This is a thread for all things cooking! Whether it be asking for advice, sharing your favorite recipes, or even showing off your latest dish! If it’s food related, it goes here.
Links of Note
Serious Eats: Like America’s Test Kitchen, but free. They are known for testing and retesting their recipes until you end up with a something that is truly wonderful. And in some ways they’re even better than ATK. Did ATK painstakingly recreate the mythical McWhopper? I think not.
Unfortunately I don’t have any recent success stories to kick off the thread with. All I managed to do today was completely fail to make smashburgers. I didn’t make them nearly thin enough so by the time they were cooked on the outside the inside was still raw.
Of course it didn’t help that I was panicking because my house was filling up with smoke because my vent hood isn’t worth a damn.
Nooot a great first experience with making my own burgers, all in all.
I swear I’m a good cook guys. Don’t kick me out of the club.
It’s a good thing someone other than me made this thread, 'cause I was absolutely planning on asking what people would bring to the table.
Anybody have good slow cooker meals that they like to fall back on? I haven’t been doing it much since it’s summer here, but as the weather cools down in the coming months I’m planning on making food I can come home to without needing to do excess preparation, so new suggestions would be cool. Even better if measurements are in metric.
It’s really easy to make a beef stew on short notice with a crock pot. There are some extra prep steps you can take to improve the final product, but you can also get away with just dumping the ingredients in there. Get a nice cut of beef, like sirloin or something, chop like 3 onions into quarters or so, you want like 1 cubic inch hunks of onion. Chop up some carrots or just use baby carrots. I like to throw like 4 cloves of chopped up garlic in there, too, along with whatever herbs and spices you like. Last time I did this, I also threw in the remaining ~1/4 bottle of a savory bbq marinade I had lingering in the fridge, and that turned out really good. Add some potatoes or something if you want, I don’t bother because I’m trying to avoid carbs. Basically it’s important to have a sizable layer of vegetables in the crock pot to provide additional moisture, or else the meat will dry out. You can also add water, but this usually dilutes everything a little too much in the final product for my liking. I prefer everything to just taste like onion juice, haha.
Easy version:
Cut the meat into 2 or 3 large chunks, so it fits in the pot without having to fold it or anything. Don’t worry about this- the slow cooker will make the beef so tender that it basically falls apart when you get in there with your serving spoon. Throw on the spices you want, then put the vegetables on top. Cover and cook on low for like 10 hours.
Hard mode for if you want it to be better:
Chop the meat into chunks, about 1 cubic inch again. Now pre-cook that at high temperature in a skillet, just enough to sear the outsides a bit. This will help preserve flavor and structural integrity of the meat, since it’s already been cut into manageable small pieces. The rest of the process is the same.
A few months ago when the cold started kicking in I made slow cooker stovies. Stovies is somewhere between mashed potatoes and potato stew and it’s super filling. Basically it’s 1 onion, 1-2 potatoes, and enough water to cover them. You can also add cooked sausage - I like adding spicy sausage because it makes the broth a little spicy too. Cook on low till the potatoes are soft and cooked through (6~ hours in my experience). If you wanna add sausage wait till about 4 or 5 hours in, then add it.
It’s a pretty simple homey Scottish dish and you can mess around with the recipe a lot. I tend to make a lot of simple stuff and then make it all fancy with spices because I’m cheap, lol.
I love Serious Eats, especially their “FoodLab” series. I make sure I have a jar of their carne asada marinade in my fridge at all times.
A few links that I really enjoy:
Maangchi, probably one of the more well-known YouTube cooking channels. The New York Times once referred to her as “YouTube’s Korean Julia Child”
Manjula is my go-to for Indian recipes. The only downside is she’s a follower of Jainism so no meat & no root veggies.
And, if you’re not squeamish about butchery/charcuterie/sausage making I highly recommend Scott Rea. He’s a very talented British butcher with videos covering just about anything thats made of meat.
And if you’re looking for a little inspiration for your grocery list I highly recommend foodgawker.com. You can filter by keywords, tags, primary ingredients, etc. Helps with restrictive diets, or holiday planning too.
Ooh, those look great! I’m always looking for authentic recipes to try out. And it’s made me realize how tragically little Korean cuisine is in my life. Mind if I add your links to the OP?
It’s been a minute since the last time I did something that takes effort in the kitchen… I haven’t really had much motivation in that regard, ever since the new year started.
But the week before Christmas I rubbed a mix of cumin, fresh tarragon and rosemary, salt & pepper into a lamb shoulder, then put it in a slow cooker with mirepoix, a coup of syrah, a cup of beef broth, some preserved lemon and a bay leaf. The next day I skimmed the fat off the reserved liquid from the lamb shoulder and combined it with a dark roux to turn it into a kind of lazy person’s beef demi-glace, crisped up the shredded lamb shoulder and topped it with mint tarragon greek yogurt.
