The Cooking Thread
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@DoctorJones said in The Cooking Thread:
@Polygeekery this was my thought process...
Asser?
Bummer?
Bottomer?
Oh, it's Butter!
Heh, I skipped bottomer. But, overshot to
clbutterfor the same final score.
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Not even once.
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Brussels sprouts sauteed in bacon grease and finished with cotija cheese:
Not pictured: steaks and roasted butternut squash.
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Not pictured: steaks and roasted butternut squash.
I lied, and I forgot the sauteed veggies:
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Not pictured: steaks and roasted butternut squash.
I lied, and I forgot the sauteed veggies:
God I wish we lived closer. My husband is the one the cooks most of the time but it is not very diverse (neither are his parents). I'm more of the experimenter but I hate the preparation.
I want you and my husband to have play date.
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Once again I cooked the roast chicken with root veggies:
This time I thought about how I needed to let the chicken rest for 15 minutes so I might as well toss all the veggies in the chicken fat and let them continue to roast. It worked out well.
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@Polygeekery Ended up with something similar today (photo taken after I had dinner...)
I should try adding potatoes(?) et al. into that as well - right now it's just a base of onions and carrots. (Liquid is mainly from soaking the clay pot in water before putting anything in it, and maybe the chicken itself. I only added a bit of lemon juice.)
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
This time I thought about how I needed to let the chicken rest for 15 minutes so I might as well toss all the veggies in the chicken fat and let them continue to roast. It worked out well.
Yeah, I've been doing this in a cast iron pan, so I'll finish them on the stove top.
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Lest anyone think that I only apply my skills to "fancy" stuff, behold:
Homemade chicken strips brined in pickle juice and buttermilk, dredged in panko and flour with Old Bay seasoning and homemade oven fries. All served on a cheap plastic plate.
Yeah, my kids are spoiled. Lil'Dude said they're the best chicken strips ever.
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
All served on a cheap plastic plate.
Still better looking that whatever horrible plate you used in previous pics.
Story time!
My parents got (as a wedding present, I think) a flat rectangular cake dish, of canary-yellow ceramic with golden insets. It was hideous. But it was very convenient to put the Christmas cake, because it was the only somewhat fancy dish that my parents had of the right shape. So we used it for that -- once per year, hidden below the cake, so there never really was any pressure to get a better dish.
After some years, it became part of the tradition. We still all thought it was hideous, but we had to have the Christmas cake on it otherwise it wasn't a "proper" Christmas cake. So for... probably at least 3 decades, we used it so, joking every time that we should break it because it was so ugly and yet carefully stowing it away until next Christmas.
It all ended up this Christmas, where after being used in the traditional way, we actually managed to break it (truly accidentally, and by my mother who usually played the role of the defender of the dish, as opposed to everyone else saying it should be broken!). We weren't sure whether to be glad, or sad. But we laughed a lot. Though the wine probably helped for that as well (Sauternes...
).And so ends the story of the ugly yellow dish.
(lame, I know)
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@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
Still better looking that whatever horrible plate you used in previous pics.
First I wondered why he put his plates on the floor but apparently that is some tiled top ...
In a vague hope of saving my garden shed the certain auto combustion my house is waiting for I choose to remain silent.
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@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
And so ends the story of the ugly yellow dish.
(lame, I know)No, little traditions like that are great.
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@boomzilla said in The Cooking Thread:
No, little traditions like that are great.
I will second that. The plate had a great backstory.
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@Luhmann said in The Cooking Thread:
apparently that is some tiled top
For years I've wanted to rip that out and replace it with a proper butcher block top but now my wife is so used to putting hot pans wherever without needing a trivet or anything that I don't know if we could ever replace it. Guaranteed that if I replace it there will be a huge scorch mark within a week.
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@boomzilla said in The Cooking Thread:
No, little traditions like that are great.
They are. But they still make for lame stories when told to an outsider.
Of course, if the outsider is your SO who's just joining the family, they'd better not say so. Or at least not seriously. But they're supposed to love you and keep any
for themselves.
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@remi hopefully they feel like they've been let in on a secret and accepted into the family.
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
For years I've wanted to rip that out and replace it with a proper butcher block top but now my wife is so used to putting hot pans wherever without needing a trivet or anything that I don't know if we could ever replace it. Guaranteed that if I replace it there will be a huge scorch mark within a week.
