The Cooking Thread
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@pleegwat said in The Cooking Thread:
@polygeekery I'm pretty sure it's a traditional French dish. And if you're using more snails than garlic by weight you're doing it wrong.
I have had escargot. I do not know enough about eating snails to know if that is what is shown. I also have no idea how to prepare them myself.
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@polygeekery I can't find an English recipe (closest thing), but basically you just cover them with the sauce and put them on top of a fire for a while.
@masonwheeler said in The Cooking Thread:
@polygeekery Depending on where you live, they can be easy enough to find in the backyard...
No need for ... backyard snails do get eaten.
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@anonymous234 said in The Cooking Thread:
No need for ... backyard snails do get eaten.
I never prepared snails (only bought them already prepared or in restaurants), but I think that while you can indeed eat your garden snails, it is slightly more complicated than just picking one in the garden and popping it on the grill. IIRC, you need to first make sure they did not eat anything in the previous days but stuff that will make them tasty (or at least not nasty), then starve them for a couple of days so that they run out of mucus, and only then prepare them. The usual (French) recipe is indeed to cook them in a mix of butter, garlic and herbs (traditionally, they are cooked and even served in their shells, like on the picture).
They do taste kind of like any shellfish that would be cooked in the same way: a bit chewy, and a strong taste of the seasoning, not so much of the animal itself.
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I have a bit of a phobia of slugs and snails. Just the thought of eating them makes me slightly nauseous.
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@jaloopa the key is to make sure you chew them well so that they don't slither back up your throat and out your nose while you sleep. Also, dry wine helps. Its astringency helps clear the slime from your palette.
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
the key is to make sure you chew them well so that they don't slither back up your throat and out your nose while you sleep.
You're not helping!
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@jbert yes I am. The slime trails are hard to wash out of bed linens!
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@polygeekery You monster. Excuse me while I go and throw up
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@jaloopa said in The Cooking Thread:
I have a bit of a phobia of slugs and snails. Just the thought of eating them makes me slightly nauseous.
Are you OK with oysters?
I'd much rather eat a thoroughly cooked snail than slurp a living oyster after watching it squirm under the acidity of the lemon juice.
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@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
@jaloopa said in The Cooking Thread:
I have a bit of a phobia of slugs and snails. Just the thought of eating them makes me slightly nauseous.
Are you OK with oysters?
I'd much rather eat a thoroughly cooked snail than slurp a living oyster after watching it squirm under the acidity of the lemon juice.
What about eating a live snail after watching it squirm under the acidity of the lemon juice?
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@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
Are you OK with oysters?
Never eaten one. I don't have the same squeamish reaction to seeing an oyster as I do a slug though
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
I'd much rather eat a thoroughly cooked snail than slurp a living oyster after watching it squirm under the acidity of the lemon juice.
What about eating a live snail after watching it squirm under the acidity of the lemon juice?
I think a snail clings better to its shell than an oyster (especially after its pseudopode has been cut, which is what you do when opening it), so you'd have to suck really strongly.
So the question is, how hard do you suck?
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We are on vacation this week. When we go on vacation we almost always rent a house or condo so that we have plenty of room to spread out. When you have kids more space is always more betterer. We also like having a full kitchen to prepare our breakfast and dinner.
Of all the places we have rented over the years the kitchens have varied from "perfectly serviceable" to "scaled-down commercial gourmet kitchen". The gourmet kitchen was on Sanibel Island in a condo that had its own pool and private beach area on the ocean. It was really nice.
This time we are staying in the Smoky Mountains and you can tell that the family we are renting from does not enjoy cooking at all. The cookware was purchased by going to WalMart and looking for the absolute cheapest set available, half of the cooking utensils are either falling apart or massively melted. There are no measuring spoons. Half the measuring cups are gone.
They have a glass cutting board. Seriously, do not ever buy or use a glass cutting board. They ruin the edge on knives instantly. When we got here I told my wife not to use it. She forgot. We always bring knives with us because with the exception of the property on Sanibel the knives in rental properties are always completely dull. She ruined the edge on all three knives we brought the first day we were here. She did so while cutting up fruit for sangria.
