Soup, Chili, Pot Roast, BBQ beans and franks and Pasta sauce are all super easy to make. All pretty much toss everything in at the start and just wait then eat.  Pulled pork requires shredding afterward, but it is great as well.

Freezing the pasta sauce gives you sauce for a long time.

Maybe cajun seasoning doesn't belong on everything.

LOL!!! Watch that seasoning. It does go bad and get a bitter taste when it gets old.

Loaded baked potato night. What are you guys putting on yours?

I'm going to check the freezer for either brisket, pulled pork, or chili. I'm worried I'm going 0-3

What you use for your Jambalaya.

Sausage, chicken, rice, celery, sweet onion, green pepper, garlic... was supposed to add shrimp at the end but didn't have it thawed so I just opted out and added some potatoes instead. I really gotta find a sweet spot for serving size because I think I'm doing too much just blindly following the recipes I'm reading online.

The base was tomatoes (diced and paste) and chicken broth. Was annoying af getting the paste out... think 1/2 was left in the can lulz.

Trick for tomato paste is to use a can opener on both ends then you can get it out easier. Or add a little water to the can and swirl it around and it will loosen up. So this with the crushed tomatoes I use for most of what I cook.

Jambalaya can be like a potluck type dish where you just add whatever you got to it. The base is the trinity, aromatics, totomates and rice. Can add in whatever you want from here.

Serving size with online recipes gets weird. You kind of learn to wing things as you go on. This is generally a recipe you cook once and reheat for days.

Gumbo boils jambalaya... is this all just poor people making the most out of whatever they got?

Pretty much. Most home style meals are cheap meals that use what you can get on sale to feed four or more at a reasonable price.

Think I found the greatest cooking video ever. Home cook doing the Julia and Julia gimmick making a classic French dessert.

Still on my pizza bullshit. Been on the sauce now. Found the sauce I like best so far is crushed tomatoes, basil, garlic powder, green onions, with some salt and sugar. Heat it then hit it hard with an immersion blender. Will sauce 8 pizzas.

For sauce on top, I do the same, but cook out the water and do not blend it so it is THICC. Basically cook down the crushed tomatoes into paste. This will do four.

Testing a new one next week though that is frying tomato paste first in crushed garlic and oil, and then adding the rest. That one is a more traditional upscale NYC style sauce. The one I been using a more mainstream NYC style sauce. Green onions are my add on, but I add them to everything.

Need to do cheese after these and that is where I am stumped as good cheese is expensive and this is all meant to be cheap.  Think cheap mot and mild cheddar will work well together, likely motz on cheddar.  Parm to top after cooking.  

Toppings have at sausage and onion, but still playing with them. Use cheap sausage rolls to do four pizzas. One onion can do many pizzas too.

One day I will figure out how to transfer pics around on modern tech and get pics.  Not a good pizza to do pics for as if you make them traditionally you pile cheese on the sides of the steel pan with oil under, so when it hits the oven at 500 the oil camerilizes the cheese as it melts.  Makes everything look like a burned mess though.

For those who never seen it, this is what it looks like when Kenji does it:

Cheesy pull... cupperoni with a small grease puddle... it is deep dish.

It be a thicc boy.

Cold rising the dough was an utter failure and will not be repeated. May work for other dough styles, but this one rose halfway and lacked any elasticity.

Anybody have a good bacon jam recipe? I have lost mine. Generally main ingredients are bacon, caramelized onions, brown sugar, coffee and balsamic vinegar. Looking for something with mostly that base.

Found what I am planning to do this Thanksgiving. A fucking mostly deboned stuffed turkey ala Julia Child. This monster looks amazings but seems like a bitch to prep. Will likely prep with pan chickens in the near future to get deboning down.

Will skip making the stock as I have no room for a huge pot of stock.

Got to be wild to serve to people not expecting it either, since it looks like a turkey but you literally cut slices straight through it to serve.

Anti-Chef making it. Normally I make changes to things, but outside of that stock, this looks perfect as is. And is not as wasteful as Julia was known for being.  And kind of what I like cooking these days that focuses on technique without needing expensive ingredients or tools.

Apr 10, 2023 1:00:22 GMT Foos said:

Anybody have a good bacon jam recipe? I have lost mine. Generally main ingredients are bacon, caramelized onions, brown sugar, coffee and balsamic vinegar. Looking for something with mostly that base.

Made my own bacon jam and it turned out awesome.

NONE FOR ANY OF YOU.

Put it on some crackers. That's a winner.

Looks like miniature pickled bats...

Been neglecting the crock pot (and cooking in general...) and bought this pour in packet. You can cook noodles in this bitch without needing to boil water and thereby dirtying extra dishes? Dude it's a game changer...

If you ain't sneezin' it ain't seasoned.

What did you make that was nice and spicy?

Baked chicken.

That was just a line from a cooking video I watched. I do have a mini spice shelf these days. Before it was just salt and pepper like the bland white boi I am.

Why are salt and pepper so ubiquitous in cooking? Literally every recipe has some form of "add salt and pepper to taste". What about all the other lovely herbs and spices?

May 8, 2023 15:36:45 GMT Emperor said:

Why are salt and pepper so ubiquitous in cooking? Literally every recipe has some form of "add salt and pepper to taste". What about all the other lovely herbs and spices?

I assume pepper being ubiquitous is a holdover from when it was the hot new thing to come from India. 

May 8, 2023 16:32:26 GMT Gyro LC said:

May 8, 2023 15:36:45 GMT Emperor said:

Why are salt and pepper so ubiquitous in cooking? Literally every recipe has some form of "add salt and pepper to taste". What about all the other lovely herbs and spices?

I assume pepper being ubiquitous is a holdover from when it was the hot new thing to come from India. 

Cant speak to pepper but There’s a cool Cooking doc and book called, salt, fat, acid, heat. There’s a whole episode on salt that answers a lot about why salt works and why it’s one of the basics in almost every recipe.

Yeah salt has chemical properties come into play with cooking.

Pepper is very interesting. It was the ancient spice that Roman went to the east to trade for and was a staple luxury spice for royalty for thousand of years. Eventually more and more were able to get ahold of it, as commoners wanted the luxury spice, then over time tradition made it the primary table spice for western cooking.

Some cultures do not use pepper. Some italian groups replace it with garlic powder, some cultures use Cumin, some Szechuan pepper, others a chili powder, etc.

Like how Asia does not use salt, and uses soy sauce instead.

Velveting meat has completely changed my cooking. Any time you're going to cut beef or chicken into smaller chunks for stir fry, tacos, broccoli and cavatelli, whatever. Take your meat, after you've cut it up, and toss that with baking soda. Not a whole lot, you don't want to drown the meat, but you want enough that it'll get a good dispersal and even coating, a few teaspoons should do it. Then you sit that in the fridge for about half an hour, then you wash the baking soda off before cooking it. The meat comes out SO incredibly tender, it's been a total gamechanger.

What do you think is better... meat sauce or spaghetti and meatballs? Or are we supposed to do meat sauce AND meatballs?

Who makes spaghetti and meatballs without sauce? Sauce is what makes it all work!

May 16, 2023 20:35:11 GMT Emperor said:

Who makes spaghetti and meatballs without sauce? Sauce is what makes it all work!

I didn't wanna brown ground beef, was gonna do just canned sauce and some meatballs.