We have glass covers for the worktop next to the cooker exactly to avoid those sorts of problems. Something like these but I'm not sure if it is exactly them (
says don't go and measure). They work really well.
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@boomzilla That's probably how my SIL felt, since she was the most mortified of us all when the plate broke. Despite not being involved in any way in the breaking.
The cake itself is part of a family tradition. It's some sort of chocolate Swiss roll, and the recipe comes from when my cousin had cooking lectures in high school (while the boys in the class had DIY lectures... yeah, that kind of shows the age of the story...). My mother liked it and copied the recipe.
It's not very complicated but it's a bit fussy and a couple of years ago my mother said she didn't want to do it anymore. But it's part of the tradition, so I took over making it.
This Christmas while I was making it, we calculated that it happened that when I started making it I was about the same age as my mother when she did. And even more, if I do it every year for as many years as my mum did, one of my nieces will be that same age by then -- so we all said that she would take over from me at that time.
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@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
my cousin had cooking lectures in high school (while the boys in the class had DIY lectures... yeah, that kind of shows the age of the story...).
Boys had wood shop; girls had home economics.Filed under:
club
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@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
All served on a cheap plastic plate.
Still better looking that whatever horrible plate you used in previous pics.
Story time!
My parents got (as a wedding present, I think) a flat rectangular cake dish, of canary-yellow ceramic with golden insets. It was hideous. But it was very convenient to put the Christmas cake, because it was the only somewhat fancy dish that my parents had of the right shape. So we used it for that -- once per year, hidden below the cake, so there never really was any pressure to get a better dish.
After some years, it became part of the tradition. We still all thought it was hideous, but we had to have the Christmas cake on it otherwise it wasn't a "proper" Christmas cake. So for... probably at least 3 decades, we used it so, joking every time that we should break it because it was so ugly and yet carefully stowing it away until next Christmas.
It all ended up this Christmas, where after being used in the traditional way, we actually managed to break it (truly accidentally, and by my mother who usually played the role of the defender of the dish, as opposed to everyone else saying it should be broken!). We weren't sure whether to be glad, or sad. But we laughed a lot. Though the wine probably helped for that as well (Sauternes...
).And so ends the story of the ugly yellow dish.
(lame, I know)
I thought it was cute.
Accidental traditions are the best. Organic, not forced.
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Beef chuck braised in adobo sauce with pickled onions and cotija cheese.
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@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
Still better looking that whatever horrible plate you used in previous pics.
There is a bit of a story behind those plates, although not nearly as good as yours.
Years ago we were looking for good "special occasion" plates for holidays and such. Which we found. They are better looking than the ones I post in pictures. But while looking for those the same store had several end of stock plates in the clearance section. All the same basic design, but all mixed up colors. Whitish, yellowish, brownish, etc. All really cheap.
My wife asked what I thought, I told her that I thought they were ugly but I didn't really care. They are just for us so it doesn't matter and on a long enough timeline they will end up broken anyway.
A decade on, I think only one of them has broken and we are still using the same clearance section cornucopia of plates.
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
There is a bit of a story behind those plates, although not nearly as good as yours.
Any story behind every day objects is good. I was just teasing you anyway. I like your story, finding stuff in a bargain bin and making it part of your life is great.
Almost all the plates at my mother's have a back-story. Well, for everyday's plates the story is really lame (like, "we bought them to replace the previous set", duh). But she also has at least two sets of fancy ones, which she both got from her family.
One set was my grandmother's wedding present -- at the time it was the custom that the wedding present was a full set of plate, dishes etc. and everyone bought pieces of it (=went to the shop that sold everything and picked a few pieces). There were "rules" as to who (godfather of the groom/bride, uncles, cousins...) was supposed to buy some of the most expensive (=larger) pieces, and also who should buy the silverware, which was a different item. I think one person was also supposed to offer some bed or table linen (probably one of the women), ideally embroidered with the initials of the newly weds.
(I'm saying all that because I have no idea how commonplace that tradition was. In the region of France where my grandmother was, and I'd say probably in most of France at the time, it was very common, but maybe not elsewhere?)
Anyway, my grandmother had the choice between a not-very-high-quality set, of which she would get more pieces, or a higher quality one. She picked the lower quality one. For some reason she almost never used it so my mother inherited an almost complete set.