On the bright side I asked my wife to remember this the next time I am going to buy something for the kitchen. She promised I will never again hear, "Honey, don't go overboard. No need to spend a lot of money on X". :)
Last night for dinner the wife made roasted veggie mac and cheese. Super tasty and filling. Will make again.
http://www.cookinglight.com/recipes/roasted-veggie-mac-cheese
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Did 6.25 lbs of pulled pork in the crock pot today:
I'd have a hard time remembering what I put in, but it tastes good...
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@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
I never prepared snails (only bought them already prepared or in restaurants), but I think that while you can indeed eat your garden snails, it is slightly more complicated than just picking one in the garden and popping it on the grill. IIRC, you need to first make sure they did not eat anything in the previous days but stuff that will make them tasty (or at least not nasty), then starve them for a couple of days so that they run out of mucus, and only then prepare them.
My flatmate and I once planned to do this - she claimed at the outset to be utterly familiar with the process and had watched her mother prepare snails many times.
We were a bit over-enthusiastic about gathering, ending up with a very large pan full of squirming slime (probably ~5 kg). We'd been lead (mislead) to believe that the best way to purge them was to feed them pasta for several days. This was a mistake - just adding to the overall impression of sliminess. After more than a week of indecision the snails began to putrefy. A bit of a waste. Sometime I will try again, more sensibly.
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8 hours in the kitchen today. For Thanksgiving I always do as much cooking as possible on the day before. Mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, dressing, cranberry sauce, green beans veggie dip and cheese ball are all made ahead of time. Hot dishes are in 13x9 dishes and ready to go in the oven tomorrow for heating through.
Turkey is in the brine. In the morning it gets rinsed and dried and oiled and will go in the pellet grill around 8am (keeps the heat out of the house). Tomorrow instead of cooking all day I mostly just put stuff in the oven on a schedule to be done at 1pm. The rest of the time I get to spend time with family. The only thing I have to make tomorrow is gravy after the turkey is done.
As a consequence everyone always says, "You make it all look so easy!" Yeah, piss off, you should have been here yesterday. :)
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
The rest of the time I get to spend time with family
Jack Daniel is part of your family ?
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@timebandit he might as well be my brother.
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@timebandit said in The Cooking Thread:
Jack Daniel is part of your family ?
Funny that:
So I have two Rtic tumblers (like Yeti tumblers, but half the price). In the morning I fill one with coffee, in the evening I drink booze out of the other. Today when I was cooking I had the coffee one on the kitchen island and then switched to water, so it was just sitting there.
Tonight I made myself a drink and my wife asked me to make sangria for Thanksgiving tomorrow. I am slicing up fruit and grab an Rtic tumbler expecting Jack and Coke and got cold coffee instead.
That was not expected, nor wanted.
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
8 hours in the kitchen today. For Thanksgiving I always do as much cooking as possible on the day before. Mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, dressing, cranberry sauce, green beans veggie dip and cheese ball are all made ahead of time. Hot dishes are in 13x9 dishes and ready to go in the oven tomorrow for heating through.
Turkey is in the brine. In the morning it gets rinsed and dried and oiled and will go in the pellet grill around 8am (keeps the heat out of the house). Tomorrow instead of cooking all day I mostly just put stuff in the oven on a schedule to be done at 1pm. The rest of the time I get to spend time with family. The only thing I have to make tomorrow is gravy after the turkey is done.
As a consequence everyone always says, "You make it all look so easy!" Yeah, piss off, you should have been here yesterday. :)
Forgot to post the follow up:
In the pellet grill at 6am:
1 hour in smoke and 5 hours at 325F later:
It turned out pretty much perfect. That white cloth over the top in the second picture is an old towel. I had to put it over the top for insulation because it could not get up to 325F when I started that morning. The ambient temperature was in the low 40s.
Using the pellet grill kept our dual wall ovens completely free so I had plenty of space to cook the side dishes. It also kept 5-6 hours of oven heat out of the house. It also made for a good "Dad joke" as new people came and checked the ovens.