I turned the leftover gravy-lamb mix into hand pies using some puff pastry I had in the freezer.
I really, really wish I’d written ANY of this down as a recipe. I’ll re-make it at some point and take notes as I go if anyone’s interested. You could make a KILLER shepherd’s pie outta these leftovers
Sure, please do! As for Korean recipes, I highly recommend giving her kimchi stew, her pork lettuce wraps, or even her spicy garlic fried wings a shot. Her twice-fried wings, using starch instead of flour, have become my preferred method.
Sous vide rules if you can get into it. I got one of the Anova wands for it and need to get a bigger container to cook with but good lord it turns a pretty basic recipe into absolute bliss. SeriousEats has some good tips on how to do sous vide on the cheap with hot water, a thermometer and a beer cooler if budget is your issue and their recipes for cooking meat are pretty straight forward. Made a killer steak that has sliced shallots, garlic cloves, salt and pepper and nothing else in the bag and it was beyond delicious.
It’s a little complicated and becomes a bit of a juggling act in the middle while the potatoes parboil. I’m trying to definitely cut back on the amount of containers I’m using to make the recipe, and I’m also trying to figure out a good size of potato cut to use. But I’ve been able to cut the recipe in half and make a pretty excellent amount of potatoes for three people and I’ve gotten my folks hooked on them.
I’ve always really enjoyed https://www.budgetbytes.com for my cheap but tasty cooking needs. She includes step by step picture instructions below the actual recipe. She recently put up a recipe for taquitos which is next on my to-do list. I’ve tried so many recipes on this site and quite a few have become home staples. Gotta keep that food budget low
For fun baking I usually go to http://sallysbakingaddiction.com Some of the tastiest cakes and cookies I’ve made come from this site.
I’ve wanted to make smashburgers at home ever since I watched J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s first-person cooking video where the made them, but I’m pretty sure my kitchen’s vent hood isn’t nearly hardcore enough to prevent my whole apartment from smelling like beef fat for a week.
I’m a big fan of smashburgers, though. I don’t even think I knew they were a thing until I moved here to Wisconsin, but there are a few great places to get them around Madison, like the Tipsy Cow.
I wholeheartedly endorse using Serious Eats as a resource - I was the one who showed HostileV those potatoes and I can personally attest after making them they are holy shit good. Like, I don’t know if I’d ever make roasted potatoes a different way again without some strong convincing. The only caveat is as of the past month or so they’ve had a kind of notable decline in new content, with like one or two recap or compilation articles a day and maybe one new recipe article with them. It’s a bit of a shame compared to how much stuff they cranked out for a few months, but that just means you can do an archive dive and find a mountain of things to try.
The other thing I’ve made off the site nearly as much as the potatoes (that isn’t sous-vided) are these black beans. The laziest beans you’ll ever make and still about as good as you’re gonna get with stewed black beans. All it needs is rice to eat legitimately tasty food for couch change per meal, but you can use 'em for anything you’d do with cooked black beans.
Oh yeah, if you want to have good-ass chicken and don’t want to mess around with sous-vide because you’re broke or you think it’s black magic, do this to your chickens. Trust me, the difference it makes is unbelievable.
Watching that video I think my main issue was I didn’t have one of those big smashing things and none of my spatulas are heavy-duty enough to really get the patties as thin as they needed to be. Ah well, live and learn. Thankfully I had leftover ground beef so I made regular burgers today and they turned out great.
I’m trying to get into making my own burgers more often. I have this negative mental image of homemade burgers in my head because growing up my parents always used Laura’s Lean Beef and then cooked them in a George Foreman grill. It was like eating particularly tasteless rubber.
@SinistralLizard mind if I add your links to the OP, too? I’m trying to beef (ha ha) the OP up a little.
Yeah, those potatoes are ridiculously good. I made them for my family’s Christmas dinner last year and was shocked how delicious they were.
@dijondujour My parents always bought frozen burgers, but my dad was super into grilling so we at least generally had them cooked on a grill. A few years ago I got them into making them at home, though, and that’s also what I do on the rare occasion I cook a burger for myself. It’s not very much work and it’s always worth it.
We went lazy today and did mac and cheese. My husband likes to add random spices to his semi-bechamel sauce so it’s always a surprise. Today was green chile mac.
As I make my grocery list for the next week and write down “6lbs Lemons” I’d just like to remind everyone to never ever make this Serious Eats recipe for lemonade. It will ruin store-bought lemonade for you. It will ruin regular lemon juice/sugar/water lemonade for you.
You should get some extra and make some preserved lemons (use organic so you don’t have to worry about chemicals in the rind messing with the preservation process)
Also, do yourself a favor and add in the extra safi seasoning mixture. Any savory dish that I’d normally put lemon in I use some of this instead, it’s incredible. You’ll never make a lamb or fish dish without it.