Which should have meant (there were some breakage, plus likely she never got the absolute full set) at least 3 dozens of plates, 2 dozens of dessert plates, 2 dozens of plates for soup (deeper ones), and a sundry of presentation dishes (at least 2 or 3 round ones, 2-3 oval ones, one for soup, one for salad, one cake plate...).
It's kind of ugly (a bit like your plates, though still not as ugly
), but my mother likes them a lot. Plus it's the only set where she has so many of... well, everything.The other set has an even more complicated back story. I have to work for my wall-of-text
.It's fairly good quality porcelain, and originally comes from, uh... a cousin of my great-grandfather, I think. She married a guy who worked in a printing shop. He was initially a lowly worker but invented some printing process (which no one knows what it was about and which allegedly was patented, sadly I've never managed to find the patent) and became rich. Well, not Elon-rich, but rich enough to become your typical early-20th century Bourgeois -- nice house with garden, a couple of servants... and a nice set of plates!
They died without issue (their only son died before them), and my great-grandfather family was your typical farm owner -- very down to earth, and very fair. Very fair. So everything had to be split as exactly as possible into 3 (they were 3 inheriting cousins). So they got one third of each type of plate. Contrary to my grandmother, they used them quite a lot, particularly those for soup (they loved soup in these days!), so most pieces ended up broken. The rest was inherited by my mother, this time no one wanted it so she could have the lot -- she even actually got what's left of 2/3rd because one cousin also died without issue, and she got a couple of additional pieces from the last 1/3.
So that set "only" has about one and a half dozen of normal plates, plus a couple of plates for soup and one or two dishes. I don't remember ever seeing any dessert plate, though I imagine they must have existed.
I love that so many things at my mother's have a "proper" backstory. My brothers don't care that much.
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@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
I'm saying all that because I have no idea how commonplace that tradition was. In the region of France where my grandmother was, and I'd say probably in most of France at the time, it was very common, but maybe not elsewhere?
It's still common in the US for a couple to put china on their bridal registry, along with linens, small appliances, and other housewares. It's less formal, though, with no "rules" about who buys what of the expensive items, so they're rather likely not to get any of them. And they typically only register for enough for a small dinner party, maybe 6, 8 or 12 place settings, not 3 dozen.
My ex and I put both everyday tableware and nice china (replacements for broken items of china she already had) on our registry when we got married. We got pretty much all of the everyday set, but none of the fancy stuff (which was ok; we didn't really need it). None of that everyday tableware is left; it all got broken. I still have surviving remnants of other everyday stuff we bought to replace the broken wedding dishes.
That fancy china also has a back-story, but I don't really know it. She already had it before we were married, but whether she bought it herself or it was a product of her first marriage was never really clear to me. When we lost our house and she divorced me, it was stored in the joint storage unit we had, and when I cleaned out the unit and moved to WA, she retrieved a few items but not the china. She eventually gave it to our daughter, but daughter doesn't want it, and it's still sitting in a bin in my spare bedroom.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
It's still common in the US for a couple to put china on their bridal registry, along with linens, small appliances, and other housewares.
I think it's also the case here, though many couples don't even do bridal registries. Sometimes everyone does what they want, but quite often there is some sort of big gift that everyone chips to instead (usually a trip abroad, which might or might not be the wedding trip (many couples don't really do a "formal" wedding trip anyway, mostly because they've usually already been together for years).
It's less formal, though, with no "rules" about who buys what of the expensive items, so they're rather likely not to get any of them. And they typically only register for enough for a small dinner party, maybe 6, 8 or 12 place settings, not 3 dozen.
That's also the case nowadays. I'd say that all those kind of "rules" were a thing of, to put it simply, the Victorian age. It's the time where you have tiny social rules for absolutely everything (think "Downton Abbey"), and you can find books (I do have a couple of them) laying out those rules in excruciating details. I remember a whole section about mourning clothing, with minute rules ("after some time you can add a ribbon on your hat, but it still has to be black," this kind of things) for whether it was a brother, sister, cousin, cousin once removed on the woman's side or her husband side and what not.
As far as I can tell from family history, this stopped with the Boomer generation (post WW2). They still had wedding registries (while later generations didn't necessarily), but they stopped following very elaborate and complicated rules about what should be in it and who should pay for what.
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Here's a combination I've never considered. I thought about the Nope You Eat It thread, but I don't really have super strong feelings here and it's all stuff I like (steak, butter, coffee).
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@boomzilla interesting. Finishing a steak with herb butter is a thing and it works well. Doubly so if you overcook the steak. The butter prevents it from tasting "dry".
