heat a couple of cans of kidney beans (I rinse off the sugary gloopy stuff they come in, then heat them in water).
- Chop a tomato in about 1/2-inch squares, as well as some peppers (whatever color), some onion, maybe some squash. You can go nuts and put small-chopped broccoli if you like.
When rice is done and beans are heated through, put a pile of rice, then a couple of spoons of kidney beans, then sprinkle on your various veggies on top of that. The tomatoes are important, in my view. Sprinkle on some cheese if you want. Top with a spoon of sour cream for true excellence.
The original version included cooked ground beef and sliced radishes. The radishes are a nice addition. I imagine you could do shredded chicken.
Chicken salad in a pita?
I guess that's really more of a breakfast item.
Buy a bunch of arugula, pine nuts and a bunch of prosciutto. Cook pasta, drain, put in the arugula as quickly as possible and toss (normally it's better to start with the cheese, but you want the leaves wilted), add grated parmesan and toss, add the prosciutto, pine nuts and olive oil, toss some more.
Make pesto the old fashion way, no mincing required. More seriously, for a lot of stuff if you really hate mincing for some reason, you can just chop the cloves into two or four pieces, sprinkle with a good bit of salt, and mush it into paste. Or buy a good quality press.
In any case, stir fried chicken provencal is good. Take a bunch of chicken breasts, chop into bite sized chunks. Put a bunch of flour into a plastic bag, add salt, pepper, and any or no dried herbs, as you wish - I generally either do none or herbes de provence. Dump the chicken into the bag, toss and massage until all the pieces are thoroughly coated. Mush some garlic, put some butter in a small sauce pan, melt, add the garlic, add a bunch of long grain rice, saute gently, add water cover and cook over low heat. As it cooks chop a ton of parsley, ideally curly. Pour a bunch of olive oil in a large saute pan, add a ton of butter, melt everything turn up the heat to high, add the chicken and parsely, turn it down to medium-high and start stirring. When it's basically done, turn off the heat, wait a bit, and add a ton of mushed garlic and mix thoroughly. Eat everything. You can add either sweet or hot peppers as you want, though the latter should be minced.
Buy some calf liver, green peppercorns in vinegar and some vermouth or sherry. Take out a bunch of the peppercorns onto a doubled up paper towel, wrap, take a mallet, and take out the day's frustrations. Melt some butter at medium heat in a pan, salt and peper and then flour the liver and then saute it until it's at about medium (you want some pink). Put it on a warmed up plate, dump the pepper corns and a bunch of sherry/vermouth into the pan, simmer until syrupy, add a bunch of heavy cream, stir together until thick, turn off the heat and add a bunch of cold slices of butter and stir in. Serve with rice and cooked or raw vegetable of choice. Or apply the same treatment to thin sliced veal or pork or well cleaned veal kidneys.
Fry up some chopped bacon, saute some spinach in the bacon fat, add the bacon and some crumbled up feta when wilted, when the feta begins to melt, add a little bit of heavy cream and a bunch of mushed garlic. Toss with parmesaned pasta.
Buy some good quality ravioli, cook. While doing so pour a bunch of heavy cream into a small sauce pan, add two bay leaves, turn on heat to low, simmer for a while, add a bunch of grated parmesan, remove bay leaves, serve with the ravioli.
Saute a bunch of sausage and chopped leaks, add some good quallity coarsely chopped canned tomatoes, serve with parmesaned tubular pasta.
Using an oven in Texas seems like it's just asking for trouble. Although I did just make long simmered chili and chowder (not together) in Alabama without air conditioning so who knows.
Breakfast burritos- all the ease of eggs with the deliciousness of breakfast! Lightly char the tortilla. Corn tastes better but flour is more flexible. The Herdez green salsa is the best. In addition to refried beans and eggs scrambled with salsa, top with cheese, lettuce, chopped onions and cucumbers.
Pasta ziff is a recipe my boyfriend saw on Li/dia's It/aly which is super easy. Saute chopped garlic (use a garlic press) and hot pepper powder/flakes in a tbsp of olive oil. Once it looks cooked-ish (say 3 mintues? don't let it burn), add 1/4 cup of pasta water (oh, right, have pasta boiling) and cook for like 3 minutes more. Add drained pasta and toss. Top with chopped/scissored parsley and Parmesan cheese.
Also pasta puttenesca if you like capers and olives.
