Some of my household is vegan, and it’s amazing how much things have changed in the last 5-10 years. It’s no longer a downgrade for the rest of us when we cook/bake vegan stuff. Although I still think that the best vegan meals are from cuisines that inherently embrace veganism/vegetarianism.
Not vegan myself, but I think the move away from mock-meat and mock-dairy opens up more interesting food opportunities. Vegan food is way better when it’s not trying to cater to non-vegan palates.
Definitely, instead of a pretend burger or chicken. I get why some people do it, and we do it a home quite a bit with pretend mince etc. I always feel a bit of a cheat though and am trying and steer my wife away from that.
This was my first thought, too, like you took the thought out of my mind. I agree, OP. Lemon or Lime juice, or even a small splash of high quality vinegar can make all the difference.
Hopefully it’s thawed already because it will take two days to thaw all the way through in the fridge. 13 pounds is huge in the slow cooker, and should take about 13-14 hours on low or about 11-12 hours on high. Might be better off braising at 275-325 F in the oven, see this recipe for the general gist www.theseasonedmom.com/braised-pork-shoulder/. Should only be 4-5 hours this way and remain tender and juicy.
Use herbs and spices. Use different spices. I get tired of recipes that use the same 4 flavors over and over, so I look for recipes that use something else. Under-used spices I love: cardamon, rue, sumac. Under-used spices that I can only fit in certain recipes: caraway, mace, fennel seeds.
Get spice mixes for pre-balanced flavors, like Herbs de Provence, Garam masala or Harrissa paste (you can make this yourself, but you should try a few versions to figure out what you’re shooting for).
Maybe these are al old hat to you, but here are some standard examples:
add tarragon to tuna/chicken salad
add cardamon and nutmeg to cooked oatmeal and omit cinnamon
First, I want to make sure we’re talking about sumac and not poison sumac. I originally got it as garnish for my hummus and Baba ghanoush. It works well in lots of Mediterranean recipes. For me, it seems to lose potency when cooked too long, so I generally add it towards the end.
P.S. I make hummus from 1/2 pound dry garbanzo beans cooked for a long, long time. Add 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda near the end to ensure soft, mushy beans. Maybe 15-20 minutes of extra cooking after that, then drain off excess water and let cool. The beans shouldn’t be dry, of course, but not soupy, either. There are vegan recipes that use that leftover liquid, so consider saving it.
In a food processor, add several cloves of garlic, about 3 tablespoons tahini, and a bit of salt (maybe 1/2 teaspoon or less). Add somewhat cooled beans, 1/2 teaspoon sumac, and about 1-2 small lemon of zest and juice OR 1/2 -1 large lemon. You can save some juice to the side for correcting flavor later. Optionally add pine nuts or other flavor agents, like roasted red peppers or parsley. I diverge from the standard hummus by adding a glug of olive oil directly into the mix as well as using it as a topping, so add a couple tablespoons in if you so desire. Buzz repeatedly, scraping down the sides as needed until you have a creamy mix. Correct seasoning as desired, then put in a bowl, create a swirling depression in the middle and sprinkle with sumac, then drizzle with olive oil. Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate. A good olive oil may make it stiffen up in the refrigerator, so if you are going to eat it cold and added oil to the blend, you may want to make it with extra liquid.
My baba ghanous is almost the same recipe, but with roasted eggplant instead of beans, and extra tahini when the eggplants are over-mature, which means darker, more bitter seeds (and which the extra tahinin cuts).
Interesting, never heard of rue. Translated it to German and never heard of Weinraute either :D I’ll have a look at the store the next time. And I’ll also give sumac a try.
Caraway is very commonly used in Germany, but my South African wife does not like it, so I very rarely use it.
I must say I’m a bit lazy with herbs, and I just buy “italian herb mix”.
For other spices, I always have chili (we love hot), pepper, salt, tumeric, all-spice, one hot curry madras mix, and nutmeg.
Depending on the recipe, I also have a lot of different dried chilies, and usually some standard fresh ones (jalapeños and habaneros)
One thing I’d like to recommend you: toasted ground coriander seeds. Toast them carefully over low heat until they release oil, grind in a spice grinder or mortar and pestle. Use for most meat dishes, but also goes into some salads. Widely used in South Africa, especially in their traditional Boerewors, which is why I stock it.