But espresso butter? I don't know. It could work. It could be a crime against taste buds and steak.
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@Polygeekery yeah. They talk about "waking up the taste buds," and I could imagine that it would play that sort of role to give you these contrasting flavors to help appreciate the beef more. But you might just ruin a steak, too.
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Finishing a steak with herb butter is a thing and it works well. Doubly so if you overcook the steak.
You're making me very hungry, and I've only just eaten…
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@boomzilla said in The Cooking Thread:
I thought about the Nope You Eat It thread
Your first thought was right.
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
espresso butter ... a crime against taste buds
Yes. Anything with coffee flavor is a crime against my taste buds, even if nobody else agrees.
Filed under: Unpopular ideas thread is
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@dkf said in The Cooking Thread:
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Finishing a steak with herb butter is a thing and it works well. Doubly so if you overcook the steak.
You're making me very hungry, and I've only just eaten…
Fat shaming thread is
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
@dkf said in The Cooking Thread:
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Finishing a steak with herb butter is a thing and it works well. Doubly so if you overcook the steak.
You're making me very hungry, and I've only just eaten…
Fat shaming thread is
I salute and celebrate @dkf's efforts towards obesity.
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
It could work.
It'll work. The flavors are far more compatible than it sounds. However, I cannot advise putting bouillon in your coffee. Also you cannot smoke coffee - or, at least, I cannot smoke coffee.
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@Gribnit said in The Cooking Thread:
It'll work. The flavors are far more compatible than it sounds. However, I cannot advise putting bouillon in your coffee. Also you cannot smoke coffee - or, at least, I cannot smoke coffee.
I find that hard to believe.
Hard to believe that you cannot smoke coffee. I totally believe that you have tried.
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Hard to believe that you cannot smoke coffee. I totally believe that you have tried.
No, it interferes with his mercury.
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@Polygeekery well yeah. It doesn't stay lit - it's a surface area and flocculation issue. Coarse ground doesn't expose enough fuel and espresso grind can't get air. Maybe it would've worked with a much oilier bean, but it seems like roasting drives out most of the lighter volatile wanted for ignition.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Hard to believe that you cannot smoke coffee. I totally believe that you have tried.
No, it interferes with his mercury.
Nothing interferes with this. How would that even happen?
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@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
Yes. Anything with coffee flavor is a crime against my taste buds, even if nobody else agrees.
Coffee taste is best experienced in coffee.
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@PleegWat said in The Cooking Thread:
@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
Yes. Anything with coffee flavor is a crime against my taste buds, even if nobody else agrees.
Coffee taste is best experienced in coffee.
Surely, via the process of coffeenating a previously noncoffee substance, you mean. The beans themselves require significant chewing over other beverages.
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@PleegWat said in The Cooking Thread:
@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
Yes. Anything with coffee flavor is a crime against my taste buds, even if nobody else agrees.
Coffee taste is best experienced in coffee.
I'm not sure I'd say "best", but yes; that way it's easier for me to avoid.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
@PleegWat said in The Cooking Thread:
@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
Yes. Anything with coffee flavor is a crime against my taste buds, even if nobody else agrees.
Coffee taste is best experienced in coffee.
I'm not sure I'd say "best", but yes; that way it's easier for me to avoid.
A touch of Malort cuts the sweetness, if that's the problem.
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@boomzilla
is a lie.
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The are from last week. Making a fresh batch today.
Recipe https://ilovecooking.ie/food-tv/patrick-ryans-doughnut-masterclass/
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We subscribe to several food magazines and one of those is 'Eating Well'. The most recent copy had a recipe for
corned beef and cabbage that my wife wanted to try.. I use the because you start with a plain brisket and then make a dry rub from pickling spices and salt that you grind together. You apply the dry rub, sear off the brisket, add some beef broth and cook it in a pressure cooker. Once that is done you pull the brisket and then cook the cabbage and potatoes.I was skeptical considering that the recipe had no salt curing being done and only called for 1 tsp of salt for a 2.5lb brisket, a head of cabbage and 2 lbs of carrots. But I will give anything a try once.
Well, I made it last night.
Verdict: 2/10, would not waste good brisket again. But the cabbage and carrots turned out well after adding a couple more teaspoons of salt to the broth and then finishing it with a sprinkle of finishing salt. There was no such salvation for the brisket.