Oh yeah, buy Marcella Hazan's book on Italian cooking. Browse the recipes. Do the braises for multi-day meals, do the quick pasta recipes for last minute ones, substitute mushed garlic for minced as appropriate.
14.
Most people mean baechu kimchi when they think of kimchi, so that's probably what you'll get. If it comes already cut up it'll be easier to eat. I prefer getting more of the juicy white part of the cabbage, less of the thin green part.
Other types I like:
Kaktugi, which is made with cubed radish.
Yeolmu kimchi, which is made with radish stems.
Also, you might like mulkimchi, if you're not especially adventurous. It's not so spicy. It looks like a cold translucent (sometimes white, sometimes pink) soup, with thin slices of pear and apple and radish floating in it, and also radish stems and slivers of red pepper. It's one of my favorite things when made right, but I don't think I've ever bought it at a grocery store.
Buy the smallest container you can, as it goes bad fairly quickly.
Frozen perogi from a box, cooked with onions in butter, are great.
Seriously, though, use your oven. Take a whole pork tenderloin. Salt and pepper. Cut a clove or two of garlic into slivers, make slits around the tenderloin, and stuff them with the garlic slivers. Take some fresh thyme, strip a couple of teaspoons of leaves from the stems, and mix the leaves with dijon mustard. Spread all over the tenderloin and roast for 20-25 minutes at 350.
Oh, also pasta tossed with hot crispy bacon, chopped garlic and Parmesan. Add raw egg (make sure things are fairly hot) and you get carbonara. The egg makes a magic sauce. Ham is traditional but I fall with Halford.
I need to buy bacon.
Pasta ziff
This is effectively spaghetti aio e oio, right? Which is not to say it isn't awesome, just that there's a more traditional name.
And yes, Marcella Hazan's book is great.
Roasting stuff is a very good idea, and then you can take the stuff you roasted and use it in various simple dishes (w/ rice, w/ eggs, etc.).
...to expand on what Benquo already said.
40: Yes! I didn't know that.
(Add white beans for extra protein)
Ham is traditional
Guanciale is traditional (pancetta will do in a pinch). Thus inspired, I am off to buy guanciale and make some carbonara.
Ok, who washes onions? I think the high heat/lower heat comments are correct. Also, get one of those wire mesh splatter guards - you'll be fine.
As for easy recipes that use an oven.
1) You haven't roasted a chicken?!?
a) Get chicken, remove it from packaging.
b) wash and dry (important!). Optional- salt and pepper, other shit.
c) set on rack in pan and roast at ~375F for ~1-1.5 hrs depending on size. Do this a few times to get the hang of the timing vis a vis your oven, chicken source etc.
Ok, so this takes some time. But then you have a WHOLE CHICKEN. And later, you can make stock. No, wait. Don't do that yet.
2) Easier- roasted broccoli.
a) Chop up a bunch o broccoli (see only one thing - takes less than a minute). Put in a roasting pan.
b) drizzle olive oil. Salt, pepper, any other spices you like.
c) Roast at 350-375 for about 40 minutes.
1.b.1. Remove bag of parts from the cavity. Very important (I would make this a lot, but a certain other person in my household finds meat with whole-chicken levels of bones and animal-like shape to be problematic).
45: Put potatoes under any chicken when you roast it. Easy and cheap.
If you don't like chopping, blended soups are pretty easy because you only have to roughly chop everything. Onion, maybe garlic, maybe carrot, some vegetable. Cook 'em all in stock until the vegetables are mushy enough to blend well. Blend it with a stick blender. Maybe add some milk, maybe some spices.
Cauliflower makes a particularly luscious soup this way. If you want to get fancy, tear up some bread and put it in your bowls, top with some cheese, and then ladle the soup in.
Roasted cauliflower or Brussel sprouts (sprinkled with balsamic vinegar) done like Scott Pauls said.
I have one knife that I think is a good knife. It must have been a wedding present. I tried to use it once to cut a loaf of bread and I think it's now ruined.
|| "We're here, we're queer, we're unicorns, and we'll fuck you up!" |>
(Sorry to go OT, having not read the thread yet. This chant is just irresistible.)
30 and 36: Thanks Asteele and jms. I don't think I've had too many spicy pickles, but I'd like to expand my range.
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Okay, my aunt is about to call to tell me why she's mad at me. Wish me luck!