Oh, I bought it as a live plant. We’ve had it in the ground for several years now. Even when the rosemary bush died in the cold, the rue lived on. Our thai hot pepper plant is in a pot and has to come in before it frosts. Of course we always have to buy new basil and cilantro seedlings each year. You can’t stop mint from coming back – same goes for perilla. Anyway, sample links to seeds: earthcareseeds and/or seedneeds.
I’ve had a cactus die from lack of water, my wife is the green thumb person and only grows chili plants ;) we only have a balcony, so not that much space. According to Wikipedia, rue is European, so I still have hopes of seeing it at the store.
I like to cook pasta in MSG-water sometimes. I also tend to use wholemeal pasta, which I think is important (the wholemeal aspect) ^.^. MSG works best for me when I use it with things that already have a decent depth of flavour and/or variety of ingredients ;3. It doesnt work so well if your food doesnt have enough flavour.
Other cool ingredients:
liquid smoke (works really well in a lot of things including vegetarian chilis, but especially i’ve found its good in lentil soups when you also have mint e.g lentil and pea soup, lentil, potato, onion soup, etc. ^.^) - look for the industrial stuff, its like £5 per bottle but you only need 1 or 2 drops for litres of sauce and it will last you months, kinda like MSG. Add it near the end so you don’t evaporate away lots of the flavour, too.
yeast extract - this shit is delicious in tomato sauces and stews and chili, even if in the uk we typically have it on toast ;p, adds a meaty, mushroomy flavour
cinnamon - works amazing in tomato sauces, it sounds weird as fuck but tomato sauce without it tastes like its missing something to me now, its so fundamental to any tomato sauce i make ;3
bonus: yeast extract + mustard makes a really really cheesy flavour in various sauces, and its completely dairy free. I
I’ve tried this once, and I can’t say that I liked the result. I guess that my spice profiles simply doesn’t combo well with cinnamon, since when I use baharat instead (that contains cinnamon) it gets great.
Some of it is probably personal preference too. I really like cinnamon, which might influence why i like it particularly much in tomato sauce ^.^
Typically for tomato sauce I like it quite umami, so I add things like peppers (the fruit/veg and black pepper), soya sauce, salt, MSG, etc., as well as mixed “italian” (i doubt it actually is, but it’s sold as that, and I have limited spice cupboard space) herb and spice mixes (usually with stuff like parsley, basil, etc. in it), as well as sage, thyme, garlic powder, with amounts depending on what I want ^.^
Probably the only time I wouldn’t add cinnamon is if I was using the tonato sauce as a component of a curry, but a lot of that is because it would get diluted out and I don’t think cinnamon goes so well with some curry flavours.
Ehh, liquid smoke is def a lot better for you that actually smoking things, because there is a filtration step that removes a lot of the worse Volatile Organic Compounds that make smoke carcinogenic.
You’re probably right it’s not fantastic though ;p
And damn, idk what i’d do if onions made me ill… I use them in so much. Though i’ve found some ways of making them do make me feel ill , just i rarely make them that way so.
If you’d rather avoid liquid smoke try using smoked paprika instead. Store bought does the job but if you can find the good stuff at a local farmer’s market, it’s worth it.
I always hated Halloween food that were suppose to be gory or spooky. They end up just looking dumb and don't taste good. Go with a traditional autumn food. I recommend bread and soup.
I mostly agree with you about the looking bad and not tasting good, but I have made the “Meat Hand” before and that was just as good as normal food if you like meatloaf. Just make your recipe of choice but form into a hand shape, top it with a little cheese before baking, and cook on a sheet pan, then transfer into mashed taters. Looks great/horrifying, hard to mess up, and tastes like regular food. Plus ketchup makes “blood.”. Options fingernails are just onion slivers and the wrist is the onion core/center part.
Pic below isn’t mine, but mine came out looking just as good.
You should try it! I forget where I saw the idea originally, but my ex was very into Halloween, so we made it.
I normally don’t like meatloaf, but the different shape and the crunchy cheese gave it a texture I enjoyed better, so IMO it’s even better in hand form then it is as normal meatloaf!
Yummy! I’ve been trying to source legit wild rice from a tribe in Minnesota but it’s proven tougher than I thought. Any suggestions on where to source?