"Where's the turkey?"
"I knew I was forgetting something!!"
"He thinks he is so funny. He is cooking it outside on one of his grill things."
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
@timebandit said in The Cooking Thread:
Jack Daniel is part of your family ?
Funny that:
So I have two Rtic tumblers (like Yeti tumblers, but half the price). In the morning I fill one with coffee, in the evening I drink booze out of the other. Today when I was cooking I had the coffee one on the kitchen island and then switched to water, so it was just sitting there.
Tonight I made myself a drink and my wife asked me to make sangria for Thanksgiving tomorrow. I am slicing up fruit and grab an Rtic tumbler expecting Jack and Coke and got cold coffee instead.
That was not expected, nor wanted.
I forgot half a beer in the garage once. About a week later I saw it and brought it back into the house to put in the recycling bin, walked in and set it down on the same table as the beer I was currently drinking and walked off. Obviously 5 minutes later I had a mouth full of lumpy moldy beer...hork
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So every year on Christmas day I cook a very special dinner. Something we would not normally cook, something usually unconventional for Christmas day and a meal that we normally spend a fair amount on. Last year was an herb encrusted rack of prime rib (I spent $115 on that cut of meat, IIRC) with horseradish pan sauce, rosemary potatoes, yorkshire pudding and some other side. Polenta maybe? The year before that was Beef Wellington (with Yorkshire pudding, of course). Before that leg of lamb. Before that was Lobster Thermidor, I think. You get the idea. Special meals.
This year, oxtail ragu:
If time, and the kids, permit I plan on making the garlic bread from scratch with the boys. Should be a fun time. Or it will be a total shitshow. Either way it will make for good memories, even if we end up cooking some store brand garlic Texas toast under the broiler because the kiddos end up ruining the bread.
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Made my famous crock pot mac and cheese yesterday. went awesome. is sitting next to me making the office smell amazing.
also made Meatballs in Awesome sauce.
Meatballs in Awesome Sauce
1 Package of Store bought meatballs of whatever variety you want
22 oz Grape Jelly
22 oz Ketchup.put in a crock pot, slap it on high for 30 minutes then down to low for 2-10 hours to have them ready and perfect for a party.
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@accalia said in The Cooking Thread:
22 oz Grape Jelly
22 oz Ketchup.My first thought to that is Yikes! What is it actually like?
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@dcon said in The Cooking Thread:
@accalia said in The Cooking Thread:
22 oz Grape Jelly
22 oz Ketchup.My first thought to that is Yikes! What is it actually like?
Better than you think. We usually use Chili Sauce instead of ketchup though.
Also, you do not use:
@accalia said in The Cooking Thread:
1 Package of Store bought meatballs of whatever variety you want
You use Costco meatballs or you don't even bother. All else are rubbish. :P
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Just been out for lunch at a local restaurant; we were their last customers of the year, so everything was really relaxed (and it is within walking distance of home so nobody needed to stay sober). They did some really delicious lamb, with gravy, roast potatoes, sprouts, carrots and parsnips, and the turkey dish and fish dish that my family preferred looked superb as well.
But the interesting part was that instead of their usual style of starter and pudding, they instead did tasting plates: instead of having to pick which of their starters or puddings you wanted, they brought out a little of all of them. So to start out with there was some fancy soup, crab, smoked salmon, salmon paté, a chicken terrine, sweet onion paste, and chicken liver parfait. Then, after the aforementioned lamb, there was another plate with a little christmas pudding, some eton mess in a white chocolate shell, a tangerine meringue (with very dark chocolate), and a small tiramisu-like affair with marzipan. Wonderful, but I now have a problem with food-stroke. ;)
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@dcon said in The Cooking Thread:
@accalia said in The Cooking Thread:
22 oz Grape Jelly
22 oz Ketchup.My first thought to that is Yikes! What is it actually like?
fookin arseome! is how it tastes.
you can play around with the ketchup, as long as whatever you put in is tomato based and roughly the consistency of ketchup i've yet to fins a sauce that fails to be arseome!