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I haven't found that buying a rotisserie chicken at the grocery actually gets us two meals like people online claim, but I do take bones/skin/leftover meat and let it simmer with chopped veggies and a lot of water to make stock while I'm washing up after dinner. I just used that stock plus white (pocha) beans and some ham hock and pimenton and rosemary to make a tasty soup, but usually I go for potato leek. If you buy the leeks in a bag at Trader Joe's, they're prewashed and the chopping is easy.
Heebie's resistance to chopping is a significant barrier.
How helpful would one of those veggie-chopper things be? Some food processors can do it decently, if you're willing to change blades and all of that; my immersion blender comes with a mini food processing canister, in which you place a mini-blade, then attach the immersion blender motor thing. I think it makes a hash of things -- you cannot get clean slices of carrot, and you'd be a fool to try. It seems mostly to grate.
Heebie, you can get jars of pre-minced garlic. It works okay enough, and would free you up to chop or mince something else.
52.2: Good luck with the trying relatives.
53: Those are usually small birds. I need 1/2 just for me.
I have one knife that I think is a good knife.
Uh, everything OK at home, ned?
My mother makes a really good white bean chili, I should really get the recipe from her. Chili is pretty easy, and you can buy most of the ingredients pre-chopped or whatever.
Here's the super easiest pasta ever: shred deli ham into a bowl. Toss in a bag of frozen peas. Toss in half a bag of shredded parmesan cheese. Stir in your pasta.
Serve with Shiner Bock while wearing an Aggie sweatshirt.
Pasta puttanesca is the easiest thing there is: the most complicated thing in it is minced garlic, and even that you can just knife-whack.
P.S. I've come up with an entirely novel method of chopping vegetables, but I won't tell you about it.
Best of luck to the enraging.
Tacos: Beef, Ancho pepper, onions, possibly bell pepper, cumin, garlic, bouillon cube.
Do you have a grill? Grilling is excellent. Carolina treet or another vinegar-based sauce if you do not wish to make your own, so that marinating is possible. I mailorder to always have some handy, as stores here have only glorified ketchup. Also a basket for veggies/shrim/fish, which latter two with Mojo Criollo.
I really love cauliflower -- when I was temporarily diabetic I would eat them like mashed potatoes.
Grilling fish is super easy. Roasting potatoes also easy, though it involves the oven, which is commended for these kinds of things.
Eating my first homemade carbonara. Thanks, Unfogged! It's delicious and was an easy 20 minutes of cooking (although that's about 19 more minutes than I prefer).
I just cooked: bison ribeye, sauteéd fiddleheads. Delicious! Super easy! Not terribly generalizable!
Oh damn, fiddleheads. Gotta get me some of them.
Also, is it ramp season or did I miss it?
I did my first pulled pork a couple of weekends ago, and was very happy with the results. It was a good solution to the problem of "what do we do with this huge-ass hunk of pork that we acquired?"
Tons of left-overs. That's key.
I haven't found that buying a rotisserie chicken at the grocery actually gets us two meals like people online claim
I'm glad you say this. I thought we were just pigging out and eating four servings at once every time. People will talk about getting a chicken and eating it "all week," which, what, as garnishes or something?
Savenor's has both ramps and fiddleheads!
Excellent! Probably bison ribeye, too.
I am sort of off of roast chicken these days. The last few times I've made it or bought it, I've sort of picked at it for a few days and then made chicken salad or soup of the rest.
Probably bison ribeye, too.
I bought the two they had out, but I bet they have more.
I have attended a ramps festival and observed, as part of the festivities, the crowning of Miss Ramps. There was also a child pageant.
Damn but those bison steaks were amazing, though. I may not be paleo, but I appreciate their indigenous edible ungulates.
A rotisserie chicken from the grocery store usually gets this two-person household two to three meals. There are no kids being fed here, so that cuts down, and the meat usually becomes an accent for the second and third meals -- meaning, shredded chicken is added to a burrito, or is made into a chicken sandwich that has other stuff in/on it. I'm sure it's just whether you're a meat-centered household or not.
Hey, the ramps festival is this weekend!
For the record, I can't believe anyone would put their child on the paleo diet.
What's wrong with chicken salad or soup?
Is it hard to grow ramps and fiddleheads yourself? Ramps I would think not. Fiddleheads you find in the forest, but forests aren't readily available to a lot of people. Hm.
Yards aren't readily available to a lot of people.
Tweety has talked about his grandmother having had fiddleheads in her back yard, but I didn't get the impression they had been planted.
