What's cooking? part 4

Wait but then you have garlic peel in yr food!

Not if you run it through the VITAMIX! You can stuff shit in there with a peel (garlic, ginger, apple, whatevs) and you will have no idea because it is pureed into oblivion!

i don't always peel ginger and i never notice it. if knife is sharp enough it will get it nice and small.

or food processor, no need to peel it then

Lentil soup on the stove, Italian-style cos it didn't require ginger. I winged it, started with pancetta (I think this is non-trad?) then all the ush soup flavors plus a parmesan rind out of my freezer. Lentils are a mix of brown Goya ones and red Goya ones but I am incapable of buying nicer lentils than that.

When a recipe calls for puy lentils or French lentils or whatever, I mentally just sub the kind I can get at my local stores. Bonus: they're done in like half the time.

<3 lentils and bacon

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Green-Lentil-and-Bacon-Salad-105069

or i make this one except instead of using olive oil for the onions and carrots i use bacon drippings like in the last recipe

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2006/11/cheap-caviar-1/

and yeah i just use brown lentils from the farmers market too

also i was just thinking because i am slow, what do you mean peeling? any time i remove the peel i just slice it off with the knife so it ends up being like a square.

My chef friend told me years ago to peel ginger with the back of a spoon! Later I switched to a vegetable peeler because FUCK picking the bits of brown skin off a thumbs-length of ginger. It has never occurred to me to cut away like 30% of the thing to make it square, maybe that seems wasteful? Idk.

Lentil soup delicious btw.

i want to make this tonight but i am having trouble figuring out how to scale it. there's no way i can eat a cup of lentils, is there?

Vahid, you must have an amazing assortment of bookmarked recipes!

well they're mostly from epicurious

I just made 2 cups' worth of lentils into soup so...?

Admittedly I'll be eating it for 5 days but that is the plan.

if you keep your ginger in the freezer you never waste any of it, and it grates very easily. i also use a microplane, but the zesting one, and i don't bother to peel since it grates so finely.

Heeeeeeeeeey

i can't eat leftovers more than once, i get really grumpy about it for some reason on the second day of eating the same leftover

maybe 3/4 cup's worth of lentils for just me would last meals days? and use one onion and one carrot ... hmm, think i will give it a shot tomorrow

whoops i meant two days

you waste like 5% of the ginger. can also make a shape with more sides. i can't even begin to imagine peeling with the back of a spoon? how in the world

I knnnooooow, god. At that point I had never cooked w ginger before or seen anyone else do so, I just took her word for it. Thank you, this thread!

I think lentils in a red curry coconut sauce is my favorite. I also love barley and lentil stew, but I've never tried to cook stew yet. I've decided this winter I will after hearing that anchovies are the secret ingredient to making a great stew.

I meant Anchovy paste.

You use the tip of the spoon, I think. I have a gimmicky ginger peeler that looks a lot like that. It works really well once you get the hang of it.

http://www.thekitchn.com/oxos-good-grips-ginger-peeler-96763

this is insane. i never knew there was such acrimony about ginger.

V, I used 2C of lentils, one large carrot, two medium stalks of celery, half a large onion, like 6 cloves of garlic because <3 garlic, 2 bay leaves, 1 stalk of rosemary, and 6C of water. Oh, and one diced tomato because that's all I had tho the recp called for 2C of diced tom.

Currently on the hob I am attempting the Hazan tomato sauce using San Marzano tom. I can't quite believe you just...put the stuff in there all together.

i prefer lidia to hazan personally, really <3 her alla vodka and all'amatriciana recipes

All this lentil talk reminds me I gotta cook and chill some tonight to make into my patented lentil and antipasto salad.

Ohhhhh this sauce is so beautiful

It has all the acidity that I crave but richness too. I over-dried it a little so I added some pasta water back in. It's like velvet.

my ginger strategy is usually to start with a bigger piece than i need, do a really rough chop into a rectangle to get the skin off, and then chop it down into matchsticks and dice it from there. it's tolerable.

estela you're a genius. am going to freeze my ginger from now on.

I freeze mine just so it keeps, but it's harder to peel that way. :D

I make something that needs fresh ginger probably half the time I cook anything and I hate peeling it and grating it but it's part of the deal. I wish there was some equivalent of a garlic press for ginger, but instead I have to mess around with scraping or shaving the peel and running it through a microplane.

It's onion, potato, cabbage, and squash season at the farmer's market and I ended up buying like ten pounds of onions for maybe five or six bucks. I filled my 8qt all clad dutch oven and my 14 inch lodge cast iron skillet to the point of overflowing and cooked them down for like six hours total.

I probably have a pound of caramelized onions now which means there is nine pounds of onion juice evaporated into my house which is kind of insane to ponder.

I freeze mine just so it keeps, but it's harder to peel that way. :D

this freezing of ginger is a revelation to me but how about... peeling before freezing?

Yes, and mincing.

I'm trying to cook though all 100 of Saveur magazine's 100 classic dishes from around the world. Martin Yan's scallion pancakes, and the African peanut stew variation have been best of the dozen I've tried so far. The hot and sour soup recipe I tried was far, far worse than the Andrea Nguyen (or Bobby Chin) one I usually make.

In unrelated news, my quest to make a "Thanksgiving in a bowl" soup got sidetracked by my discovery of the polygamous marriage of kaffir lime, cranberry, kabocha and fresh ground pork.

I never peel ginger, is the skin really that bad?

usually what I do (learned via my parents) is to cut one or two big slices, and just toss it in at the beginning in the oil, ginger is pretty resilient to high heat I find. I kind of like eating big slices of cooked ginger after the dish is done, it makes me feel tough.

if it's a big stew type thing then yeah I'll just cut it into matchsticks, then tiny cubes, and I find that I can't even find it at teh end.

I guess if you're used to eating the skin it'd be fine.

I peel before freezing. The thing to remember is that if you use a microplaner or need to slice it, you need to do it while it's still mostly frozen. Thawed ginger is very squishy.

If you want to juice the ginger, though, freezing it and then thawing it makes it really easy. Mmm, ginger juice.

ginger seems like a miracle root to me. I love how it 'self-heals' after you cut off a slice.

ginger skin isn't even a thing - it's not like garlic or onion skin that's still papery and tough and impossible to chew even after you cook it.

African peanut stew

I have a recipe for something of this nature!! I think it calls for peanut butter.

I thought the bamboo ginger grater were p effective - though I've never used one. Is this true or no?

Microplane is ok but I find I end up with more schmutz on my side of the grater than on the grated side, it kinda comes out like ginger juice

that's why i use a cheese grater! it's more like a pulp and loosens with a little tap tap tap.

That's it, Veg! The fibers clog the teeth, it sticks inside the curved-over back side, blah. Remy is prob right and I should set aside 30 mins once a month and just dice a whole bunch and freeze in an ice cube tray.

xp or buy another grater. :)

maybe I will investigate a bamboo hoonja doonja

speaking of ginger, my favorite thing when I'm sick is to make a hardcore ginger/lemon/cayenne + honey infusion. I love ginger in citrus juices, god it's so good and zingy

xps Yeah, I've started using the finest-mesh of my 3 graters for ginger. I've also started using it for garlic -- 1 large clove grated brings as much flavor and pungency as 4-5 slivered or chopped.

I just read a short story that mentions a dinner of fettuccine with a pesto and cream cheese sauce. I need to figure out how to make that.