Marilyn Haggerty's amazing Olive Garden review and the subsequent viral shitstorm

I mostly hate cooked vegetables. Salads and raw carrots and the like are OK, tho.

if you eat meat, buy some chicken, throw it in a pan with some vegetables cook some rice...voila...food.

And if you don't eat meat, a can of black beans or a package of firm tofu does the same trick.

a top-of-the-range ready meal spag bol costs £3 and involves significantly less stress

(i would imagine that the panic and stress i experience in the kitchen is way worse for my blood pressure than any sodium)

I will probably buy a bodega sandwich tonight for $3.50 because I'm lazy, but I def. recognize that it will be more expensive and less healthy than just making some food at home.

basically having some rice or a bag of potatoes at home = you are halfway to dinner. if you are me. it ain't brain surgery.

LEX we get it you are as helpless as a newborn kitten. i would eat out every night too if i was single and lived in london.

lex i'm super confused if you don't cook....or eat out...or get take out....

how do you actually eat? like MREs from the army or spaceman food?

typical day:

breakfast = muesli
lunch = often i'll scavenge throughout the day. crackers w/cheese, apples or other fruit, yoghurts, nuts, seeds
dinner = soup from a nice, healthy pre-packaged range w/a bit of bread. maybe pasta with peas and pesto if i feel like pushing the boat out. maybe fishcakes if i just want a light meal. very occasionally a ready meal.

I find cooking relieves a lot of the stress of the working day. I love to cook when i get home. Put some music or the TV on, chop some stuff, fry it up, lovely.

I wonder if Marilyn Haggerty cooks.

i love the idea of a helicopter dropping MREs into lex's apartment

if i'm popping out i might pick up a salad or a pastry from the supermarket some days.

I think frying onions is, literally, one of the greatest fuicking achievements of human civilisation. It's extraordinary.

I find cooking relieves a lot of the stress of the working day

the EXACT opposite

no working day could ever reduce me to near-breakdowns the way attempting to cook does, every time, without fail

mmm...now i really want some pasta with peas and pesto. i am definitely getting hungry...

xxpost OTM

The smell of onions frying in butter is probably the supreme culinary scent.

i am definitely incapable of frying onions. chopping always goes wrong and then...i just HATE frying stuff. it makes me nervous. and frying pans are particularly grim to wash up.

this thread got amazing

Don't use a frying pan; use a high-sided saucepan. Stops splatter.

i choose using neither

wisconsin apparently has the highest COL in the united states

well typically when I'm doing the cooking, things are much cheaper. and yes I do admit that we do waste a lot of things by letting them go bad or not using the entire ingredient. just saying a lot of stuff cooked in our house really does involve like, over a dozen things

. E.g. we always keep some kind of fish on hand, with a few fillets in the freezer and maybe one in the fridge -- you have to remember to throw one into the fridge to defrost and then eat it within a couple days.

just defrost in the sink or a bowl of water! it'll take half an hour, prob less for a fish filet

this one time when i was pulling an all-nighter and there was no food in the house i did go slightly loopy and GIS pictures of food in the hope that i would somehow be able to download them into my mouth

i loved this

yeah you can defrost fish in the sink in like 10 mins

I do admit that we do waste a lot of things by letting them go bad or not using the entire ingredient.

this is seriously terrible and would make me dislike you in person

On Sunday I slowly roasted a shoulder of pork on top of a pair of fat bramley apples and some water, so the apples collapsed and the water steamed the meat moist. I used the collapsed apple mush to help make an apple and onion gravy. I also roasted parsnips, carrots, and potatoes, and make a sage and onion stuffing from scratch. An awesome afternoon. We had a guest so i was cookign for 3 people. I had enough roasted veg and stuffing leftover to do me a big pot for lunch on Monday.

A decent frying pan with a good surface takes about five (5) seconds to get clean. A cast-iron pan, marginally longer.

Salmon is a little more expensive than cod, right?

sorry to hear about your apples collapsing

Ha!

this is seriously terrible and would make me dislike you in person

good for you! i'm glad your life is so neat and organized that you can efficiently plan ahead and not waste anything. thank god I don't have to worry about meeting you in person!

einsturzende neuapfel

Faded - collapsing new apples
Watch them - collapsing
Jaded - collapsing new apples
Watch them - collapsing

On Sunday I slowly roasted a shoulder of pork on top of a pair of fat bramley apples and some water, so the apples collapsed and the water steamed the meat moist. I used the collapsed apple mush to help make an apple and onion gravy. I also roasted parsnips, carrots, and potatoes, and make a sage and onion stuffing from scratch.

i don't know what any of this means or how to do it, you may as well have written "on sunday i slowly roasted fairy dust on top of a cloud"

hahaha

doesn't it make you curious to learn what it means?? it sounds awesome!!

i feel guilty enough when i buy fruit and don't eat it in time before it rots, this would only happen on a larger scale if i bought other ingredients and therefore i don't

I'm not expecting you to know how to do it from that description, but I'm pretty sure I could write a step-by-step guide that you could follow. I won't though, unless you really want me to.

it sounds awesome for someone to do for me! (i am happy to wash up)

if i did it, it would not be awesome. i can guarantee that

isn't there another thread where you can brag about what you cooked

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/NewAnswersControllerServlet?boardid=66

Not meant as a punchline. Just thought this thread needed to be annotated like a recipe.

I'm gonna ANNOTATE you like a RECIPE, punk

Don't collapse me.

cooking is a little like learning another language i think. you learn some rudiments and then comes a point where you just need to fling yourself off the edge and wing it, knowing you will make mistakes, not being afraid to make mistakes. knowing it will almost certainly be good enough. the deep skills come in with what DL mentioned about leftover improv. that is the moneysaver. when i buy a chicken i buy a really expensive chicken, but i get 2-3 meals out of it, and 2 pints of stock go in the freezer, every time. add a potato and some leeks to those and that's another 3 meals.

frogbs i have kids, so economizing is important to me, so that's a helpful motivation. i guess i also have a kind of morality about not wasting food. and i feel stupid when i waste money. but "neat and organized".... is not how anyone would really describe my life. it's maybe because of that that the kitchen is like one place where a TINY TINY bit of planning drastically improves my day and makes me feel good about myself.

the way i learned to cook was to just do a ton of simple recipes and follow them terrifiedly and slavishly. eventually you get good at them. eventually you learn why they are structured the way they are and what is actually 'going on' in the pot or whatever. like tracer said, it's like a language, where eventually you just start doing it on your own with some implicit knowledge of what will work or not.

Tracer OTM.

Also after a while it's not really that hard to plan b/c you just get to know your eating habits and how much of something you will or won't finish.

Wait, what the fuck what thread did I just wake up in an hour later? Is it just really nice everywhere and no one feels like working?

xp to s1ocki yup. best thing i ever did was get 3-4 cheap cookbooks of like "easy weeknight dinner" recipes and make all the ones that seemed appealing. it gives you a great base for doing more complex stuff.

the rudiments are beyond me, i am terrified of making mistakes and also how do you learn to ENJOY this lengthy, time-consuming, incredibly stressful, hateful process, at the end of which you produce a mediocre and unappetising mess that's gone in 10 minutes and oh hi it's washing-up time?

compared to "heat soup up in 5 mins, pour into bowl, wash up bowl and spoon, fin"

i used to live wiht a guy who was really 'good at cooking' and used to 'freestyle' in the kitchen and 'throw things together' and would always interrupt and tell me how i should probably just throw some of X in there with Y. fuck off i like to cook like a robot and follow the recipe exactly! how it should be imo.