You have plenty of recipes now, but here are two more. One for summer and one for fall:
Summer
Romaine (or whatever lettuce) for however many
Diced avocado
Mandarin Oranges
Mix these in a bowl, and before serving, add bleu cheese crumbles. No dressing necessary.
Fall
In a crockpot, combine
three-ish sweet potatoes (big chunks)
five peeled/cored/halved apples
2 lbs sausage (I use 1 lb hot, the other sage)
little bit of flour, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, etc mixed with water.
Make it in the morning, cook it on low in the pot and eat when you get home.
Simple!
No dressing necessary.
Whenever I've heard that, I've always been left with the impression that the speaker has a stricter definition of "necessary" than I do.
The fall thing sounds interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about the spice mix, but it would certainly be something new with potential.
67: Excellent! Ours was delicious, too.
Fiddleheads are (just) unfurled ferns. I guess you could plant them -- I don't think they'd take much care or maintenance -- but they usually just grow wild. I'm just thinking out loud about how they're desired and marketed things, when they just grow wild out there. Just musing.
87
Ideally, the oranges and avocado do magic things and create the appropriate amount of moisture.
I have never written a dirtier sentence.
Public service announcement: cook fiddleheads thoroughly! They can make you sick, or at least they did me and my roommate once and I continue to live in fear.
Roasting chicken is quite easy, though it always takes me longer than I expect, and the cleanup can be a pain. So much chicken grease... BUT if you have a freezer full of stock then you can make cheap and easy soup anytime.
85: well, they were in the woods behind her house.
If the chicken always takes longer than you expect to cook, your oven may have a faulty thermometer. Also, you should let the chicken come to room temperature before cooking. If you can't, the chicken will take 10 to 15 minutes longer to cook.
Not all fern fiddleheads are edible, some are poisonous. It's not great to eat huge amounts of even the edible kind.
I'm with ttaM in 18. A large percentage of my dinners are some seasoned meat fried in butter, with a salad requiring minimal chopping prepared while waiting for it to get done. 5-10 minutes and its ready.
I've never had ramps. They had them at the greenmarket on Saturday but they were $50/lb. Fuck that. Fiddleheads can be really wonderful or just meh, I assume at has something to do with freshness and/or over-maturity. But whatever you do don't cook the hell out of them. A bit of steaming to max color and then some butter and lemon. Or lots of butter rather.
re: chicken
i) US roasting times always seem amazingly short. Either you are buying tiny chickens [poussin sized] or eating it raw. If I cooked a standard UK sized supermarket chicken for 60 - 90 minutes I'd expect the thighs and probably some of the areas around the carcass to still be rubbery and possibly even unsafe [juices not running clear, etc].
ii) We usually get 3 meals out of a chicken by jointing it.
One meal with a breast each [stir-fried, or bashed out into escalopes, or whatever], one meal from a leg each [marinated and roasted, or jointed into thigh and drumstick and made into a curry or other slow cooked thing], and a soup or rice dish from the carcass boiled to make stock and then picked to remove the bits of meat.
Stuff to do with the oven: baked fish. Dead easy. Get a fillet of fish, wrap it in tin foil, add something (lime juice? chili? dill? ginger? something like that) and bake it for about 12 minutes. There you go.
IME there's a lot more on a chicken you buy and roast than on one you buy cooked. Also I really go to town on stripping meat off the carcase before boiling it up. The resultant scraps are good for throwing in a pasta dish or whatever.
I don't usually make gravy so I pour off the juices while still hot into some suitable container, and stick in the fridge. This will separate neatly into white chicken fat (mostly I dump this) and golden brown chicken "jelly", to add back to whatever you want to give the extra flavour boost to. I don't know anyone else who does this but I got fed up trying to scrape up the good bits from the roasting pan later on without incorporating too much of the fat.
Roasted veg at the same time is handy, usually I go for carrot, parsnip, peppers & mushrooms. They can be in large chunks so not much chopping. Carrot can take longer so I might put it in first & add the others later. Courgettes otoh can go to mush so if using I add later still.
Butternut squash is good roasted too, I sometimes just do this with halloumi cheese & pumpkin seeds for a simple meal. There is a lot of chopping, though.
One suggestion on the chopping: when you chop, say, an onion, chop more than you need and stick the rest in a container in the fridge for the rest of the week. I love chopping, so most of my current cooking revolves around it.
Pork tenderloin recipes.
1) coat with a blend of dijon mustard and maple syrup, then roll in crushed nuts to coat. Roast.
