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The Ignorant Chef
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When mom visits life is much more simple, but when she leaves and I am not able to take advantage of the culinary opportunities, I find myself throwing together foods, ingredients and spices to make meals that I am grossly unfamiliar with.
For instance, I'm trying to make a chicken w/ rice bake as I type this. The problem: I have no clue what I'm doing. Right now, it's in the oven and I'm hoping the end result is edible.
Has anyone found themselves in such a predicament? What are some simple recipes that you know?
For instance, I'm trying to make a chicken w/ rice bake as I type this. The problem: I have no clue what I'm doing. Right now, it's in the oven and I'm hoping the end result is edible.
Has anyone found themselves in such a predicament? What are some simple recipes that you know?
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As to specific recipes, I leave most of that to my wife. My cooking is limited to eggs (in any form.. fried, omelettes, etc), pancakes, throwing a slab of meat on a grill or frying pan, canned soups, and stuff from a box.
1) Find a spice store. Not a Publix, etc. An actual store that sell fresh spices, herbs, etc.
2) Go there, buy a small amount of as many things as you can find.
3) Taste them.
4) Experiment!
Good cooking is all about experimentation. Try things! Online recipes sites like allrecipes or epicurean.com are great places to get ideas, but the best way to learn to cook is to learn the basic flavors and combination of the spices and sauces, meats and vegetables. It's like learning the scales on a musical instrument or forms for a martial artist. Master the basics, and you can make anything without a recipe.
Try try try!
I've also heard that using a crock pot is relatively simple.
-food
-time
-a liquid
Want delicious Octoberfest food? Throw in some chopped smoked sausage, carrots, potatoes, onions, and garlic, add a pint or two of guiness, throw in several heaping spoonfulls of mustard seed and fennel, and cook for six hours. It's delicious.
Want chili? That's what the crock pot is made for!
You can even do complicated (sounding) things like bar-b-q spare ribs and more. There are dozens of awesome cookbooks and website devoted just to these things. Keep in mind the time is (at minimum) 4 hours or more per dish, and the longer is usually better.
1) This site has more detailed instructions than most recipe sites: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
2) Start watching Alton. Besides the actual recipies, he teaches how and why to cook. His books and show (Good Eats) turned me from hopeless to hero. I made his blueberry buckle over the weekend, and OH HOLY FUCK was it good.
1) Alton Brown's Top 100 Recipes.
2) You are now cooking fucking awesome food.
My chicken w/ rice dish didn't make me retch or run to the bathroom. I label it a success.
However, 20min into it I noticed that the rice looked dry, so I had to take it out, add another can of cream of mushroom soup, and put foil over it. I put it back in for another 10min and it turned out awesome.
Hallelujah. I made food.
The more you cook and follow recipes to success, the more confident you will become experimenting and expanding upon them to your own tastes. Look at the Alton Brown website, or buy a book like the one I linked. Every Saturday, write down a meal per day from them that you want to make over the coming week, and a list of the food items the recipe tells you that you'll need. Go to the grocery store and buy those things, then make one every night. You'll get comfortable with it in a hurry and once you have a repertoire of go-to recipes you can do without looking in the book, start improvising.
Now do it again.
Now that we have a house with a decent kitchen, I can try branching out and cooking, instead of just going through motions. I downloaded the All Recipies Iphone app, and have used it once already to glowing response. Gonna try it again tonight! (going to Trader Joes for supplies, I think, though)
Enc's Encredible Crab Cakes:
Things you will need:
1 can - lite coconut milk
1 box, hot curry (Golden Curry, brand)
Tomato, red onion, green pepper minced (I usually get a package premade at my grocery)
1 package Surumi (at most groceries, looks like crab meat, should be near the fish market)
Four
peanut oil
minced garlic
Lime juice
Heat the coconut milk with the curry paste in it, mix until smooth and curry paste is fully dissolved. Place in large mixing bowl. Add minced vegetables. Mince surumi and add to mixture. add garlic, mix well. Let cool. Mix in flour until fairly thick (thick enough to make a ball when you have flour on your hands, but not so thick that it dosen't catch to your fingers without the flour.
Heat a raised edge frying pan to high on your stove, with a centimeter or so of peanut oil, watch carefully, you don't want a grease fire.
Make 1-2 inch balls by coating your hands with flour and rolling the surumi mixture. Place in frying pan and flatten immediately with a metal skillet. Flip after about 2 minutes or until browned. Cook for another 2 minutes or until browned. Remove and place on a secure plate with layered paper towels to absorb any excess oil.
Repeat until you have all of your cakes made.