I usually get it at a high end grocery store here but that is usually cultivated or mass harvested. Not sure how to best get tribal harvested but I'm sure you can find some online
You as a consumer will not ever buy GMO seeds, accidentally or intentionally. Because the genome is a protected product, farms who buy GMO seeds from companies like Bayer (formerly Monsanto) have to enter into a legal agreement with the seed supplier, and they buy massive quantities at a time. Many public seed companies proudly declare their seeds are non-GMO, but that’s true of all seeds you’d be purchasing.
The seedless plants that you as a consumer can buy are bred by creating a sterile hybrid between two non-sterile lineages. It’s essentially a “defect” in the children of the two lineages which prevents their progeny from developing seeds even though they still develop fruit.
Edit to answer the rest of your questions:
Legal to use biological waste: Use freely.
How the patents work: Patented plants are basically just a legal protection for the company that produces the seeds you’re buying. They’ve put a lot of work into generating lineages of pepper plants which can be cross-bred to produce seedless peppers, and their patent ensures that they are the only legal supplier of these plants (these specific plants–someone else could breed separate lineages and patent their plants without any issue). The USDA website and US Patent and Trademark Office website have more information, but I’ll summarize: You could be sued if you bought their patented seeds, grew pepper plants from those seeds, then created a business to propagate and sell those pepper plants. You, at home, growing food for you and your family/friends? No one cares. The patent only exists to prevent another company from taking the plant that the original company painstakingly bred and selling it as their own.
Implications for society: You can’t build a business selling their patented plants without a licensing agreement, I guess. Nothing odious about hybrids, and protecting specially-bred plants is enshrined in the Plant Patent Act of 1930, so it’s been around a long long time.
If you use cast iron, carbon steel, or stainless pans, buy a chainmail scrubber. They are SO GOOD.
Also steel wool ball scrubbies are nice for real cast iron disasters, but they can scratch or get gross if used as a first resort.
Nonstick is not worth it and cast iron is a million times easier to care for than people make it out to be. You can wash it with soap - it was only old school lye soaps that were an issue. You can let food soak in it some. If it rusts or the seasoning is damaged, that’s easy to fix. It’s a hunk of iron - don’t worry about babying it if that’s the thing keeping you from trying it!
I find it does sometimes have food stick more rhan with nonstick, depending on whether I’ve been doing the extra cast iron care things recently or not, but the ability to use steel utensils/spatulas/scrubbies compensates for that very well, imo.
Tldr try cast iron or carbon steel if you haven’t!
Some people like to think they’re super water-efficient doing the dishes, but they’re not; dishwasher saves water.
The only extra cost is electricity, but it’s easily offset by the savings brought by cooking more often caused by the reduced hassle of doing the dishes. It’s like 1-2 dollars of electricity per use (YMMV but it’s that order of magnitude: less than a tenth of a dine out).
I never got this. Maybe it’s because we don’t have or want children, and are only us two. But dishes take me ten minutes every day. And I have a bunch of higher quality things that can’t go into a dishwasher anyway. If I had the space, is probably still get one, but I just don’t see how saving 7 minutes a day is a big thing.
If it’s worth to purchase a dishwasher… it varies a lot given each ones own priorities and situation.
If saving X minutes a day is a big thing or a small thing… it also varies a lot given how you value your time and how much you enjoy dishwashing by hand. I know a few people who love to do it; no need to take away that joy for the sake of efficiency.
But for the vast majority, if you have a dishwasher idle, those are some minutes you get back practically* for free.
I also cook only for two, but I do it three times a day, and I have a lot to do so I value each minute saved in chores immensely. My dishwasher has been a blessing, without it I would be eating out or ordering delivery MUCH more frequently.
I don’t enjoy it, but I guess I also don’t mind it that much. And I only cook once a day. Mornings are usually cold, evenings only my wife eats and that’s warned up. So dishes are just those 10 minutes, once a day. That’s about 2-4 songs playing on the kitchen speaker ;) if I had to do the dishes middle time a day, I’d probably like it less as well ;)
I live alone and cook one time per day. Dishes takes me like 2 minutes since I just shove everything in the machine and come back two hours later not just to everything being clean, but also heat sanitized. The only things you can’t put in there are knives, as well as nonstick and wooden items. I would personally hate cooking if I had to scrub every item by hand afterwards…
Absolutely, this is a personal thing. I’ve found myself not buying things that are incompatible with the machine as much as possible so I don’t really have that issue
And some things I just toss in there anyway. My Wusthof knifes for instance are not carbons steel and don’t have wooden handles, and my machine has a neat spot that secures it perfectly upright so the edge isn’t touching anything. I have been doing this for years and observed no noticeable downside.