2) stuff prunes or other dried fruit inside the tenderloin, season (salt, pepper, marjoram), and roast. Then deglaze the pan with a quantity of white wine, add an equal quantity of cream, and use the sauce over the pork and the spaetzle or other noodles you are serving as a side.
99: We do that: deglaze (put a little hot water in and scrape up the stuck/burnt bits) a roasting pan into a container, and then make a cream sauce the second day (roux made with a. couple tablespoons of the fat, throw the rest of the fat out and add the jellied aspic with the stock or milk, season with whatever herbs, reheat chopped scraps of chicken from the carcass, and pour over popovers. Or rice or toast if you don't want popovers, but they're traditional in my family.)
I have one knife that I think is a good knife. It must have been a wedding present. I tried to use it once to cut a loaf of bread and I think it's now ruined.
I'm not sure you're serious about this, but if you ruined a good knife that way, u r doin it vry rong. Either way, get it sharpened by a professional. The 5 bucks is money extremely well spent.
The guys at my knife-sharpening place will often hold a sheet of paper in the air and slice it vertically to demonstrate how sharp the knife is.
101: I didn't really mean deglazing which of course people do, I just meant the immediate pouring off & cooling for ease of separation.
Yeah, I just meant that we do the same process of getting the good stuff out of the pan but not doing anything with it immediately.
Consistent contrarianism can sometimes hit the truth.
This thread is reminding me how easy cooking is when you eat pasta. Boil pasta! Mix it with some stuff! Easy! And then I gain 15 pounds.
when you eat pasta ... And then I gain 15 pounds.
Sympathetic weight gain?
96: $50/lb!!!! (Although I bought like $40 worth of "wild" arugula once in Union Sq. by accident.)
I made a metric shit-ton(ne) of ramp pesto last week. But the ramps were $3 a bunch, and I got 2 bunches.
Or rice or toast if you don't want popovers, but they're traditional in my family.)
I want popovers! Do you need the special popover pan? Or can you make a muffin tin work? My grandmother (may she rest) made amazing popovers. Some day, I will learn how myself.
Ooh! I thought of a couple from my SIL that doesn't involve much or any chopping. Roast sweet potatoes or pumpkin, simmer in broth with ginger, garlic, chilies (maybe onion, I forget -- but I'm sure you could skip it so as to avoid the chopping!). Add a can of coconut and blend until smooth (stick blender or blender blender).
Roast a pumpkin and some sweet peppers. stick 'em in a blender with garlic, onion (it's going in a blender, so you don't really need to chop beyond maybe quartering it), cumin, chili powder, salt. separately layer corn tortillas with chicken, cheese, beans -- whatever fillings you like -- cover with the pumpkin sauce and some more cheese, and bake. (My SIL would say to roll the fillings in the tortillas and would call these enchiladas. But that's more work and I suck at rolling stuff in tortillas.)
It's interesting the differences in taste. All of the recipes with sweet potato, or pumpkin, or squash read to me like boak-inducing sludge. And yet so many people [my wife included] like such things.
Thinking about what grains I do cook any more reminds me of another easy soup. Buy a decent tomato soup, like the ones in the tetra paks. Cook two cups of barley, in stock if you wanna get fancy. Saute onions / mushrooms / herbs (rosemary is nice). Mix it all together. Voila! Hearty soup.
I know some people here have railed against the 'doctor up some processed food' method of cooking, but it really has its benefits. Of course, this depends on being able to buy decent soup. And it will still probably be pretty high in sodium. But it's fine once in a while.
Late to this, but BG, my favorite is buchu (chive) kimchi, which I like to have with poached eggs for breakfast. Ojingo (squid) kimchi is also worth trying.
Similar to the barley in 115, some of the shops here sell prepackaged pearled spelt grains, either just plain or flavoured, that make a nice substitute for rice/couscous/bulgur. You can make a risotto with some mushrooms, maybe a bit of bacon or ham, onion, and spelt.
Like this:
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/13242/spelt-and-wild-mushroom-risotto
115: If you're going to be buying soup at all, why don't you just buy a decent minestrone soup and save yourself the bother of preparing the rest of it?
If you're going to be buying soup at all...
There's not need to buy soup since Hoffman's "Steal This Soup" brand of soup.
Because canned pasta is disgusting? And canned vegetables often as well.
If you hate canned pasta, you had both America and France.