Serve with cucumber, fresh tomato, and a sprinkle of lime juice over the top. Siracha sauce or tabasco works well, if you like hot sauce on the sides. Delicious, and you can get all the ingredients to feed four people for about $10-15 (hence the surumi, rather than actual lump crab).
Then go upwards from there, if you want to start cooking more complex dishes.
Case in point, I just got the cookbook for the Fat Duck for Christmas.
The recipes have 10-18 sub-recipes on average.
:O
Woks are great fun for experimenting.
Agreed. Woks are rad. I made a tasty stir fry one time. It's pretty easy. Throw meat into the wok, then throw in the vegetables/stir fry mix, spice it up, and cook to perfection.
So, does anybody know how to make a mean hot chocolate? Have you ever had Mexican hot chocolate?
There are a zillion cook books on the market, but would probably benefit you most is something simple and educational to teach you the basic techniques.
As for hot chocolate, I have no idea what Mexican hot choc is like, but I've had Spanish hot chocolate that was super thick. Similar thing?
Yes, make hot chocolate by heating milk in a pan, adding about 2 tsb cocoa powder per cup milk and sugar to taste. Adding cinnamon and nutmeg, maybe a bit of cayenne pepper will make it mexican and delightful.
They cast a shadow like a sundial in the morning light. It was half past 10.
After that separate all of your spices into groups, like basil, oregano, and garlic for simple Italian. For simple Mexican use cumin, garlic and chili powder. For Asian I like to use the generic trio of Soy sauce, Hoisin and Fish Sauce. Experiment with quantities and combos.
Once you get a feel of the basic spices used in the various types of foods you will get the hang of things.
See you had the wrong attitude.
Cooking is not hard.
If you want to make restaurant grade quality sure it can be hard. Unless you are baking (I only say baking is hard because once you stick it in the oven not much can be done, however anyone can follow the recipe!) it is extremely hard to mess something up to the point that it is not edible.
The thing about cooking is that it just takes time, and too many people equate time to effort. This is not the case.
There are a few things you can learn like judging a steak by eye. But most of it is common sense. Like risotto, if it was too dry add some liquid! If it is cooking too fast turn down the heat. When you taste something ask yourself, is there something I can do to make this taste better? If I'm doing that my thought process usually follows, do I need to add something sweet/spicy/sour/tangy?
The best three tips anyone can ever give someone if they want to be a better cook is. 1 Go cook something. 2. After you have cooked something. Think about the meal.What parts did you enjoy? What parts did you not enjoy. What could you do differently next time? 3) Have fun I personally love the chaos in the kitchen. I'll jump around talk to myself and dance to non-existent music while in the kitchen making stuff, don't turn it into a chore.
Satans..... hints.....
Blaket is so right... cooking is only a chore if you make it one. My wife and I have an evening ritual (no not that one) where we cook dinner together, we joke, we talk about our day, we listen to music, we dance around, and generally have as much fun as we can clothed. Oddly I always end up doing the dishes.
Echoing what everyone else has said here: experiment, taste your experiment, reflect on its success or failure, repeat.
Oh, and in addition to Alton Brown's cookbooks - if you find yourself leaning onto the baking side of things find the Joy of Cooking.
Btw, I made an awesome flourless chocolate cake last week... I found out I have Caeliac so I'm avoiding the gluten. Desserts have been hard to come by until I learned that egg whites, whipped, with chocolate are awesome.
Melt - 8oz. semi-sweet chocolate w/ 5tbsp butter in a double boiler
Separate 6 large eggs, whisk whites into soft peaks and add 1/2 cup sugar + spot of vanilla
Add yolks to melted chocolate, whisk together
Whisk 1/4 of whites into melted chocolate to temper
Fold remaining 3/4 of whites into melted chocolate
Slap in buttered springform pan (+/- 9" pan) bake for 45mins at 275F
Voila, awesome, more awesome if you apply whipped cream and raspberries!
For instance, I just randomly googled "chicken tomato asparagus" and got a recipe for an easy looking pasta dish.
The internet is full of recipes, so there is no need to ever buy a cook-book. Cook-books tend to be overelaborate anyway, so you end up hunting a supermarket for some obscure ingredient. On the internet you generally can find about 500 variations of the same recipe, so you can pick the one that looks easy and that you have the ingredients for.
Epicurious.com is OK but you do need to hunt and occasionally a well rated recipe is just well ... bland, and foodnetwork.com is great (especially if you've already seen the dish done and are tracking down the recipe). I've been finding a lot of quick and healthy recipes on the Whole Foods website, which is quite helpful in getting me to eat greens of which I know I'm supposed to eat more. Tyler's Ultimate is a TV food show on which I've found a lot of tasty recipes. Though he doesn't go into the whys and hows like Alton, and he uses a lot more fats and salt.