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Better than you think. We usually use Chili Sauce instead of ketchup though.
We do the meatballs w/ sour kraut, cranberries, and the chile sauce (50/50 Heinz/ sriracha)
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
You use Costco meatballs or you don't even bother. All else are rubbish.
I found bagged frozen meatballs at Aldi which probably came from the same supplier. They tasted just as good.
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@accalia said in The Cooking Thread:
@dcon said in The Cooking Thread:
@accalia said in The Cooking Thread:
22 oz Grape Jelly
22 oz Ketchup.My first thought to that is Yikes! What is it actually like?
fookin arseome!
Agree to agree. With what that sounds like, not what you seem to have meant by it.
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@accalia said in The Cooking Thread:
Meatballs in Awesome Sauce
1 Package of Store bought meatballs of whatever variety you want
22 oz Grape Jelly
22 oz Ketchup.put in a crock pot, slap it on high for 30 minutes then down to low for 2-10 hours to have them ready and perfect for a party.
Oh, yeah! My grandma used to do this (except, of course, when she did it the meatballs were homemade). Damn. I gotta make me some of that.
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@boomzilla said in The Cooking Thread:
Oh, yeah! My grandma used to do this (except, of course, when she did it the meatballs were homemade). Damn. I gotta make me some of that.
It doesn't sound like it'd be good but with so many people backing it up, maybe I'll try it for the upcoming holiday week. (We're doing something similar to @Polygeekery; we'll probably do prime rib or something nice, everyone brings food, but no presents.)
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"Breaking Bad" jokes welcome.
https://youtu.be/ydFszkTuesE
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@heterodox said in The Cooking Thread:
It doesn't sound like it'd be good but with so many people backing it up, maybe I'll try it for the upcoming holiday week.
Honestly I never would have tried it to make on my own but I had it at a friend's home once and it is pretty good. Go with the chili sauce. And Costco meatballs.
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Honestly I never would have tried it to make on my own but I had it at a friend's home once and it is pretty good. Go with the chili sauce. And Costco meatballs.
Will do. Might have to borrow a Costco membership for it unless Aldi or BJ's have the same thing. I know exactly the meatballs you're describing.
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@heterodox said in The Cooking Thread:
I know exactly the meatballs you're describing.
Fucking homo.
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@heterodox I got a bag at Aldi... I'm pretty sure they're exactly the same thing. Was $10 for a 3 lb bag.
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What makes these meatballs so much better than making your own? It only takes a few minutes and you can season them with whatever you want
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@jaloopa somehow or other they manage to make them hold together really well, which is nice when you want to drown them in sauce and let them warm up for a while in a crockpot.
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@accalia said in The Cooking Thread:
Grape Jelly
English uses the same word for jelly and jelly, but I assume you mean the kind that is gelatin-free.
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@zecc said in The Cooking Thread:
@accalia said in The Cooking Thread:
Grape Jelly
English uses the same word for jelly and jelly, but I assume you mean the kind that is gelatin-free.
@accalia speaks Americanish, not English. Jelly and gelatin (or Jello) aren't the same word in left-pondian.
ETA: and gummies (gummis? gummy candy) are yet another thing that aren't jelly in USian.
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@zecc said in The Cooking Thread:
@accalia said in The Cooking Thread:
Grape Jelly
English uses the same word for jelly and jelly, but I assume you mean the kind that is gelatin-free.
i mean "Jam but without the seeds" kind of jelly, not the "made from horsed hooves" kind of jelly. :-P
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@anotherusername said in The Cooking Thread:
@accalia speaks Americanish, not English.
Facts are a barrier to making fun of English.
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
This year, oxtail ragu:
Decide to make it yesterday. As there is so much collagen in oxtail it is basically a stew and stews are always better as leftovers. Plus the recipe said to basically cook it forever so I wanted it done in time.
In the roasting dish ready to go in the oven:
Roasted at 425F for ~1.5 hours:
Into the sauce and ~6-7 hours later:
Falling off the bone tender. Now on Xmas day I just need to pull the fat from the top, reheat and pick out the bones before serving.
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