110: Muffin tins work, albeit not as well. And they're easy as anything; I've never had a recipe not work. Mix up a thin, eggy batter, pour it in the greased cups, bake at 450 for 20 min, 350 for 15, don't open the oven, and there you are. I mean, look up a recipe, but they're not something with a trick to it.
How much does a chicken cost in the UK? $4-$8 retail US, $8 for no-antibiotic or pricey grocer. Organic is like $15 and up. Roast chickens $12 apiece at pollo a la brasa places.
I remember being surprised at how expensive both French and Czech supermarket poultry or meat was.
How do they even make pasta that can sit in a liquid indefinitely and not dissolve?
re: 123
At the supermarket I use, £4 - £8 for the standard ones, I suppose, depending on size. £6 - £10 for corn-fed, and a bit more for organic.* You could certainly get them much cheaper in a cheaper supermarket, though. Maybe £3 - 5.
* although I can get organic 'fancy' chicken cheaper from an actual butchers. Cheaper than $15 US, certainly.
I think someone was saying that WalMart or Sam's Club will get you a roasted chicken for five dollars. I don't know how to spend $15 on a raw chicken unless I tipped the cashier or something.
Roasted chicken is $5 on Thursdays at my local Shaw's.
I'm pretty sure I've seen whole organic chickens for around $25 at the Whole Foods (and not much more than 3 lbs either)! Maybe not regularly, but some special farm that they get a shipment from. Their hens can serve you tea in 4 languages, etc.
126. You may have heard of Whole Foods. Where I live, the local crunchy grocers, who actually use local farmers, are at least as expensive, often more. Chicken farming regulations are roughly speaking written by Tyson in the US, strongly slanted against small farmers. Local grass-fed beef and reasonably raised pork is much cheaper.
I shop at Whole Foods, or used to before my wife started doing the shopping. Maybe I only look at the cheap chickens at Whole Foods, but I've never bought a chicken anywhere else in years. Or maybe I've just repressed how much they cost.
Regular chicken prices here about the same as UK, I'd say. All the chicken in my nearest supermarket in Dublin is antibiotic free. I've never bought corn-fed as I have a vague notion that it's a bad idea for some reason.
I don't really buy organic chicken but I often buy free range fillets. A whole free range chicken might be about €12.
The packages have the farmer name and details, and sometimes the supermarket has free range chicken from the farm 50 miles away of two brothers I went to primary school with.
Easy recipes:
Using the oven doesn't have to be hard. You can just marinate something in something and cook it. As for specific recipes, I'm sure cooking times and marinating times vary, but I like this one: mix 1/4 cup maple syrup, 2 tablespoons soy sauce, one clove of minced garlic (I'm sure you could crush it if you don't like chopping), and salt and pepper. Put salmon in a baking dish and cover with the mixture. Marinate for half an hour, turning once. Cook for about 20 minutes at 400 degrees.
Now that I think of it, maybe it's hard to find maple syrup in Texas, I don't know, but you get the general idea. This kind of recipe is much easier and quicker than you'd think if you just judge by the total cooking time, because 90 percent of that time is spent either marinating or in the oven.
Shrimp alfredo. Make pasta, simmer alfredo sauce, sautee shrimp in butter (garlic, parsley, salt and/or pepper optional), put the sauce and shrimp in the pasta, serve.
Are we thinking about just dinner, or breakfast too? I like making omelets for breakfast. It helps to have a special pan for them, with a ridge down the middle to help fold them over, but it's not required. Put a little oil or butter in two pans. Chop up the filling - I've been using onions, peppers, and grape tomatoes lately, but you could do lots of different things - sautee it on low-medium heat in one pan, and heat up the second pan at medium for the egg. Whisk two eggs in a bowl with salt, pepper, and two tablespoons of water. When the empty pan is hot, pour the eggs in. After the eggs have set a bit, put the filling in one half, fold it over, and let it cook for another minute or two. Grated cheese is recommended; it's up to you whether you whisk it in with the eggs or put it in the middle with the filling.
72: yeah, portion estimates in recipes almost always seem twice as high as they should be. Recipe-writers seem to assume that every meal includes three dishes of equal size plus dessert.
portion estimates in recipes almost always seem twice as high as they should be
And prep time half as long as it should be. (As I believe rfts has railed against before.) Of course Recipe X only takes 10 active minutes if you don't count cutting everything up!