So you don't lose interest you might look for "quick" recipes or recipes that don't have too long of "prep time." Cooking is the fun part, it's all the prep time that I find tedious.
Time management is the biggest hurdle to cooking for me. Unless I'm using the crock pot I do a lot of prep work in the morning or at lunchtime so that when I get home after work I can immediately jump into cooking. That way I can cook things for dinner that require lots of prep, but still serve dinner at a reasonable hour.
In the magazine they do kitchen/cooking tips, equipment comparisons (which I consult before buying any new gadget/pan), food taste tests, and a bunch of recipes every 2 months. The recipes are accompanied by an article detailing the methods they used to perfect each one. Also the magazine has no ads in it.
The website is basically an archive of everything that ever appeared in the magazine. If you need to find a recipe, odds are they've made what you're looking for hundreds of times, and revisited/updated the recipe since it was first published.
I think you're right. Last week, I managed to ruin instant rice. In the near future, I'm going to try a pasta, tuna fish thing. I think it should be pretty easy.
Spanish/Mexican/whatever hot chocolate, I remember it had cinnamon in it and then a lady topped it off with a healthy dose of cool whip. It was delicious.
This is also good advice. It is pretty common for people to think you can do a few others things while cooking. While you can to a certain degree, there are a lot of things you want to pay attention to. Especially when learning. If you pay attention to timings, you can end up with everything ready and cooked perfectly at the same time. It's awesome when that happens, and you don't end up with part of your meal over or under cooked and everything else ready to go.
Slider, I would focus on a few basic recipes and learning some basic cooking techniques. Don't look at cookbooks with piles of recipes or ingredient lists that look like an old Dungeons and Dragons spell components table, you're just get over-whelmed.
My last failed attempt ended up ruining a pan. You are supposed to put, like, foil down when you cover chicken in salt, pepper, & honey. Who would have thought?
(Please stop laughing, I was hungry and wanted honey chicken)
One of my co-workers has had great success with Cooking By Numbers.
Steam Me
Sweet Lassis
Polenta Pudding with hot blueberry topping
Cheesy Eggplant Bake
That last recipe was the first time I'd ever bought, cooked, or eaten eggplant, and it was delicious. I just find that the author seems to have a good nose for recipes; I've never been steered wrong on something she's posted.
I didn't have any dinner, so I'm a little hungry at the moment.
Hash browns:
2-3 Potatos (depending on the size of the potato) diced
1 Clove of garlic
1/2 small onion
Paprika
Salt
Pepper
Chili Pepper
Olive Oil (for frying!)
I make 3 eggs, butter up the pan, pour three eggs in ( I put them in a bowl before I start cooking), salt, pepper, garlic salt, chili pepper to taste. Cook until the yolk is starting to get firm, flip for 10 seconds and plate. Cover in Maple Syrup. Smile Blissfully.
Steam Me
Anyway, take a red potato, dig the eyes out. Stab it a few times with a fork, chuck it in the microwave for 1 minute. Turn it over, another minute. Dice it medium (careful, it's hot), throw it in some olive oil in a skillet with salt, pepper and spices. Toss occasionally until they get a nice brown crust and are tender.
You can do it without the microwave step but it takes a lot longer. Another way to get them cooked through is do it in the pan from the beginning, olive oil, and a little water. Medium low heat, and keep the lid on the pan. Steam/fry until they're tender, then fry with the lid off to get the crust on.
Good Eats. It's the most important TV series you, as a normal person who wants to eat delicious food, could possibly watch.
I'm Just Here For The Food 2.0 is the BEST cook book I've ever read and I've read many. My girlfriend is a professional chef and vouches that it is one of the best, easiest to read, most friendly and downright delicious looking books you might possibly own as a normal person who just wants to eat well.
Please do not link to the quite frankly illegal uploads of his shows to youtube. Get the DVDs. They are dirt cheap. Get the book. It is worth its weight in gold.
Alton Brown can teach you everything you wish you knew about cooking.
Short of that, always always always measure your ingredients, and write down what you used and how good it tasted and roughly what you did. Keeping notes is the best way to independently improve your skills.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
Cooking is an experiment, it is a process, it is something you need to enjoy.
If you treat it as a chore you will never excel at it and you will never properly enjoy the results.
There's a reason that one of the monumental books in the genre is called The Joy of Cooking.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH