Pati Jinich really opened my eyes to guacamole’s full potential. In the states, a lot of food people have an incredibly rigid idea of what is and is not guac. Pati revealed to me that in Mexico there are no rules with guac. Makes the purists here freaking out look super silly. Guacamole is a mole. And like all moles, there are infinite variations, the only necessary thread being the aguacate.
So what about you? Any food/cooking lessons you’d like to share?
It’s a dying trend but following a family recipe book is at the same time a travel through time in your language, your society, your family and, as a bonus, how tastes and flavours have changed over time.
Profissional authors tend to create books for an audience, while family cooks tend to put down tips, tricks and thoughts on how and why something works or does not, in the hope it will travel down through the generations and be helpful later on.
My partner as inherited cook books from her family, relatives and friends and this is well know in our circle and she has been offered good money to surrender those books to professional chefs. With no success. In those books there are recipes and tricks completely forgotten to modern day culinary.
Ive recently started cooking lentils a lot. They are so much faster than beans.
I made a batch with carmelized onions, and now I dont think I am capable of making lentils without carmelizing some onions first.
Legit amazing.
Beef bourguignon is peak pot roast
Indian cooking techniques when it comes to spices, like tempering and blooming and dry roasting spices, map over to other cuisines. I got myself a little frying pan specifically for the task to reduce friction. I’ve also improved my spicing by learning when to add certain types of spices, e.g. ground spices not too early or they’ll get bitter.
Eggo sized Belgium waffles made at home and frozen, much better and cheaper!
I’m going to sound like a shill (go through my post history if you think so) but this knife sharpening thing: https://www.horl.com/en-US
Friend of mine in NYC introduced me to it, and I was super skeptical it wouldn’t just strip five time more metal than a whetstone. I emailed the guy who made my chef’s knife, and he said “No, that thing is the bomb.”
My knives are always sharp and if they are not, they get sharp in 2 minutes. And one of the disks doubles as a honer. (and yes I know I should have been honing them more before I got this, but could never get into the habit of always using the steel and being afraid my angle was off).
I soak my freezer fries in water to remove freezer burn and loosen the gluten makes them crisp up nicer.
I ADD’d and missed the “fries”, and only read “I soak my freezer in water to remove freezer burn!”
Was legitimately confused for a second…
I do the same with frozen shrimp, though.
What a good tip! I soak cut potatoes in a warm brine before making oven fries but would never have thought to do that with frozen, I would have thought they’d dissolve or something.
Decide what you want to eat. Pick-up can or ready meal of product… read ingredients and place back on shelf. But ingredients separately. Go home. Make approximation of meal you wanted. Edit and repeat until happy.
Got my “super fast red pesto” recipe this way. I had a glass of red pesto sauce which I put on my spaghetti and it tasted nice, so I read the ingredients.
Bell pepper, olive oil, cashew nuts, parmigiano (something like that plus preservatives)
I thought “that I can do myselves”.
When I prepare it I throw everything into the blender while the pasta is cooking for its 7 minutes, blend it and add in a small ladle of starchy salty pasta cooking water.
Fastest homemade pasta sauce I know and quite tasty.
Optional: Garlic, Sundried tomato, chili or whatever you have at home you think might fit in. I like to experiment.
Red pepper pesto really shines if you roast the peppers and take the skins off. It’s a hassle though.
Looks like someone is having “Pesto Rojo Rapidissimo con Pasta” for dinner next week.
Thanks very much.
Where do you buy your E-321 butylated hydroxytoluene?
/s
Good idea actually!
It’s apparently available from Lychees… thanks Wikipedia.
I used to just buy ingredients that i liked but my partner always wanted to know what her meal was “called” so this is a kinda compromise. She can choose a meal and I’ll knock-up an approximation based off the label.
I’m guessing made up names didn’t work? Like Whispering Orchard Risotto when you dumped whatever felt tasty
I toyed with that idea - but what happens if I can only remember the name but not the contents when she asks for it again a few weeks later? My scam would be busted. I still like the idea though…
Oh if she’s that inquisitive I wouldn’t risk it. Or keep notes, but that kind of defeats the purpose of getting away with made-up dishes.
I made some kind of lentil pockets yesterday. Flour based dough I roll out thin like roti, and fold it so it can hold the filling, and pan cook it.
Hasband was starving and took the first one from the pan. To cool it faster, he opened it up so you can see the filling. He goes, look, its an alligator mouth. Now I cant unsee it. Now they are henceforth known, as alligator pockets.
keep open avocados in a ziplock sandwich bag to keep them from going brown and gross. I can make an avocado last five days and it’s still green 💚
Mine won’t be particularly helpful to anyone else but… I have ARFID (avoidant restrictive food intake disorder) and for me that looks like textures and flavors grossing me out so bad I can’t eat a lot of things.
What I’ve learned lately about cooking is that it’s actually ok to try new things. If I don’t like it, I don’t have to eat it. And no one is going to yell at me or anything else crazy.
A second thing I’ve learned about cooking is, I don’t hate it. I wouldn’t quite call it a hobby but, it’s not a chore I hate doing with a passion anymore. But that might be partially due to having a partner who makes it fun.
I’m sure I’m about to learn a lot more now that I’ve given myself permission to not only actually cook but to actually try new things.
That’s amazing. And I applaud you for trying new things.
Thank you. It was terrifying at first but thankfully I’m an adult and can choose not to eat the food in front of my if it’s gross lol.
That is an amazing learning, not exactly the same but relatively recently I also realized “I’m a grown up, I don’t have to eat everything on the plate, sometimes portions are too large and it’s okay to not finish everything”. I still struggle when it’s very little leftovers, something in my brain goes “that’s just going to the garbage, there’s no reason to save such a small portion, better eat it now”. But I’m slowly learning to say “no, I’ve eaten enough”, and it’s been very educational to realize just how much more I was eating than what I actually wanted to eat.
Yes I understand this as well. Crazy the things we believe that actually aren’t real rules.
Remove the cardboard from the frozen pizza BEFORE you put it in the oven.
And the plastic shrink wrap.
That sounds also like a good idea.
I think this is a right of passage type experience/lesson for every young adult living on their own for the first time. It unites us all.
It’s not so much a lesson as it is an opinion: being any sort of purist when it comes to food is dumb. Good food is good food. The name or inspiration for it is irrelevant.
Good food is good food.
However, bad food is also bad food.
Yeah, but food being bad has nothing to do with what you call it
Mashed potatoes is Irish guacamole.
It would be a papamole, no aguacate in it, unless your mashed potatoes are much more different than mine hahahah
Papamole has no stone
Where ever he laid his eyes was his home
Following recipes are great at teaching you how other people make food. For an almost infinite amount of reasons, that isn’t necessarily how you should make food.
The more I’ve learned and the more I’ve become comfortable, the more I think cooking is one of the few things that are actually just vibes based. Relax. Cook what makes you feel good. Mistakes are rarely fatal (to you or the meal). The stakes are low. Try new things.
Recipes are great when you try something new. What I do is find one that looks competent enough, print it out, make it as instructed. Next time, I then try another recipe. Figure out what I like or don’t like from the differences, and then start experimenting and tweaking from there, all while checking other recipes to see what they do differently.
After making it a handful of times, I take my heavily annotated recipe, clean it up, put it in the recipe book for reference. I rarely cook from my own recipes, they’re just here for the times I need to ace the dish (ie, when I have people over)
I’m continually discovering new things my grocery store’s bulk section carries. Casually walking by it usually looks like the Granola Zone. But they usually have a pretty good spice selection too. Once you have some jars for your usual staples, the refills there are about half the price of going to the spice aisle. It obviously varies between stores, but mine’s started doing bulk peanut butter too. I never have a jar in my house, so it’s nice to just grab a couple of ounces when a recipe calls for it. Some spots mighteven have flour or rice.
Outside of that, my biggest food hack has been getting rid of most of my grocery store plastic storage containers. They have a specific container for every shape and culinary situation. It’s good to keep a few oddly specific rectangles around, but almost all my leftovers nowadays go into the “deli containers” that you get from a certain class of takeout. You can get 8oz, 16oz, and 32oz containers that all use the same lid for about $0.10-0.20 USD. Because they’re all just increasingly tall cylinders, everything in your fridge suddenly stacks super well. If anything goes funky, you can also toss the container without feeling too much guilt. https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/deli-containers-are-the-food-storage-solution-of-my-dreams-article
I love my co-op!
I refilled my bay leaves the other day, with my own jar, and by eye ball approximation the same amount that would come in a small store bought jar. The store bought jar is around $6. From the co-op using my own jar, $0.66. Sixty six cents!
Bulk buy spices are the best. They smell fresher, are cheaper, I love using my jars, and everyone is kind and friendly in the store. Oh, and it just smells amazing in that store. Used to me a Penzy’s Spice lover, and still am, but I get all my spices, beans, grains, and other randoms from the bulk section.