I'm quite quick at the knife-stuff. I like cooking and been cooking regularly since I was 12, so I do most cooking things about as fast as any other normal non-professional home-cooks. So there are some things I can do in the prep time allocated, but that's flat-out, with the ingredients readily to hand. On the other hand, there are loads of recipes, as per the linked article and others comments, where it's just not do-able at all.
Things like ristotto, for example, or lentil dishes, where the rice and/or lentils would be rock hard if you only cooked it for the '15 minutes, until tender and slightly al dente' or whatever shite the recipe says. I've done risotto with a stock pot bubbling at the side of the rice, following a recipe, and it's nowhere near done in the time allocated. Similarly, chicken recipes [chinese, for example] that call for you to fry it for X minutes only work if you have a gas hob [not electric], a proper wok or similar iron pan, and everything heated to near-fire-alarm heat before you add it.
re: easy marinades/rubs
Bit of natural yoghurt,and either some curry paste or curry powder, or a bit of harissa. Let the meat sit in a bit and then roast in the oven, grill, or cook on griddle.
133: There was a Guardian article about risotto never, ever finishing in the time cookbooks suggest. If memory serves, the author ended up swearing up and down that using a proper risotto paddle thingy (like a mini wooden hockey stick with a hole in the middle) absolutely made up the difference.
135: I have not found this to be the case, but hey.
If I cooked a standard UK sized supermarket chicken for 60 - 90 minutes I'd expect the thighs and probably some of the areas around the carcass to still be rubbery and possibly even unsafe [juices not running clear, etc].
It's actually ok to eat chicken (and pork) that's still a little pink—even the USDA agrees, now.
But I cook 4-5 lb chickens, at around 400, within that time range and it works fine.
that call for you to fry it for X minutes only work if you have a gas hob [not electric], a proper wok or similar iron pan, and everything heated to near-fire-alarm heat before you add it
Good Lord yes. I have yet to use an electric stove with enough heat for stir-frying. Even the 15000-BTU burner on my gas stove is barely adequate.
re: 137.1
What might be OK where you are, might not be OK where I am. Different food hygiene agencies, different animal husbandry practices, etc.* I certainly wouldn't eat chicken that was pink [I mean other than the natural darker colour that the thigh meat has even when well-cooked]. I gather in the UK trichinosis isn't an issue with pork any more, but I certainly don't trust chicken.
re: 135
I have one of those paddle things, or did. Came as part of a pack of wooden spoons and spatulas. I've used it. Makes bugger all difference.
* the UK food agency still recommend cooking chicken until all juices run clear, for example. Campylobacter is endemic.
I don't like eating chicken that's pink even if you tell me that it's perfectly safe and I believe you, because I just don't have the taste for it—no doubt because all through my youth (and 20s, which are now behind me, ah, age) I was told that it isn't safe and didn't eat it like that. But my chicken-cooking procedure gets everything just past that anyway! delicious.
re: 141
Linked above by Moby in 105.
re: 140
Yeah, me too. My wife is worse than me. Her mum roasts duck, goose, and chicken until it's very very dry by my tastes, so she's super suspicious of even a hint of rubberiness/pinkness.*
Anyway, if I'd have read that article earlier, I wouldn't have assumed that I was uniquely horrible at making onion soup.
Wait, fnarr-fnarr was only added to the OED last year? Why did it take so long? What's the earliest citation they give?
Regarding anathema to chopping, my mom has and swears by one of these food chopper things (not that particular one, but same idea). Not for me, as I find chopping things by hand with a knife oddly calming, but she loves it and it's definitely light years faster than a conventional knife.
They're great as long as you can make somebody else clean them.
Funny how people sometimes use measures of distance when they're talking about speed.
Like when I the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs?
I find chopping things by hand with a knife oddly calming.
Me too. Except when I zone out and slice open a finger. But that only happens a couple times a year. So mostly calming.
People just have way too much time and distance on their hands, but apparently if you're Lucas, you can explain anything.
I find chopping things by hand with a knife oddly calming.
It's like suburban whittling.
I don't know if it's come up in other threads, but since this one lives on, it seems the place to mention that you really, really ought to see Jiro Dreams of Sushi. And then plan on going out for sushi, because you're going to want to.
So I was making dinner with Mrs. k-sky, and I was like, "heebie said she hates chopping. I really like chopping!" and then i chopped off 3/4 of my middle finger's nail.
let's hear it for vicodin & band-aids.
Taking your love of chopping TOO FAR since 2012!