What's cooking? part 4

and it's so true, 9 times out of 10 you do the stupid dance they want you to and the end result turns out...*shrug* fine. But not amazing.

Yeah I know a much faster way to get the childhood casserole flavor of cream of mushroom soup.

why in the world would you tear up a mushroom

The end results often turn out amazing but then I cut corners, lots, the second go round, and it also turns out amazing. Most food is like an amazing miracle to me, I guess my standards aren't that exacting. And sometimes CI does give you a shortcut. Like iirc they said you don't have to salt eggplants. Or maybe I looked at pages of minutiae in CI about how to prepare eggplants and said fuck it and just gave up on salting them.

i think also i don't really love the kind of food they are asking me to make in the first place
i don't want to get anywhere near a can of cream of mushroom soup, esp one where i tore the mushrooms to pieces myself

sad as it is to say, green bean casserole is pretty freaking good with canned beans and canned soup. if you like that kind of thing, which I do.

i think also i don't really love the kind of food they are asking me to make in the first place

yeah for real – and I wonder about them loving it. I think every one of their recipes starts out with "every version of this we tried before was bland and insipid, with a soggy crust and a greasy finish" and I think, if you've hated this food every time you've eaten it, why are you trying to make it?

argh at tearing mushrooms - why? See also, peeling those tiny damned pearl onions. No. I do not need those precious things in my chicken pot pie ever again when I can have 2 hours of life doing something else.

There is a story somewhere (here? idk, can't remember) about someone who cooked and cooked and cooked and ended up basically with warmed up canned Spaghetti-Os.

lol yuk

2 kinds of 7-up salad

http://i46.tinypic.com/2q2k9kk.jpg

2 c hot 7-Up
1 c mayonnaise
1 c cottage cheese
green food coloring, if desired

(that is not what's cooking, it's purely for lols)

I'd take the green over the orange, personally.

♥ 7-UP SALAD ♥

I love that basically anything mixed up with some mayo is a salad :) Hello, heavenly hash.

btw, Laura Shapiro's Perfection Salad is a super read about the history of US cooking from the 1940s and 50s.

jello salad is my worst nightmare

i think that book would effectively make me lose my appetite

My friend had this Jugged Hare recipe card in her kitchen as a joke, combination lols & nausea

http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_justified_sinner/2972777850/

idgi looks tasty and pretty to me

GAY TIPSWORD. omg.

I adore CI and often times seek out recipes by them and follow them to a T and I find the articles super fascinating. Am I a fool? :-(

how do yall get their recipes? the website seems to be entirely pay-based?

It is I think. My mom sends me the magazine subscription.

we had a subscription for a while, and I bought their Baking Illustrated cookbook

Don't they have a tv show? America's Test Kitchen or something? I don't watch much so am not sure.

bowties creep me out so I try to avoid it
(well and the whole dude it's attached to creeps me out in general)

http://www.gpb.org/files/national/americas_test_kitchen.jpg

There's a podcast of some recipes plus kitchen tips and appliance reviews. I quite like it although it doesn't give the measurements of the ingreds, I guess in an attempt to force you to pay for that info. But for everything except baking, you can approximate the measurements from what you see in their bowls and spoons.

MS Public Broadcasting offers Create TV as a broadcast-only channel (no cable or satellite) but I haven't figured out how much hassle or expense it would be to set up the antenna to get it. Anyway, it has a few cooking shows I'd like to see like America's Test Kitchen and Ming Tsai's show.

P much anything they've ever done you can find by googling "[recipe bane] cooks illustrated"

America's Test Kitchen is pretty decent as a cooking show. I should figure out when PBS shows it locally and start watching again. Last I saw, they showed it back-to-back with Rick Bayless's cooking show, with he and his daughter having a bizarre almost-flirty dynamic.

i watch create a lot at my parents' house. some of those shows are soooooo bad. like the red-haired vegan lady (not sure what this is called) and katie brown workshop. there was a scandinavian cooking show on at xmas. they also have jacques pepin on half the shows, i like that.

Oh man if the red haired vegan lady is who I think you mean that's the worst cooking show ever. And Bayless def. gives of a weird creepy vibe that my wife has dubbed "yoga sleazy".

On the other hand I never will tire of Jacques Pepin.

lol @ "yoga sleazy," I know exactly what you mean

Who is red haired vegan lady?

http://www.christinacooks.com/
she wants to help you cook for your guy, she says things like that a lot. your guy will love this.

I had a feeling it'd be her; she's from Philly and I heard she had a cooking show though I didn't know on what channel. She comes into my store sometimes and is quite nice and also huge into macrobiotics (apparently in the early 90s she was the first to teach macro cooking classes targeted toward gay men to control HIV/AIDS w/o medication)

I'm making polenta today, with some vegetables and a cream sauce.

Shakshuka round 2, this time with more hot peppers. I think the other key is REALLY GOOD feta, not the bland mass-market feta I used the first time around to less-than-amazing results.

ooh i like french feta the best
so grassy!

Oh and Christina Cooks is hilarious; often she has some dude with a guitar singing ridiculous songs right there in the kitchen.

I love Jacques Pepin with all of my heart and soul!!!

xpost LL that's the kind I got this time!

I am a total feta newbie; I just bought Whole Foods' 365 brand crumbled feta for $2.79

:(

i always get the whole foods big block of feta

It wasn't bad! I used to think I didn't like feta but I don't mind it in certain contexts but I'm waaaaayy too newbish to be discerning.

I like feta that has real bite and *character*. You don't have to use very much when it is good!

My kitchen had a ceiling failure and until I get a new kitchen I have to cook on the cheap. :{

But I made an easy gnocchi dish that I am addicted to: one package of gnocchi, one cup of peas, and one can of cream of mushroom soup. Add salt to taste.

I am really into making curd. I've been reading a lot of different recipes and the sugar/juice/butter ratios vary so wildly! If you add too much butter it's still good but it'll just taste like lemon bars (r.i.p. grapefruit ginger curd). There was a very excellent article I read a few months ago that was v scientific and talked about all the different ingredients and what they did and whole egg vs yolk and etc but I spent 2h looking for it last night and I can't find it ;_;

My department is having an Olympics-themed buffet tomorrow with food from various participating nations. My latent Trini pride has just forced me to spend two and a half hours making aloo curry, buss-up-shut and tomato choka. I have no idea how my aunts do it every day. It turned out wonderfully, although i'm not sure how it'll stand up to the office microwave tomorrow.

please post recipes! I have never made any of those things, but I swear I will!

Reposted from the tacos vs. burritos thread, where I accidentally put it:

what should I do with like 8 fresh apricots

― quincie, Wednesday, July 25, 2012 8:57 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Save 2-3 for eating fresh, turn 5-6 into an ice cream topping?

― Neil Jung (WmC), Wednesday, July 25, 2012 9:01 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

trade them for tacos

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Wednesday, July 25, 2012 9:02 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no ice cream in the house, and even if there were, I am not much of an ice cream person why because apparently I hate america

anyhoo I really like this recipe, so I think I'll do it up with apricots instead of rhubarb/strawberry:

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Rhubarb-Strawberry-Pudding-Cake-238103

question: do I have to peel these fuckers god I hope not

xpost oh hell I thought I was on What's Cooking thread; apologies

― quincie, Wednesday, July 25, 2012 9:02 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tldr; basically my question is do I have to peel fresh apricots before quartering them and baking them with batter containing a ton of butter?