Some people like to think they’re super water-efficient doing the dishes, but they’re not; dishwasher saves water.
About that. I know of one study done in Europe on this, and it was paid for by dishwasher companies, and didn’t exclude outliers like the guy who used about 400L of water doing the dishes by hand.
I once measured water and power usage of me doing the dishes by hand, and it was both below what I found online for dishwashers.
If you do 2-stage cleaning (soapy hot and cold clean water), then dishwashers will be better because they don’t. Amount and source of hot water governs if you are more energy efficient. The advantage of dishwashers is that a badly used dishwasher is far more efficient than badly (= wasteful) handwashing, and even efficient handwashing is not much better than dishwashers (though I wouldn’t know how to calculate production and recycling of the dishwasher itself, not even what order of magnitude that is). Which was, as far as I remember, also in the conclusion of the study, unless there has been another one since then.
It’s plausible that handwashing uses less electricity, specially if you let the machine heat-dry the dishes. But water? If you do the comparison against a fully-loaded machine, no way. Modern machines use half the water from machines of 15 years ago, and those were already competitive against handwashing. Best case scenario for handwashing (single water bath) still uses about twice as much water. Dishwasher detergent is stronger and the machine takes longer so it has more contact time, the chemistry heavily favours using less water for the same amount of gunk to dissolve.
In your case, as you already mentioned you only cook once a day and you don’t want to degrade your high end stuff in the machine, it’s reasonable that you won’t generate dishes enough to fill the machine. If you would be using a half-loaded dishwasher then it is plausible that you would use less water handwashing, but it’s still a close call - which is why I sometimes use the machine filled 1/3 without worry.
You did say earlier that you cook once a day, meal for two. When I do that, all dishes for the day take a third of the maximum load on my machine, so I could wash once every three days, therefore averaging like 3 L per day tops? You handwashing every day are spending 6-8L daily which is more than double.
If it is true that you can spend <8L for an arbitrarily large amount of dishes, though, then I guess there must be an amount of dishes that you will outperform a dishwasher. They cannot handle an infinite amount of dirt, unfortunately. If you hand wash every 7 days you will be averaging less than 1L a day which really does sound unbeatable.
I understand where your coming from. If you are used to cooking “by the seat of your pants” for one scaling to a group is more complex than just increasing the amounts.
A couple things that can trip you up:
Prep: Bigger ingredient amounts mean you probably should prep them before starting. E.g I can peel and dice one potato in the time it takes water to come to a boil. 6 potatoes, not so much. Do a mise en place.
Seasoning: taste more often and consider aiming for a more “average” palette. E.g I like my food with very low salt but more pepper, but I don’t do this when cooking for others.
Pans: larger sizes mean you might have to do some steps in batches (browning) or use two pans where you could have used a single pan for one (e.g. split the pan and brown meat at the same time as cooking onions). Create pans/trays to hold the parts of the meal that are partially cooked. When making a lot of something, a little prep and organization makes things go smoothly since you might be repeating the same task several times, so if that task is a little quicker, you get a big benefit. Whereas you might not want the extra prep pans to wash when cooking for one, when cooking for more the better organization actually makes it go quicker.
You still can cook by taste/eye/instinct for the ingredients and amounts. It’s just that planning and organization becomes more important.
Pakora are fried veggies, samosa is pastry, paneer is cheese, naan is bread. You can eat any of those with rice and sauce, but you can also have them without. Indian food has a lot of variation on flavours, texture, visuals, as expected from any cuisine with such a rich history.
Can you recommend something from Indian culture that isn’t what I have described above?
No because “overkill on spices, sauce and rice” is subjective. If “it’s always the same flavor” then either 1) you’re keep ordering the same stuff 2) the restaurants you’ve been to do lowest cost easy menus 3) it’s not the same flavor but it looks like so to you because you’re not used to it.
Next time ask the server for “solid food, no liquids” instead.
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